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{
"id": 980721,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/980721/?format=api",
"text_counter": 332,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Konoin, JP",
"speaker_title": "Hon. Leonard Yegon",
"speaker": {
"id": 13391,
"legal_name": "Yegon Brighton Leonard",
"slug": "yegon-brighton-leonard"
},
"content": "Kingdom (UK) and other overseas countries. This is important for the Kenya Tea Board, so that it can market, brand and blend our tea to international standards. Establishment of AFA was a bad idea. It was a big mistake. The AFA lumped up all the scheduled crops. If you talk of crops like pyrethrum, tea, coffee, rice and sugar, you will find that their value is different. That is why some scheduled crops are performing poorly in the market. For example, if you talk of sugar, you will find that the sugar industry has collapsed. I believe AFA is the one that has occasioned the collapse of these industries. When you look at the trend of tea, it is heading towards that direction. That is why we need a single body to look at tea issues from its processing all the way to its marketing. On the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of service delivery in terms of AFA, to be precise, AFA has given us a raw deal. Right now, the tea Directorate in AFA is incapacitated and unable to regulate tea. On issues of conflict of interest, the regulations that AFA has given out say that if you are dealing with financial, audit matters, marketing and processing, you are not supposed to offer company secretarial services, but when you look at what is happening, KTDA is handling all those four aspects in our factories. That is conflict of interest. As we move forward, we require a strong regulator in the tea industry in the name of the Kenya Tea Board, so that it can focus on that. Moving forward - and this is something that I have not seen in the Bill - we should seek to amend the Public Audit Act No.34 of 2015, so that we can allow the Auditor-General to look into the books of accounts of the KTDA. Right now, nobody is looking at them. The KTDA is operating on public money. Farmers who have invested in tea are members of the public and the KTDA is managing their funds. We are supposed to make sure that the Auditor-General looks into their books. A forensic audit should be done on the books of accounts of the KTDA, so that we can know how many funds have been lost. Up to 2018, KTDA had been investing in banks that had gone under receivership five years before, namely, Chase Bank and Imperial Bank. That is on record. We should make sure that we look at that. I will be bringing an amendment to make sure the Auditor-General looks into the books of accounts of the KTDA. If you look at the subsidiary companies like Majani Insurance Brokers, Chai Trading Company and Green Feather, there is no way of telling whether the dividends go back to the farmers. We need to make sure that there is no conflict of interest surrounding them. If you look at the directors of all the subsidiary companies, from the Chai Trading Company, Majani Insurance Brokers to the Green Feather, they are directors of the KTDA. We need to remove this conflict of interest. Even when we talk about elections, we need to go back and look at the Companies Act to bring in one man one vote policy, so that representation in these factories does not become a one man show. Just because I have many shares, I should not be the one to determine everything in a factory including running it. The 2.5 per cent management fee is high. This fee was fixed 10 or 15 years ago when the volumes were not big. Right now, we have big volumes of tea being produced. So, it needs to be lowered to 1 percent and the other 1 per cent to be taken to the Stabilisation Fund, so that it can support farmers when prices fall. The Tea Research Institute is another body that is dead. We need to fund it."
}