BY WATIPASO MZUNGU JNR
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| A tobacco tenant (middle) with his family in Lilongwe |
Pregnancy is a cause for joy for every prospective mother as it is to the man that sowed the seed.
But for a tobacco tenant, Marko Mwale, 38, it was cause for worry. Then working for Chikoko Estate in Mchinji, his wife’s pregnancy cost him a job at an estate he worked for ten years.
It was in January 2005, when with pangs of happiness, his wife asked Mwale to arrange transport to Kapiri Mission Hospital about 20km away where she could get professional birth attendance.
Mwale did not hesitate to approach his employer for assistance as he [Mwale] did not own a bicycle nor did he have money to hire one to take her to the hospital for professional maternal healthcare. But the landlord could not allow them to.
“I was told to choose between caring for my wife or job. He reminded me that I had come alone and that, therefore, he could not be responsible for intruders,” Marko’s former boss and owner of Chikoko Estate told him.
Confused and feeling helpless, he left his boss and returned to his grass-thatched hut, which could best be described as a kraal. He found his wife lying in agony and motionless. Only a sound of groaning, a sign that she was really in deep pain, could be heard from a distance.
“For fear of losing my job and annual payments, I relented, went back to my house where I found my wife groaning in pain. I assumed the role of a traditional birth attendant to help my wife deliver,” Marko told officials from the Ministries of Labour, Agriculture and Centre For Social Concern (CFSC) during a “review of the working and living conditions of tobacco tenants and other workers on tobacco estates” that was held from 16—17 March in Lilongwe last year.
“However, the good news is that with the help and grace of God, my wife managed to deliver right at the estate. The child is still living to-date,” he sighed with deep relief.
Marko then went on to explain the ordeals that tenants and other workers on tobacco estates go through in the hands of their bosses. Marko described the scorn with which they are treated at the hands of the people they are slaving.
As if blaspheming, he said the respect estate owners receive from their tenants does not match that worshippers give to their Creator.
“We are treated like garbage. When we run out of basic needs, say flour, we go through our supervisor. We are not human beings at all in the eyes of our employers,” explained Marko who added that he deserted his first employer, Chikoko Estate owner in Mchinji after the boss denied him assistance to take his wife to the hospital to receive professional medical care.
“Our problems are recurrent. No tobacco tenant can tell you his life has improved or he has ever bought a valuable item in his life let alone a bicycle. Actually, sometimes I turn to wonder whether God cursed us.
“But one thing that I am very sure of is that all tobacco tenants in Malawi are serving life imprisonment and our crime is that we were born in poor families,” voiced out Marko emotionally directing looking into to the eyes of officials from Ministry of Labour and Justice.
Rosaria Chiteyeye, another tobacco tenant at Chiphaso in Kasungu, concurred with Marko, but unlike the latter, Chiteyeye has a slightly different version of the episode.
Chiteyeye, feminine that she is, told the officials how difficult life is for women and children in tobacco estates.
“We are not entitled to annual or maternity leave, transport facilities, medical scheme, death gratuity, and other entitlements. If estate workers fall ill, they are neither entitled to sick leave nor provided with transport to go to the hospital,” she said.
Chiteyeye added: “We just hear from our fellow women working in organizations or government of maternity leave. That vocabulary does not exist in tobacco estates.”
She also said though the degree of women’s involvement in tobacco production is equal, sometimes more, to that of men, their contributions are not directly rewarded by the estate owners or their husbands.
That is not all. Chiteyeye said most women in estates are subjected to mental, sexual and physical abuses from landlords and their own husbands. They are sexually harassed or even raped by their masters.
The situation becomes worse for tenants with large families as employers do not consider the number of the family members as their focus is on the husband.
“When our food allocations run out due to the large number of children that we have, our employers tell us they have no responsibility over the children,” she reported.
Chiteyeye further stated that children born of tenants rarely can go to school as bosses do not approve of it. She said children as young as six are offered to estate owners for domestic assignments such as looking after animals [kulisya ng’ombe, as she called it] or plucking suckers.
“This brings our families extra pay, which we normally use to buy some basic needs like toiletries and other basic needs,” said Chiteyeye adding that sometimes supervisors seek sexual favours from vulnerable women and their girl-children in exchange of food items.
Tobacco Tenants and Allied Workers Union of Malawi (TOTAWUM) general secretary, Raphael Sandram, said he was banking hopes on the November slated Parliamentary meetings to debate and pass Tenancy Labour Bill into law.
Sandram disclosed that the bill was very important towards uplifting the living standards of tobacco tenants and their families.
“In the interest of basic justice, we believe the legislation should be considered without further delay. The tenant farmers need: written, legally enforceable labour contracts, a living wage and adequate food, safe drinking water, medicine, and proper housing, interest-free loans for agricultural inputs and food, transportation to home villages, at no cost, after the growing season,” stated Sandram.
The trade union representing tenant farmers reported that their living conditions are worse today than when reform legislation was drafted in 1995.
Thirteen years later, the Tenancy Labour Bill, still held by the Ministry of Justice, has yet to be discussed in Parliament.
“Therefore, we urge Ministry of Justice to: (1) immediately create a Parliamentary sub-committee to review the Tenancy Labour Bill and send it to Parliament for debate; and (2) ensure that the Tobacco Tenants and Allied Workers Union of Malawi (TOTAWUM), tobacco landlord associations, and tobacco companies begin collective bargaining,” he added.
Officials from the ministry of Labour present at the function said the ministry was aware of the sufferings of the tenants in tobacco estates.
The officials, however, said they are failing to rescue the tobacco workers from abuse and violations due to lack of law empowering them to discipline the estate owners.
“If landlords challenge us, we have nowhere to go. We cannot take them to court for abusing the rights of their workers as there is no law on tenancy,” said one of the officials, Audrey Khungwa, when asked why his ministry was silent on the cry of the tenants.
Centre for Social Concern (CFSC) executive director, Fr. Jos Kuppens, said at the review meeting that over 500, 000 Malawians are living under dehumanizing conditions in tobacco estates.
Fr. Kuppens cited tobacco workers and families on estates of Lilongwe, Mchinji and Mzimba as some of the tenant going through such conditions despite efforts by the Ministries of Labour and Justice, and other civil society organizations to create human environment tobacco workers.
As a signatory to various human rights treaties and Conventions, like the Convention of the Rights of Children (CRC), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Fr. Kuppens observed that Malawi is obliged to enforce conditions that ensure that all its citizens, including tobacco workers and their families, can enjoy their rights and entitlements.
“Tobacco workers live in extreme poverty and are often subjected to high levels of exploitation including sexual harassment for women by their supervisors. There are high human rights abuses and violations” he said.
“The situation has become more serious since the advent of market liberalization. The majority of the tobacco workers [tenants and contracted workers] work without written or oral contracts.
“Furthermore, many landlords on tobacco estates deny workers basic necessities such as medication; food when they run out of their monthly allocation, safe drinking water and housing,” he added
The CFSC director lamented that despite the fact that most of the country’s imported goods are paid for in foreign exchange that is generated by the sale of tobacco, those who are mostly responsible for the foreign exchange have no access to proper housing, clean drinking water, and schools for their children, medical services.
Tobacco production is associated with economic development in Malawi. It provides employment to a cross-section of Malawians and contributes over 70 percent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings.
The powerful forces behind Malawi’s tobacco-dependent economy are United States subsidiaries; Limbe Leaf, Stancom and Demon, which together purchase over 95 percent of the leaf and sell it to global cigarette firms like Philip Morris and British American Tobacco (BAT), according to CFSC.
In its latest survey, CFSC in partnership with other civil society organizations, with the help of the Ministry of Labour and other experts discovered that most estates do not provide services for school-going children, leading to high incidences of child labour on tobacco estates. It was established that although primary is free in the country, children become part of the workforce by working alongside their parents on tobacco fields.
“There was also a lot of evidence that children as young as 10 years become full time workers on these estates and earning far much less than adults,” says the survey report.
The study has recommended that there should be [compulsory] signed contract agreements between landlords and estate workers; seasonal labour and tenants, that stipulate what the landlords will provide as support services to the workers, how much lump sum will be paid to the worker at the end of the season.
It also recommends that the draft Tenancy Labour Bill that was prepared by the Ministry of Labour be tabled in the next sitting of Parliament and passed into law to empower the suffering Malawians in tobacco estates.
The Bill emphasizes written contracts between tenant and landlords covering things like transports of tenants, food provisions and accommodation, and their loan repayments schemes.
“We, therefore, demand that this bill be made known, that political parties commit themselves to tabling and passing it [500,000 voters can make a difference to any party in closely contested elections] once the new parliament is sitting and has resumed business after the May elections,” emphasized Fr. Kuppens.
Only until then will Marko Mwale and Rosaria Chiteyeye smile after getting a reward for their toiling on lands owned by profit-minded farmers.
“I am just praying for Fr. Kuppens and his team for his tireless efforts to bail us out. I hope when the war is won, I should be able to buy only a mere push bicycle, which I have always desired to own,” Marko, who is now working for Chilim’nthaka Tobacco Estate in Mchinji, told the participants when asked to say his closing remarks.
END
