Cotton Lint and Seed Marketing Board

Meria

Elder Lister
Staff member
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was the Chairperson of the Cotton Lint and Seed Marketing Board.Kisumu Cotton Mills(KICOMI) was thriving then.The government gave him that post as a way of putting him on check while reintegration him after long years of imprisonment during the years of Jomo Kenyatta.
As the industry picked up under Jaramogi's stewardship,he made the political blunder of going for the Bondo Parliamentary seat,so he resigned from the board but that's another story.
The market liberation through dictatorship by the Bretton Woods IMF and World Bank finished Africa's Cotton industry.We have seen how the secondhand cloth industry damaged people's livelihoods.Yes MITUMBA,has helped but not everyone wants to wear winter boiler suits in Africa.
Just imagine how Nyanza and other Cotton growing parts of East Africa would have been the premier hub for the product today if prices benefited farmers and then the cost of production was lower?
One of the pictures here shows KICOMI workers weaving textile products,September 6 1988.

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Mwalimu-G

Elder Lister
Cotton Lint and Seed Marketing Board iligulwa. As if that wasn't enough they went for the ginneries, most of which were run as co-operatives. Farmers lacked the spirit to grow cotton any more...meanwhile they went for the textile mills like Mountex- now closed for lack of yarn - and cannibalized them for scrap metal.
 
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