Tanzania eyes takeover of Mo Dewji’s idle Mbeya tea estates

Tanzania’s government is in active negotiations with Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited over the fate of more than 2,000 hectares of idle tea estates in Mbeya Region, with officials telling parliament this week they are considering both a takeover and a reallocation of the land to smallholder farmers and cooperative societies.

Deputy Minister for Agriculture David Silinde disclosed the talks during a session of the National Assembly, responding to a question from Anton Mwantona, the Rungwe-CCM member of parliament, who had demanded to know when the government planned to repossess the unused MeTL land and redistribute it to local farmers.

Silinde said the government was in negotiations with MeTL to ensure production resumes and was also exploring the possibility of purchasing the estates outright and reassigning them to smallholder farmers. He said that handing over the factories to cooperative societies was among the options being considered and would help farmers gain direct participation in the tea value chain rather than remaining dependent on a corporate intermediary that had not been using the land.

The minister said the revival of the estates would increase Tanzania’s tea output and improve livelihoods for thousands of farmers in the Mbeya Region who depend on tea for their income. He described the planned arrangement as a long-term solution to the unreliable market access that green tea leaf farmers in the region have faced due to the dormancy of the MeTL processing facilities.

The MeTL tea estates sit at the center of a political dispute that has been building for more than a year. In September 2025, President Samia Suluhu raised the issue directly at a campaign rally in Rungwe, telling supporters that the government planned to repossess a tea estate from MeTL after concluding the assets had not been developed in line with the commitments the company made when it acquired them through privatisation. The statement landed in the middle of Tanzania’s election season and was widely read as a populist move to shore up support in tea-farming communities in the Southern Highlands.

MeTL’s chief executive, Mohammed “Mo” Dewji, responded by pursuing a financing strategy designed to demonstrate the group’s agricultural commitment. In November 2025, MeTL secured a $24.6 million senior corporate loan from the African Development Bank as part of a broader $74.7 million agricultural modernisation programme. The AfDB loan was intended to rehabilitate ageing tea estates, convert more than 1,000 hectares into certified organic plantations and upgrade processing factories with the aim of doubling output. The programme also included plans for 15,000 hectares of new sisal plantations and a 200-hectare macadamia farm. The loan was the most significant external financing commitment MeTL had made to its agricultural portfolio in years.

The AfDB financing did not fully settle the political pressure. Agriculture minister Hussein Bashe had earlier directed officials to engage with MeTL directly, saying publicly that if the company believed it could not turn around its operations it should inform the government so the state could step in. “If MeTL believes it cannot turn around its operations, they should inform the government so we can step in,” Bashe said at a tea industry forum in April 2025.

MeTL is Tanzania’s largest private employer, with operations spanning food and beverages, agriculture, energy, textiles, logistics and manufacturing across eight countries. Dewji, who became CEO in 2005, grew the group’s revenues from $30 million to approximately $2 billion. He is Tanzania’s richest individual and among the wealthiest people in East Africa, with a net worth estimated at approximately $1.5 billion.

The Mbeya Region is one of Tanzania’s most important tea-growing areas. Tea is a significant cash crop in the Southern Highlands and the dormancy of MeTL’s processing capacity has cut off a critical market link for thousands of smallholder farmers who grow the green leaf but have no factory to sell it to. Their options without an operational processor are limited and commercially damaging.

The negotiations that Silinde described to parliament are ongoing. No timeline for their conclusion has been announced, and no agreement on terms has been reached. MeTL had not issued a public statement in response to the parliamentary disclosure at the time of publication.