AFRICA | A Kenyan Community's Fight to Take Back Its Lipton Tea Estates

NAIROBI, Kenya — A community-led consortium in Kenya’s tea-growing region is fighting to stop a global private equity firm selling the renowned Lipton tea estates to a Sri Lankan conglomerate in a deal estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.

It comes after the consortium’s own bid to reclaim the estates failed last month.

The Nairobi-based agricultural firm Sasini was the other bidder for the Lipton Kenya estates, which include 11 plantations and eight factories in Kericho, Bomet, and Limuru counties. Sri Lankan firm Browns won with a promise to allocate a 15% stake in the Kenya operation to the community through a cooperative society.

Luxembourg-based CVC Capital bought the Lipton estates in Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda in 2022 from Unilever for €4.5 billion ($4.8 billion). The tea estates in Kericho, a highland town in southern Rift Valley, sit on lands from which members of the Kipsigis community were first forcefully evicted by British colonialists over a hundred years ago. In more recent years, the community has faced off with the multinational firms running the estates over layoffs due to mechanization, as well as alleged sexual abuse violations against female workers.

Two people close to the latest discussions told Semafor Africa that the Kipsigis Community Clans Organization — an umbrella group of elders, clans and cooperative societies claiming to represent over 340,000 members — had earlier sealed a partnership with London-based management consultancy firm 101 Partners with whom they formed a consortium and sought financing for the bid.

Members of the consortium claim their bid was not considered despite their willingness to match the highest offer, and that the community was not adequately consulted on the sale.

Lipton, Browns, and CVC did not respond to emails and phone calls from Semafor Africa.

“The people drinking Lipton tea should know that they are drinking blood tea,” Nicholas Kirui, a member of Kericho’s tea mechanization task force and former CEO of the Kenya Tea Growers Association, told Semafor Africa. “The land was forcefully taken from the Kipsigis people without compensation.”

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Semafor Africa