Mr David Mushebe, one of the sugar cane farmers in Namayingo District, shows a section of his sugar cane plantation ready for harvest. Mr Mushebe was supposed to supply his cane to CN Sugar Factory in Namayingo District. PHOTO/DENIS EDEMA
He is seated on the rear veranda from where he commands a vantage point over a vast sugarcane plantation that stretches into the valley below. His chin is heavily resting in the broken cups of his palms. The deep lines running across David Mushebe’s forehead tell how deeply lost he is in thought.
“What am I going to do with all that cane?” he mutters to himself, before he finally takes cognizance of our presence.
“Please forgive me. I had not realised I had visitors,” he says.
Trouble
Mushebe is one of the more than 350 farmers in Namayingo District, who had been contracted to supply sugarcane to CN Sugar Limited. The firm had been on course to open a sugar mill at the beginning of this month, but on January 20, just as final touches were being put to a mill section, a boiler and a boiling house, the High Court ordered a halt to all its operations.
Justice Douglous Singiza directed the Inspector General of Police to “evict CN Sugar from Plot 292 Block 7 in Bukooli and carry away their machinery.”
Mr Ronald Sanya, the Namayingo District chairperson, described the directive as “unprecedented”.
“I have not seen anywhere in this country where a factory has reached the levels it has reached and it is brought down. I have not seen any precedence and I doubt whether such can ever happen,” he says.
The order was the culmination of an application filed by the Uganda Sugar Manufacturers’ Association (USMA), which brings together the three biggest sugar producers in the country: Kakira Sugar, Kinyara Sugar and the Sugar Corporation of Uganda, Lugazi (Scoul), together with Bugiri Sugar Limited, in which they sought a judicial review of the decision of the Minister of Trade to issue CN Sugar with “a letter of no objection” to setting up a sugar mill since it had been given an investment license.
Conspiracy theory
Mr Twaliki Isabirye, the chairperson of CN Sugarcane Out-growers Association, says there are fears that some invisible hand is pulling strings from behind the scenes.
“On August 11 last year, the police raided the factory premises and fired teargas and live ammunition, claiming the operations were illegal because CN Sugar allegedly did not own a nuclear estate. Since when has it been the police’s duty to see whether a factory has a plantation or not?” Mr Isabirye wonders.
That is hard to prove, but work on the mill ground to a halt, thanks to the court order. The site is deserted.
Departures
Mr Hamza Tigabugwa, the chairperson of Nsano A Village in Kifuyo Parish, Buyinja Sub-county where the factory is located, says the staff had been evacuated.
“A minibus took away about 34 of the men who had been working here. We are not sure whether they were taken back to India or taken elsewhere,” Mr Tigabugwa said.
Fears
CN Sugar factory is the first manufacturing investment in a district where the biggest documented economic activities were until very recently smuggling, illegal fishing and rudimentary gold mining. Mr Isabirye says CN Sugar’s entry had caused a change to the narrative.
Mr Hamza Tigabugwa, the chairperson of Nsano A Village, Kifuyo Parish, Buyinja Sub-county, Namayingo District, shows a section of CN Sugar factory whose construction was halted following a High Court order. PHOTOS/DENIS EDEMA
Contracting of farmers to enter sugarcane growing opened up more than 10,000 jobs in indirect employment for mostly people who had transited from illegal fishing.
The commencement of production had been expected to open up more employment opportunities and trigger an economic boom. It is feared that those have been lost. The biggest fear though, is that it portends economic ruin for the farmers.
“The farmers have heavily invested in their farms. Many of them have taken out loans to prepare fields, plant and maintain the gardens. They are looking at financial ruin and loss of property if they cannot sell and fulfil their loan obligations,” Mr Isabirye says.
Recurrence
This is not the first-time farmers in Busoga are stuck with sugarcane, but just like has been in prior cases, it is because sugar mills are fighting for the control of the region’s sugarcane fields.
The opening in 2004-2005 of the GM Sugar and Mayuge Sugar Industries (MSI) mills, coupled with a drought that hit the sub-region around 2014, led to a shortage of cane. That translated into high demand for the crop, resulting into a hike in the price from Shs73,000 per tonne to Shs187,000 per tonne.
That sparked off a mass exodus into sugarcane growing. By the beginning of 2018, there was simply too much cane that Kakira, with an installed crushing capacity of 7,500 metric tonnes of cane per day; Mayuge (2,000); GM Sugar and Kaliro Sugar (1,650 each) and; Kamuli Sugar (1,450), could not take all of it.
The prices crushed from Shs180,000 to Shs120,000 first before it dropped to Shs110,000 in July 2020. That fell again to Shs104,000, reaching a low of Shs73,000 a few months later.
Permit merchants
Now one of the things that a farmer requires in order to supply cane to any of the mills is a sugarcane permit. At the height of the glut, a cartel of sugarcane permit merchants, mostly politicians and security personnel, emerged.
These would obtain permits and either buy cane on the cheap and supply to the mills or compel farmers to supply the factories through them. The permit holders then take commissions of up to Shs100,000 off each trip delivered.
Each trip made by, say, a Tata lorry, is usually 10 tonnes. Every acre, according to Mr Ibrahim Ikaata, a farmer, yields at least 40 tonnes. These middlemen would walk away with Shs400,000 for every acre of cane supplied in their names.
Those who could not access the permit merchants’ services were either forced to cut the cane or burn it. Many of them went bust. Some have never recovered. Namayingo farmers are now faced with a similar fate.
At the height of the crisis, Mr Jim Mwine Kabeho, the chairperson of Uganda Sugar Manufacturers' Association (USMA), who is also a non-executive director at Kakira Sugar, says the only way of guaranteeing market for the farmers’ sugarcane was by having them registered as out-growers attached to the mills.
The farmers here heeded the call, but that has not, at least for now, been enough to insulate them against possible loss and financial ruin.
Political implications
Mr Emmanuel Dombo, the Director for Communication at the National Resistance Movement (NRM) Secretariat, says a post-election assessment exercise carried out by the ruling party revealed that the sugarcane question was a major factor in the 2021 elections, which saw Busoga vote against the NRM for the first time since 1996.
Mr Museveni, the NRM’s presidential candidate, tallied 404,862 votes against the 437,059 votes that were garnered by the candidate of the National Unity Platform (NUP), Mr Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine.
“The prices of sugarcane were so low and poverty levels were very high. Government had to subsidise sugarcane prices by meeting the cost of transporting cane to Atiak [Sugar Factory in Amuru District in northern Uganda], but that intervention as obviously not enough. The sugarcane question was a major factor,” Mr Dombo says.
