As this was happening, the political situation was becoming extremely tense in Burundi. After nine years in office, President Pierre Nkurunziza was widely expected to run for a third term in the 2015 election — a move that opponents said would contravene the constitution and the peace agreement that had ended Burundi’s 13-year civil war in 2006.

The possibility of a third term directly concerned Bayaganakandi. He was not only a businessman and a retired colonel; he was also the head of the opposition party Movement for the Rehabilitation of Citizens (MRC). A year before the election, in the the spring of 2014, the government ordered Stevco to stop growing the plant. That July, before the first harvest had even been picked, violent attacks began on stevia farms.

At one stevia plantation in Bugarama, a village slightly north of the capital, unidentified assailants hurled a grenade at the plantation’s security guard in the middle of the night. Leaving the guard injured, they then stormed the small hillside nursery, spraying the crops with acid and bullets.

A few weeks later, a 25-year-old Stevco technician was at home in the northwestern city of Bubanza when he says police burst in. The officers seized Claude Bigirimana’s telephone and gave him an ultimatum. “If you’re still here in two hours, we’ll kill you,” one shouted. Bigirimana fled to the capital, where he has lived ever since. A spokesperson for the police did not wish to comment.

There were more violent attacks in October. In January, the regional director of the department for agriculture and livestock in Rumonge personally took part in the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of stevia plants with machetes and hoes, declaring it an "illegal" weed — a charge Steveco denies.

The raids on the plantations, Stevco managers claim, were political — designed to intimidate and undermine the opposition. “The government was scared because they thought [Bayanganakandi] could use the stevia to influence people to vote for him in the elections,” said a political analyst unconnected to the business who asked not to be named. The spokesperson for the ruling party was not available for comment.

Ferdinand Nikyongabo, who manages the plantation in Bugarama, saw the attacks as part of a larger strategy. “[The local government] doesn’t want too many people to be developed,” he said. "It has been said by the governor himself that if people get money, it will be impossible to govern them.” Nikyongabo saw nearly half of his 75-person staff leave after the acid attack.

The stevia attacks were not the first example of alleged economic sabotage in recent Burundian history. In 2013, the cavernous central market building in Bujumbura was gutted by a fire that many believe was intentional. Of the more than 5,000 registered traders, only 5 percent had insurance, meaning that many lost not just their wares but also tens of thousands of dollars in cash. (It’s common for vendors to keep money in their stalls rather than in bank accounts.) The Burundian government had sold land to a multinational company, and rumors circulated that the fire had been linked to the deal.

When Nkuruniza confirmed plans to seek a third term, more than 180,000 Burundians fled the country in the run-up to the elections, including many senior political figures who opposed the president. The opposition pledged to boycott the vote. Last July, Nkurunziza won his controversial third term in a landslide. Bayaganakandi's MRC party, which participated in the boycott, won 0.3 percent of the vote, and did not secure a single seat in parliament.