Anite heckled over govt failure to operationalise Soroti fruit factory
State minister for Investment, Evelyne Anite. FILE PHOTO
What you need to know:
- Frustrated: Government had encouraged farmers in the Teso sub-region to plant fruits for sale to the factory. However, many of them are now frustrated as their fruits including oranges and mangoes have had to just rot with no market.
Kampala. MPs on the Parliamentary Finance and National Economy committee have critised government for failing to operationalise the Soroti Fruit Factory, which has forced juice companies such Coco-Cola to resort to importation of inputs for their juice lines such as Minute Maid.
The criticism, which followed a bitter exchange between MPs and the state minister for Investment, Evelyne Anite, was stocked by Mr Harry Patrick Oyuru the Coca-Cola director for sales and marketing, who complained that the company had resorted to importing mango puree from Kenya and Tanzania as a raw material for Minute Maid, which they would have obtained from Soroti Fruit Factory.
The company, he said, had in 2009 spent $4.5m (Shs16b) to train more than 17,000 farmers to produce mangos but the company in the hope that the factory would be operational but this has not happened, which has forced them to resort to imports.
“We are paying Shs300 [in tax] for every one liter of mango juice [inputs] we import yet we could have bought them from Soroti,” Mr Oyuru told MPs who had visited the Coca-Cola Namanve plant to commission the construction of a new bottling line for the factory.
Ms Anite, who had taken up the podium to address MPs and Coca-Cola officials was heckled as MPs questioned her sense of judgment when she said she was happy to learn that other than importing raw materials for producing the company’s products, at least Uganda was manufacturing plastic bottles and crates.
“Look at her. Where do the raw materials for the plastic materials come from,” Odonga Otto, the Aruu county MP countered the minister, alerting her that the inputs for manufacturing the bottles was also being imported.
“Stop heckling at me because that is not how a civilised society should behave,” she retorted as the MPs yelled.
The Soroti Fruit Factory is a flagship project under the Uganda Development Corporation whose construction started in 2010 but has to date failed to take off.
Frustrated: Government had encouraged farmers in the Teso sub-region to plant fruits for sale to the factory. However, many of them are now frustrated as their fruits including oranges and mangoes have had to just rot with no market.
