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U
ganda Development Corporation (UDC) through
its subsidiary Agricultural Enterprises Limited
(AEL) and Uganda Tea Growers Corporation
( TGC) was set up in the 1960s to run agricultural
parastatals in the country, and the tea sector was one of them.
The tea sector/estates which straddle the former greater
Kigezi sub-region (Ankole, Igara and Kayonza Estates),
the Rwenzori mountain areas (Kiko, Mpanga, Mabale,
Mwenge Estates), Muzizi and Bugambe in present day
Kibaale and Hoima Districts respectively, Salaama Estate
in present day Mukono District near Kampala and, to a
lesser extent, Zeu highlands in West Nile region, thrived
in the 1960s (when most of the tea was planted) up to the
early 1970s.
UTGC was responsible for running Igara, Kayonza,
Mpanga and Mabale Estates where individual farmers or
groups sold their green leaf to the factories which they
eventually owned through shareholding, whereas AEL was
in charge of Ankole, Kiko,Muzizi, Bugambe and Salaama
Estates.
However, with the economic uncertainty and political
upheavals of the 1970s, these parastatals were completely
run down and by the early 1980s most of the estates had
been abandoned or were operating well below their
capacity. From the mid-1980s the government (with
funding from EU) made several interventions to salvage
the industry through rehabilitation of tea fields and
factories but eventually these efforts did not pay off, save
for the UTGC ones which kept limping along. The ones
under AEL were failing, with abandoned tea fields and run
down factories.
In 1993, through its Policy of Privatisation of Government
Parastatals, the government sold off AEL to
Commonwealth Development Corporation and James
Finlay Limited who jointly formed Rwenzori Tea
Investment Limited which was incorporated in Uganda in
1993 and began operations on 1 February 1994 under the
name of Rwenzori Highlands Tea Company Limited. The
new Company – RHTC Ltd – then began rehabilitating
the fields and rebuilding factories once more.
Fresh after graduating from the Havana University of
Agricultural Sciences (in 1993), I joined the Company on
1 February 1994 at Ankole Tea Company Limited as they
were called then, as a Services Foreman responsible for
engineering on the estate and reporting to the Factory
Engineer.What was interesting then was the poor standard
of factory machinery maintenance and lack of service parts.
For example, we would fill up worn drive sprockets for the
CTC machine with welding and later file/grind them to
give them some ‘teeth’ to achieve some drive, and when
servicing the standby generators we would wash oil filters
with diesel in order to reuse them. Miraculously, we were
making some tea in the factory!
One evening in April 1994, I saw a truck loaded with some
strange kind of poles of about 3-4 inch diameter entering
from the back of the estate. When I asked my Manager,
Mr Tugume Japheth, what these were, he laughed and told
me they were tea tree poles from the last rehabilitation of
the Ankole fields being taken away for fire wood. He said
the tea trees had grown to over 20 feet after they had been
abandoned; here I was getting used to a tea bush growing
to barely a metre in height!
~ Alfred Omoya
Muzizi T.E.
The Exciting Evolution
of Tea Rehabilitation
and Growing in the
Rwenzori Days
16 January 2016
January 2016 17
Abandoned Estates
Factory under Renovation
Tea Trees