Brookside fires half of Uganda staff following Kenya's export standstill

Brookside is a dairy processing company that packages long-life milk, cream, butter, yoghurt, ghee, and milk powder in Uganda and the East Africa regional export market.

The company says that the Kenyan government has failed to grant them export permits for Brookside Uganda since March of this year. This has cut them off to 75 per cent of their market in the same period.

In a letter addressed to the Commissioner of Labour at the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, Winnie Mirembe Mugabi, the company's Human Resources and Administration manager cites the blockage as one of the factors.

“The company has been trying to mitigate the effects of these adverse developments by trying to grow local sales and also source alternative markets for its products in replacement of the blocked Kenyan market," the letter reads in part, adding, "Having worked on these initiatives for the last three months, it is apparent that we are unlikely to realize tangible results from the initiatives in the short run. We have also engaged the relevant authorities in Government to intervene but without any success."

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“For us to continue running the factory, we have no choice but to scale down all our operations across the entire value chain to match with our current level of business which is a paltry 25 per cent of our normal operational volumes. Under section 81 of the Employment Act, we would like to take this opportunity to inform you of our decision to lawfully terminate employees whose number exceeds 10 on account of structural reasons. 50 per cent of our staff will regrettably be affected by way of a retrenchment intended to take effect in July 2023,” the letter concludes.