adminNqobile Tshili Chronicle correspondent
KUSILE Rural District Council (RDC) has come up with a five-year strategic plan to enhance development through beneficiation and value addition of resources under its jurisdiction. Council human resources administrator Sifiso Hadebe said investors were not committed to beneficiation and even pledges made as part of the community share ownership scheme have not been honoured.
Hadebe said the district was losing large sums of money through the selling of raw materials.
He said the council has resolved to utilise vast natural resources such as timber and methane gas to develop the area in line with President Robert Mugabe’s call to embrace value addition.
Hadebe said their initiative will start with timber.
“We’ve said let’s not base our hopes on someone else or issues that we don’t have control over, but utilise resources that we can control. We’ve control over our timber and when we terminated one contract we said let’s start logging ourselves,” said Hadebe in a recent interview on the sidelines of a workshop on child abuse that was held in Lupane. “We need everything to be done in Lupane so that we do value addition. Rather than selling raw timber we need to start selling finished products.”
He said plans were on course to set up an abattoir.
“We’re rich in cattle but we’re sending our cattle to Bulawayo. Is that of any benefit? No. There are plans to set up an abattoir in Jotsholo. This will benefit the council. We might even come up with a by-law that all our cattle have to be slaughtered here,” said Hadebe.
He said value addition will result in the development of the education sector.
Hadebe said schools in the district have no science laboratories, a development that has seen children failing to go to Lupane State University, which is in their midst.
“We also need to develop our schools because if we look at Lupane there are six high schools and none of them offers science subjects at Advanced level. This means Lupane State University will be a foreign university in the district and also in the province. Therefore, from 2016 we’ve identified high schools that we can say ‘can you come up with laboratories for sciences?” he said.
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