Amid Rwanda’s Ethnic Strife, Tea Plantation Is Oasis of Stability

Hidden among thousands of tea bushes, Hutus and Tutsis sweat together each morning, swiftly plucking the leaves two at a time and tossing them into straw baskets strapped to their backs.

No soldiers eye them suspiciously. No rebels lurk in the bush.

The meandering Cyohoha tea plantation is an exception in Rwanda, where attacks by Hutu rebels and reprisals by the Tutsi-dominated army have paralyzed much of the economy and everyday lives are plagued by fear and suspicion.

“We keep everybody happy here because we make a profit, offer steady employment and pay workers on time,” said Colle Alles, a Sri Lankan agronomist who runs the farm for its American owner.

One of a handful of private businesses in Rwanda, and with a rare policy of ethnically integrated labor, Cyohoha appears to have succeeded where the state failed. “I can prove that economic prosperity can bring stability,” Alles said.

Cyohoha’s success stands as an ideal--and its uniqueness as a cautionary tale--for Rwanda, Africa’s most densely populated and fastest-growing nation, and among its poorest.

Agriculture is the backbone of the economy in Rwanda, where the scarcity of land and jobs has fueled a Hutu-Tutsi rivalry that in 1994 exploded in a slaughter of 500,000 Tutsis by extremists in the Hutu majority. Tutsi rebels then ousted the Hutu government and seized control of Rwanda.

After independence from Belgium in 1962, the former Hutu leadership clung to giant, money-losing state enterprises that were endlessly subsidized by foreign donors. They discriminated against Tutsis, who took jobs in the private sector where many had made better livings--to the envy of their Hutu neighbors.

When American Joe Wertheins first looked at a large, unattractive swamp in the Cyohoha River valley in 1971, officials told him he was crazy to try to turn it into a tea plantation, Alles recalled.

Wertheins drained the swamp the same year, planted the first tea bush eight years later and saw the plantation’s output climb to a record 2,897 tons of tea, worth $5 million in 1996--more than the state-run Mulindi factory, which is three times as large. It has an annual profit of about $1 million.

But Wertheins has had setbacks.

When Tutsi exiles based in Uganda invaded Rwanda in 1990, Cyohoha was among the first to suffer. Close to the border, it was on the front line for months before retreating Hutu soldiers looted equipment and destroyed property.

But even before the war ended in July 1994 with the Tutsi rebel victory, Wertheins’ plantation became the first company to start up again--and hire people desperate for jobs.

At first, most employees were Tutsis, because more than 2 million Hutus fled to neighboring countries, fearing revenge for the massacres.

The exiles came back in late 1996 --with rebels and militiamen mixed among them. Managers knew the tea factory would become a rebel target unless Hutus were offered jobs too.

“Our policy was immediately to offer jobs to both Hutus and Tutsis. Unlike state companies, which take a long, long time to check and double-check the record of every Hutu returnee, we didn’t make any discrimination,” said Felix Mugabo, a manager.

Creating jobs is a crucial task for Rwanda’s leaders.

The population is now back to where it was before the 1994 genocide--7.5 million people crowded into a space half the size of West Virginia, which has a population of about 1.8 million.

Unemployment and the shortage of land and housing, coupled with low international prices for coffee and tea, could again touch off widespread bloodshed--as they did in 1994, when extremists in the Hutu government mobilized gangs of unemployed Hutus into a killing machine.

Economists say the government will have to create at least 2 million new jobs over the next decade to meet the needs of a population expected to exceed 11 million by 2010.

“The worst scenario is not enough jobs created. Those two million [jobless] people would be a receptive ground for any social unrest,” said Nguyem X Loung, an economist with the U.N. Development Program.

But state-owned enterprises are losing money and aren’t seen by Western experts as an engine of growth.

While the government has promised privatization, it has sold only two state businesses--a brewery and a sugar mill. It has made no move to sell its 49% stake in Cyohoha.

The World Bank says corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency and favoritism are hampering the transition to a market economy. Diplomats and the few foreign investors say the government doesn’t seem that interested in creating a competitive private sector.

For instance, RwandaTel, the state telecommunications monopoly, connected Rwanda to the Internet in December using money and equipment donated by the U.S. Agency for International Development. As part of the aid, RwandaTel had agreed the Web connection would be privately operated, but it has kept control.

Nor is the government particularly friendly to businesses that do operate here.

Alles said he was turned down when he went to pay $620,000 in taxes owed by the Cyohoha plantation last year--only to be fined a month later for not paying on time.

In addition, $250,000 worth of factory equipment for the plantation has been sitting in customs since October because the clearance forms were lost, he said.

“This is not a good climate for business,” Alles said. “I hope things will change.”