dyton mupawaenda
The news that the old David Whitehead spinning and weaving mills are returning to operation, with a lot of brand new equipment, and tied into a vegetable oil processing plant shows that a lot of things are going right.
The moves combine private sector investment with the Government’s drive to get farmers, and especially small-scale farmers, to produce the cotton and sunflower that the both the re-equipped factories and the new oil processing mills need, since it would not be much use opening these if there were no raw materials.
The new investment will also boost employment in both Chegutu and Kadoma and decent factory jobs become available for Zimbabweans prepared to work hard and learn how to operate all the new machinery to produce the highest quality products.
Behind the new investment is Pradyum Kumar Ganediwal, who has been one of the most consistent investors during the Second Republic and has in some ways become almost a walking advertisement for the national investment strategy, adding more investment almost every year in the oil seed and cotton fibre industries.
Fairly obviously he is more than happy with how his initial investment went and has thus been prepared to put in ever more capital as he takes advantage of our investment code and we take advantage of his money to continue building our agro industries.
This sort of win-win process is exactly what President Mnangagwa has been calling for and selling.
Cotton used to be a major crop in Zimbabwe, perhaps the major cash crop for small-scale farmers.
Investors in the 1950s and 1960s saw the obvious second step being spinning fibre and weaving cloth, with the raw materials ready to hand, and within a few years we had reached the stage that a lot of the clothes on our back were made from Zimbabwean cotton and cut and stitched in Zimbabwe.
Then we lost it, with the equipment at David Whitehead being run into the ground with no replacement and no investor to take over from Lonrho in the era after Roland “Tiny” Rowland.
Cottco, after its privatisation, started moving downhill, even though it had been the pioneer in lending to communal farmers, the collateral being the reputation of the farmers and the crop in the ground, and had established its own reputation for innovation and success.
The Second Republic bailing this company out, and taking over a majority of the shareholding again, has allowed it to rebuild and buy the cotton our farmers grow. That in turn has meant more farmers are prepared to grow more. This meant that more markets were needed.
Cotton is a double crop, fibre and cotton seed. We restarted converting the cotton seed to cooking oil again and several private companies now are willing to do this.
The equipment and the methods for processing cotton seed and soya are the same, with just one small extra process for cotton seed, so mills can switch from one raw material to the other almost instantly.
The same hexane extraction method also works with sunflower, although it is also possible to use a pure crushing process with that seed, but most extractors prefer the hexane method since this allows a modern mill to switch seeds easily and quickly.
This is the sort of plant Mr Ganediwal’s Agri Value Chain is commissioning in Chegutu, to add to his initial investment plant in Harare.
And that company is keen on securing its supplies of raw material, realising that the easiest way is to pay Zimbabwean farmers to grow it, which is a major reason why the sunflower crop this year is almost nine times bigger than last year. What amounts to a joint venture between the company and AARDS was a major component of that expansion.
But the other major component of cotton, and the more valuable component, is the fibre. While a modest, and for some obscure reason rationed, supply was used in Zimbabwe by thread spinners, most was exported, so other people in other countries could work in other people’s factories and be paid to spin and weave our cotton.
Now a reasonable percentage will be spun and woven in Zimbabwe, about 10m metres a year at the start, once a lot of equipment now on the high seas or being loaded into ships has arrived. It should thus be possible to once again see our fabrics on sale in the shops, rather than having near total imports.
There are practical points that help re-establish the market for local fabric. Until a few years ago almost all school uniforms in Zimbabwe were made from Zimbabwean cotton. This was no problem in boys’ uniforms, either khaki or grey drill with shirts made in around half a dozen colours, but girls uniforms covered a wide range of special designs, and the local mills made these. Schools would even be shown samples so they could choose their uniform.
This made it easy for parents to sew their own uniforms at home, using the identical fabric that a factory would use, and in any case made it easy to have competition in the sewing end, so helping to keep costs under control.
Returning to Zimbabwean fabric allows the sort of completion and home sewing that the Ministry of Primary and Second Education desires, but identical quality from all sources using the same fabric, which is what schools say they want.
We can also rebuild some of our export garment industry. Zimbabwean factories had established a reputation for quality products with rapid changes of design and size, so were able to fill specialised markets for fashion companies who might just want 50 examples of a particular size and design, rather than the thousands that a minimum order in some countries might involve.
We note that David Whitehead as it re-enters the market will be having to ensure quality, but Zimbabweans also need to respond by at least trying out the local products once again and measuring the quality against the price.
One advantage when you use fabric a short truck drive away is that if there is a problem, this can fixed with a phone call or email, and in any case a decent manufacturer will welcome suggestions and other input so that products can be tailored for what people want to buy.
While a lot of the initial investment will be going into satisfying local demand, exports must be possible, and the ideal export might well be made up garments, with all three production stages in Zimbabwe: farmer, spinner and weaver, garment manufacturer, tripling the local earnings and tripling the number of people earning their living from cotton. So the two manufacturers need to talk.
In other words the mantra that import is best need not apply.
Modern well-equipped factories can produce very high quality, especially if there is high-quality hand-picked cotton fibre coming in, and continuous quality control down the line, from field to fabric.
Online Reporter