Twelve tea clerks from Nyansiongo tea factory in Nyamira County have been suspended by the factory’s management with five others getting fired following revelation of uncouth conduct of manipulating a weighing machine to temper with the actual weight of tea as brought by the farmer.
This comes a few weeks after a group of farmers demonstrated to the factory complaining of the uncouth conduct by the suspended officials before the company constituted a committee that convicted the officials of misconduct.
According to the report from the committee of experts, at least 2,000kg of tea was erroneously lost and the suspended and the other sacked officials could not account for the lost kilogrammes.
“The factory had to take the decisive action to restore our dignity. We don’t condone such conduct and they will have to account for 2,000kg that was lost hence costing our own clients. They will also be arraigned in court to answer to the charges,” said human resource manager Pius Njoroge.
The factory’s chairman, Mr Christopher Nyokora, hailed the decision by the management and urged farmers to be vigilant to ensure such practices are minimised in the buying centres.
“We have handled such kind of issues before and what the management has done today is very encouraging and I call upon farmers to be vigilant to ensure more clerks who do not abide by the law are arrested and charged with fraud,” he said.