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Chairman says that Tole Tea Plantation is not for sale
The chairman of South African company, Brobon Finex, which bought the major share of the tea component from the Cameroon Development Corporation, CDC, has said that the Tole Tea Plantation in Fako Division is not for sale.
Derrick Garvie made the statement in a press release issued in Yaounde. He was reacting
to newspaper reports that the Fakoship Company wrote to the Prime Minister, Chief Ephraim Inoni, indicating its intention to buy the Tole Tea Plantation from the Cameroon
Tea Estates. But according to the CTE authorities, the Fakoship officials might well have forgotten that the government sold out the tea estate in a privatisation deal four years ago.
Referring to a recent crisis that rocked the plantation recently, Garvie said the issue touched on the livelihood of workers, and was being used by detractors to frustrate workers and destabilise the tea industry. The press release also carried the views of the
CTE board chairman, Baba Danpullo, who holds that the Fakoship officials do not master
the crisis of the Tole Tea Plantation.
Both Garvie and Danpullo claimed that a declaration by Fakoship boss Charles Menyoli to the effect that managerial and financial difficulties were behind the crisis, betrays his poor knowledge of theissues at stake. They said that they were reading other considerations in the Fakoship bid, but declared that CTE is not a political party but a commercial company who need to succeed by making profits.
They wondered why Fakoship thought Brobon Finex invested billions of FCFA in the
Cameroon Tea Estate just to turn around and refuse to manage it well or abandon it.
The CTE Chairman particularly expressed surprise that the Fakoship boss who knows him very well, did not bother to contact him but instead chose to petition the Prime Minister directly. According to him, the CTE board took the decision to close Tole Tea Estate in order to restructure the factory, thereby replacing old machines with new ones.
He said the Tole Tea Estate was built as far back as 1928 and needed to be fully restructured.
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