The Export-Crop Sector
Growers of crops for export could also muster some bargaining power in the Kenyan economy, in large part because of the country's heavy dependence upon the revenues these generated as a source of foreign exchange. Growers thus constituted potential allies for the advocates of political pluralism. Threats to withhold delivery of crops proved only temporarily useful, however. After a protracted struggle and the collapse of coffee prices, farmers in that sector became
less vocal in their struggles and representative associations were either disbanded or weakened. In the tea sector, the Moi government succeeded in reorganizing the Kenya Tea Development Authority to give higher prices and higher quotas to farmers from the Rift Valley, particularly from Kalenjin strongholds, at the expense of Central Province communities that cultivated tea that typically commanded higher prices on the international market. The introduction of Nyayo Tea Zones, a new parastatal, also limited the bargaining power of outraged tea farmers by flooding the tea factories with leaves from new, government-controlled plantations and rendering smallholders' tea less valuable.
The Moi government and coffee growers clashed over an extended period, beginning in 1983, when the government decided to turn the Kenya Planters' Cooperative Union (KPCU), the main coffee growers' association, into a parastatal. The coffee cooperatives had long been both a source of substantial income and a site of petty corruption and mismanagement. Certainly, there was a rationale for trying to clean up the cooperatives in an effort to ensure that a higher proportion of coffee receipts went to the farmers who produced the beans. The popular impression of the government's actions in trying to dissolve or reorganize the KPCU, however, was that the State House wanted to reduce the voice of farmers in the management of their affairs and in formation of Coffee Board policies. Specifically, Moi wanted to reduce Kikuyu influence.
The farmers repulsed the first effort to eliminate the KPCU. Then, in October 1986, the government tried to introduce a new method for paying farmers, and the country's lobby for large plantations, the Kenya Coffee Growers' Association (KCGA), joined forces with the smallholders and rebelled. When farmers threatened to stop delivering beans to the Coffee Board, the government relented. In March 1987, the KPCU successfully fought off an effort by the State House to remove the organization's two representatives from the directorship of the Coffee Board, again through the threat of holding up delivery.
Unable to attenuate the power of the coffee growers in this way, the government moved to try to divide the growers on class lines—to sever the link between the small growers and the matajiri. In June 1987, the government announced that it wanted to disband the KPCU and replace it with a National Coffee Cooperative Union (NCCU). The rationales were various. The State House had earlier embarked on a shake-up of personnel in both the Coffee Board and the Kenya Tea Development Authority. These reshufflings had placed a large number of inexperi-
enced managers in high positions, and the reliability of the services both organizations provided suffered in the view of farmers, who were irate. Some members of the Moi government suggested that the owners of large farms (more than fifty acres) had stirred up the trouble and that this group had benefited disproportionately from the services of the marketing boards in the past. Indeed, they said, the effort to disband the KPCU stemmed from a desire to curb the influence of large-scale farmers in that organization and give greater voice to smallholders whose plots were smaller than fifty acres.[39]
Growers used tried-and-true tactics to repel the government's initiative, and they temporarily persuaded it to back down, but were eventually unsuccessful. When the State House tried the intermediate step of imposing new voting rules and new directors, farmers gathered to protest these actions and threatened to suspend deliveries of beans to the Coffee Board. They further called for elimination of the coffee export tax, and for suspension of the Coffee Board's management to permit investigation of the alleged disappearance of beans from its warehouses. Again, the government backed off its demands, but only temporarily.
Shortly after the protests by farmers, the Criminal Investigation Department picked up the KPCU's managing director, Henry Kinyua, for questioning. Although he was eventually released, Kinyua stepped down from his position. In 1987, the KPCU itself was first dismantled and then suspended, its functions being assumed by the Coffee Board. These changes were interpreted by many as an attack on Kikuyu growers, who generated 70 percent of the country's coffee crop,[40] although the government may also have taken the measure to reduce the bargaining power of coffee growers who wanted to exceed the country's coffee quota, set by the International Coffee Organization.
Eventually, the government allowed a reorganized KPCU to register again, but in a greatly reduced form. Until 1989, the KPCU had been one of the chief sources of short-term loans for coffee farmers. It was able to play this role because its assets made it easy for it to obtain credit, which it then used to extend loans to farmers, and because it could collect on the loans by recovering the money from the farmers' coffee receipts.[41] To the degree that the reduced role allowed the union limited both its assets and its access to farmers' earnings, its credit functions, and consequently the utility of the union to growers, were undermined.
The government was less disposed to bargain with the lobby for large plantation owners. In early 1989, it dissolved the Kenya Coffee Grow-
ers' Association (KCGA). The Weekly Review said this step "marked a decisive stage in recent moves by the state to reduce the influence of mass-based autonomous farmers' organizations in decisions affecting the coffee industry."[42] As had the KCPU, the KCGA had strongly protested the coffee amendment bill of 1987, which proposed many changes in the role of the Coffee Board, including making the chief executive of the board responsible, not to the board's directors, who typically included farmers, but to the minister of agriculture.
Matiba and Rubia had expressed concern that tea farmers, too, were losing their voice in public policy—or at least, tea farmers from the Central Province zones that produced high-grade leaves. The Kenya Tea Development Authority (KTDA) was long recognized as a success story rare among parastatal organizations. During the 1980s, the Moi government took several steps to reorganize the company, replacing the older, more experienced managers with new people more beholden to the president. It also introduced measures that increased the power of tea growers in the west of the country and sowed division among tea farmers, reducing the effectiveness of group action.
The changes in administrative personnel had rapid consequences for the reliability of tea-collection services and for the condition of the country's hundreds of kilometers of tea roads, many of which became increasingly impassable. Farmers in Central Province also began to charge that the KTDA managers or the government were manipulating the level of end-of-season payments, which were supposed to reflect movements in world prices, in contrast to initial payments, which were in proportion to the quantity of tea leaves delivered. In 1989, several hundred farmers in Murang'a District tried to protest deteriorating services and price manipulation by boycotting picking and by burning 2.5 tons of tea leaves already harvested.[43] Matiba, who hailed from Murang's District, was consequently quite attentive to farmers' demands and incorporated them into his platform.
The Moi government moreover introduced new policies that increased Kenya's tea production but divided the ranks of producers, decreasing the effectiveness of farmers' associations. In 1984, the president launched an effort allegedly both to enhance soil conservation and to increase tea production. The idea was to provide funds for Kenyans to plant narrow strips of tea adjacent to gazetted forests in the multiple expectation of limiting soil erosion when trees were cut, enhancing the capacity of the forest police to observe illegal cutting by creating a space around these forests in which trespassers could be easily seen, and bol-
stering the country's tea production. In 1987, the president created a new parastatal, Nyayo Tea Zones Development Corporation (NTZDC), to administer the program. By the end of the 1980s, the NTZDC had established zones in fifteen districts, mostly in the Kalenjin and Luhya areas of the western provinces but also alongside the KTDA-run plots in Central Province, encompassing about 15,000 farmers.[44]
The new Nyayo tea zones immediately created problems for smallholders, however, particularly in Central Province and Kericho, where they competed with smallholder production. When the zones were created, the NTZDC decided not to build tea factories but to use existing facilities in nearby smallholder areas instead. That meant, however, that factory capacity was swamped by the new production. Smallholders could not have their tea treated, as they had in the past, because the leaves from the Nyayo zones took precedence. Matiba was right when he noted: "Tea from the Nyayo Tea Zones has completely swamped up the existing capacity."[45] Moreover, the zones interfered with other sources of smallholders' income. Most households were able to obtain permission from the local forest police to graze livestock on gazetted lands during some seasons of the year, or during alternate years. They were restricted to the fringe areas, but they nonetheless had use of them. The Nyayo tea zones interfered with this system, however. In many cases, the government established its zones, not along a narrow strip of already deforested land, but on swaths of land a mile wide cut from existing stands of trees. The forests were placed off limits for grazing in consequence, and farmers were forced to secure pasture elsewhere.
The creation of the tea zones meant that the government received a larger share of the income from tea than it had in the past, and that smallholders lost influence as their share of the proceeds dropped. Withholding or burning tea was no longer the devastating tactic it might once have been. It could no longer be used to force government attention to farmers' concerns. Thus, although growers of coffee and tea, especially in Central Province, were discontented and a potential reserve of followers for an opposition party, they could no longer by themselves lend opposition leaders bargaining power.