In February 2025 the High Court affirmed Geoffrey Kirundi Chege as the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) chairman, the organization that represents 680,000 smallholder tea farmers. The court dismissed a challenge brought by Enos Njeru, who was Kirundi’s predecessor before losing his seat in the January tea elections.
For Kirundi, a 72-year-old accomplished lawyer, he has his work cut out. He has the Herculean task of ensuring that KTDA avoids collapsing like all other cash-rich farmer organizations. It will be welcome for smallholder tea farmers who have been spectators to the KTDA infighting over the last five years, which has all the hallmarks of a Netflix saga.
To understand KTDA’s current challenges, this three-part series will examine the causes, effects, and potential solutions for strengthening the smallholder tea farmer organization.
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Low Bonus
In October 2019, smallholder tea farmers got a shock, the lowest tea bonuses in 10 years. Farmers across the country were livid that their annual tea bonuses, paid depending on the volume and quality of green leaf farmers deliver to their factories, were low.
KTDA paid a KES 46.45 billion bonus for the 2018/2019 financial year, a 25 percent drop from the KES 62 billion paid a year earlier.
Currency woes, overproduction, and low-quality teas all made the perfect storm in a teacup. In short, KTDA said it had just had a bad year. Farmers would hear none of it. Protests rocked all the tea growing areas with farmers calling for a change in guard in KTDA.
Kenyan politicians never let a crisis go to waste, and they used the growing anger to begin muscling in one of the most cash-rich organizations. For perspective, KTDA had KES 89 billion in revenue for the year ending June 2024, roughly 2.5 times bigger than Britam’s revenue from their last financial year.
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KTDA’s then-chairman Peter Kanyago and CEO Lerionka Tiampati either never took the bonus issues seriously or were naïve, misguidedly confident that these were mere tantrums that would soon fade away. Whatever the case, it was a serious error in judgment that would cost them their jobs.
One of the reasons for the growing anger was how KTDA operated.
KTDA was likened to a Chinese politburo, where leadership held unchecked power and dissent was met with severe penalties. The storm in the teacup was brewing and fast.
Towards late 2019, a spirited campaign that roped in tea farmers, politicians, and the media gained traction. Notably, former transport Principal Secretary Irungu Nyakera and the Sunday Nation columnist John Kamau took on the once unassailable KTDA leadership.
Through a meticulous campaign that included a barrage of stories that touched on all the inner workings of the KTDA, public sentiment was strongly against the organization.
The tipping point came on January 14, 2020, when President Uhuru Kenyatta turned his guns on KTDA. In Mombasa, the President delivered a speech that pummeled KTDA’s leadership, blow by blow. His speech was a public reprimand.
“KTDA has delivered a lot of value to farmers in the past, but some operational and governance challenges have emerged in the last few years. Key among these is a conflict of interest by directors and a lack of clarity in the declaration of dividends by subsidiary companies. The governance of KTDA and the entire marketing of tea will require restructuring if we are to ensure our tea farmers get more revenue from their tea sales.”
And Uhuru Kenyatta had, two enforcers Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Peter Munya and his security college Fred Matiangi, to make good his agenda to remove Kanyago and Tiampati from KTDA’s leadership. A series of events kicked in that would result in an overhaul of KTDA.
In June CS Munya formed a taskforce to implement tea reforms including giving life to the Tea Act 2020. The Tea Act, assented to on December 23, 2020, came into effect on January 11, 2021.
If stakeholders believed that the Tea Act 2020 was the panacea for all that ails the sector and its biggest player, KTDA, they were grossly misguided. The series of events over the next five years, some comical and others disastrous, revealed the ill-conceived nature of political meddling in private businesses.
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Next, we will look at the effects and casualties of the tea reforms.
