Chemelil Sugar Company has committed to pay Sh. 7.5 million weekly in a bid to clear farmers’ arrears

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By Wycliffe Odera
Chemelil Sugar Company has committed to pay Sh. 7.5 million weekly in a bid to clear farmers’ arrears amounting to Sh. 235 million.
The Company Acting Managing Director, Mr Gabriel Nyangweso, says the arrears accrued from the months of January to March.
Already, he says, the government is assisting the company to pay an earlier arrears of Sh. 230 million with the first batch of Sh. 138 million already paid.
“What the government has disbursed so far in payment of these early arrears amounts to 40 percent. To date we are still waiting for the government to release the remaining monies equivalent to 60 percent,” he said.
Nyangweso however says the company will be dealing with the arrears it accrued out of what the government promised to offset.
He says they have agreed with the farmers that the new arrears will be paid every week until the whole amount is exhausted.
“We agreed to pay this Sh. 7.5 million every week, and we started it from the month of October and we envisage to complete it within six months,” he said.
Nyangweso who spoke to the press on Thursday at the company offices announced that the company owes huge sums of money to employees.
“These arrears build up during the period we were in low production, part of it 2017, we were not in production for almost 8 months, the whole of 2019 we were not in production, these are the arrears that have accrued,” he said.
However, he explained that currently the staff are earning their full salary as opposed to the other months they were earning partial salaries.
Depending on the production, Nyangweso says they will be able to pay arrears to the employees that stands at Sh. 800 million.
“As we are producing, we are now not accruing any arrears but we are working round the clock to repay the arrears that had been accrued before,” he said.
Nyangweso disclosed that through the Directorate of Sugarcane Development, they are lobbying the new government to settle the commitment to pay the remaining 60 percent to enable the company to pay farmers their arrears.
He hailed farmers for standing with the company during the hard times promising support to them in terms of promptly payment for cane delivered.
“I want to thank our staff, right now they have hope that the company is slowly but surely returning to its olden days,” he said.
At the moment, he says the factory is 100 percent operational after successful maintenance.
“We have improved our production from an initial 30 percent to now we are doing 60 percent of our capacity. We are able to do about 2,000 tonnes of cane on a daily basis,” he said.