Stranded in Mogotio: Agony of neglected sisal workers

Nakuru, Kenya: Deep in an expansive sisal plantation in Rongai, Nakuru County, is a cosmopolitan population of squatters whose forefathers abandoned their ancestral homes to slave for a foreign billionaire sisal investor.

Everyday, they brave thorny sisal thickets and poisonous snakes to toil under a scorching sun and the unblinking eyes of harsh supervisors, all this to ensure that spinning mills are constantly supplied with millions of tonnes of sisal threads.

Atop Subukia Hills overlooking the Vashapht Majani Mingi Sisal Estate owned by Harry Horn, a Greek national, one would be deceived to imagine that the vast plantation has helped improve the livelihoods of the poor squatters.

Beneath the beautifully woven line upon line of green sisal bushes lies a people exploited to the bone marrow, ravaged by sickness and living in squalor and anguish.

In his sick bed where he has been confined for four miserable years, 75-year-old Ali Musa gulps water as he takes the last drug of his dose. Blind and ravaged by a stroke that has paralysed half of his aging body, Ali groans as he leans back on his tattered bed - it is clear that he is in immense pain.

Ali buries himself inside his bedding in shame for a while when he is told we are journalists.

He begrudgingly wakes up a while later, supported by two worshipers who had just concluded their 1pm prayers at the Abureria Majani Mingi Mosque. It is here that the old man has been offered a small house.

Although he worked as a pump operator for Horn from 1964, Ali says he was thrown out of the sisal estate as soon as the billionaire learned he was sick.

“I was no longer useful to the rigorous work,” he says. “I worked in the sisal estate diligently my entire life and was only thrown out when they realised I was of no use anymore. I live as a pauper in the mosque now,” he says.

With no land to move to, Ali accuses Mr Horn and his managers of denying him his rightful benefits even after working for them for 36 years. He claims the estate owes him Sh300,000 in arrears. His wife Khadija says her efforts to carry her bed-ridden husband to the company’s premises, in hope that it could trigger sympathy from the managers, have been met by mean-looking guards who lock the gates upon sighting them.

“What I want is my money so I can go to hospital. I also need a wheel chair since I can’t walk or see,” Ali says amid heavy convulsions. A teary Khadija narrates to The Standard on Sunday how her husband fell down at the pump site after igniting the heavy engine.  “They have never visited us to see how we are faring. I have used all I have on his medication and we are now extremely poor,” she says.

 

Diminishing hope

Metres away from the mosque is a sickly Tari Racha, 60, a former guard at Majani Mingi Sisal Estate. The fervent stench emanating from his dimly-lit single-roomed house is ominous.

From the weevil-infested floor to the soothed walls, Racha’s emaciated body is heartbreaking.

His furrowed face and bony cheeks betray his diminishing hope of clinching on to dear life. He can only be supported to his feet.

Racha says it has been a year since he last took a bath as his hands became numb following a strange ailment that struck him 2010.

His hands are immobile. Apart from the rafters he calls his bed and a small metallic box stuffed with old clothes, nothing else qualifies the room for human habitation.

He says he fled his Marsabit home in 1993 after witnessing cattle rustlers butcher his people. Then a young and energetic man, Racha says he secured a job at the estate as a guard. He proudly opened the gate for the master for 14 years.

“I don’t know why he (Horn) has left me to languish in poverty even after serving him diligently. I am now desolate,” says the father of four. “I suffered a severe bout of pneumonia due to the cold I was subjected to for 14 years.”

Racha shows us a sheaf of records signed by a Majani Mingi Sisal Estate manager. Although they have been beaten by dust, one of the records shows he is owed Sh132,621. 80. Another shows a figure of Sh144, 797. He is yet to receive a penny.

Useful investor

Joseph Alila, 60, was laid off after his two fingers were chopped off by a crushing machine. He had worked as machine operator for 37 years.

“My other fingers are also immobile, as they had been crushed earlier but were fortunately not chopped off. I am now jobless and don’t have a place to call home,” says Alila, who left his Webuye home more than 40 years ago.

He, too, claims he is owed an unspecified amount of money in accumulated arrears.

Benson Ekai, 22, has been taking care of his three siblings since his parents died at the estate four years ago. He had to drop out of school to fend for his siblings.

Ekai, who cannot trace his ancestral home, says he wants his parents compensated. “If my parents had been compensated, we would be in school today,” he laments.

Felister Awuor Odhiambo, 40, is desperately pondering her next move.

 

Her husband succumbed to stress months after he lost his job at the estate. She returned to Majani Mingi after her husband’s funeral in Siaya County. She says she has lost hope of ever reclaiming arrears she alleges her husband is owed by the estate.

Peter Juma, a retired shop steward, says many estate workers are exploited by the estate owner and have no one to run to.

Juma wants the Government to intervene so that Sh5 million he claims is owed to the workers can be paid.

He also wants Mr Horn investigated.

“We have families yet we don’t own any land, not even where to bury our dead, yet someone is busy taking advantage of us away from the Government’s eyes,” he argues.

More than 800 squatters live in the expansive Banita and Majani Mingi sisal estates.

Most of them are remnants of the workers laid off after Horn sold most of his 14,000 acres to the Government for resettlement of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).

Their presence, a constant headache to the land owner, is silently and gradually brewing tension. They have vowed to stay put even with the signs of imminent eviction.

Contacted for his comment, Horn told The Standard on Sunday:  “I direct any issue on workers complaints to my manager. Whatever he will say represents my thoughts and it is the exact position of my estate on a particular matter of concern.”

But the manager, Charles Keget, dismissed the workers as landless squatters out to frustrate a “very useful” investor after drinking everything they have been paid “since independence”.

Evict ring-leaders

Keget brazenly said the complainants know the road to the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (Cotu) and should stop complaining through the media.

“I am going to evict their ring-leaders immediately if they want to tarnish our good name through the media. I know the culprits,” he said.

He, however, declined to explain why the company has failed to compensate workers dismissed due to injuries and ailments they got in the line of duty.

Rongai Deputy Commissioner David Koskei said he was not aware of the workers’ plight.

“That is unacceptable, I need to confirm and if it is the truth, action must be taken. No one should exploit desperate people looking for employment. Workers should also respect the conditions given by their employers,” says Koskei.