Athi River Mining Company On Spotlight For Hiring Unqualified Foreigners As Expatriates Denying Qualified Kenyans Deserved Job Opportunities

Rhino Cement previously referred as Athi River Mining is on the spotlight over breach of business moral ethical conducts. Disgruntled workers in most of the branches of the mining company has approached Kenya Insights with intention of bringing to light a serious issue in the recruitment process where the management is jumping the rules and irregularly hiring unqualified foreigners.

In this company every department is headed by an Indian who is considered an expartriate. In real sense some of them do not possess little knowledge of whats happening. Beside having an Indian head, departments also have about 3-4 other indians who act as supervisors, headmen, foremen, and other senior jobs. “Our graduates are treated as trash and handle the dirty job while the indians supervise.” Says one of the disgruntled workers whom for obvious reasons shall remain anonymous.

It doesn’t make any sense that at ARM, HODs, Supervisors, foremen, and generally small jobs that can be well handled by Kenyans are assigned to foreigners who are brought in as expatriate. How unqualified foreigners pass through the immigration process to get jobs that’s can be done by local workers isn’t much of guess work. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the management collude with immigration officials to give work permits to foreigners who don’t deserve.

One of the expatriates at work

We’re made to believe that the so called expatriates at NRM were just fixed to earn 10 times what Kenyans earn. A foreman for instance earns 250k while a Kenyan engineer earns a gross of 30k.

Rhino company has five different factories and each has a different number of Indians at each dept so its difficult for me to know the exact number of Indians. It has factories in Kaloleni, athi river, tanga, dar, Rwanda. Also the companies caters for their accommodations, tickets to India and back once a year, their meals, generally everything at the expense of Kenyans who do all the work.