The Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture, Livestock and Co-operatives has opposed proposals to privatize Kenya Meat Commission.
The committee visited the factory’s headquarters in Athi River town in a seven-hour fact-finding mission on Thursday.
Led by the committee’s chairman Abdi Noor, members said proposals to privatize the firm is ill advised and a plot by certain cartels to kill the factory.
“As a committee, we are on a fact-finding mission on the giant Kenyan factory KMC that has been ailing for more than 15 years now. We want to come up with long lasting solutions for its revival ones and for all. We will analyze all the problems and see how best we can solve them,” said Noor.
“For a strategic partner to come here, he might want to own the land and houses, partner for a while and turn to another business,” said Noor.
Noor said more than 70 percent of Kenyan population earns its livelihoods from the firm and, therefore privatization will be doing injustice to them.
“We need to see on how farmers and the pastoral communities especially those from Arid and Semi-arid areas can be able to benefit from the company, there are multiple problems facing this factory which was established in the 1950s by the colonials,” said Noor.
Noor said in its current condition, KMC cannot compete with the world or Kenyan markets arguing it has archaic machinery and equipment that cannot facilitate effective production of high volumes of meat and meat products to meet high demands.
He said the committee has confidence on the future of the factory because there are readily available livestock and markets for the company’s products and therefore the committee is committed to ensuring the firm gets proper funding for its revival in a bid of making it self-sustainable.
“There has been a disagreement between the government and KMC’s management on whether the factory should be modernized or be replaced with a new plant, this has paralyzed the process of its revival for some time. Due to mismanagement and governance problems, whatever monies the government has been pumping in the factory have not had credible impacts. We need other ways of making it economically viable,” said Noor.
“For instance, if the plant requires four machines to run but only one is running as we have seen, what happens to the production process if the single one breaks down,” said Noor.
He said due to the disagreement, Sh600 million allocated by the government for upgrading of the plant in the last financial year was utilized to clear debts that included for livestock production and workers salaries arrears.
Noor said the committee will analyze a report provided to it by the company’s management at a retreat meeting in Mombasa soon, and come up with a way forward on how the firm should be revived.
He said as a committee they preferred that the old machinery be replaced by modern ones for efficiency in production as opposed to constructing a new plant.