adminAuxilia Katongomara Chronicle Reporter
THE Parliamentary Portfolio committee on Lands, Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development is backing the proposal by the ailing Cold Storage Commission to sell its idle land worth about $11 million to raise funds for recapitalisation. CSC, one of the country’s strategic parastatals, submitted its proposal to the government two years ago, but nothing has materialised.
Speaking after a tour of the CSC depot by MPs in Bulawayo yesterday, the committee’s chairperson, Cde Christopher Chitindi, said his committee would make efforts to push for the approval to sell the land in order to revive the company. “The biggest challenge for CSC is finance, they need funds. We know they’ve applied to the government to dispose of some assets and land which could earn them $11 million,” said Cde Chitindi.
“I’m told they have applied for over two years now and we’re going to push for it to be expeditiously approved so that they sell the land and excess machinery that they would want to export.”
He said if the parastatal manages to raise the required amount, it would be able to restock and assist farmers in Matabeleland who are losing out on fair prices for their cattle to private players.
Cde Chitindi encouraged the CSC to engage partners like Arda which is now doing well on its estates. During the tour, it was established that the CSC is operating at 10 percent capacity and surviving on slaughtering and processing cattle for farmers.
CSC chief executive officer Ngoni Chinogaramombe said the parastatal had been forced to close some departments due to low levels of production. “The costs are coming down but the volume is going up, we were slaughtering about 200 cows per week but we’ve gone up to 600 per week for service slaughter.
“However, these aren’t our beasts and that service we are offering isn’t our core business that we can rely on. Our mandate is to slaughter for the nation,” said Chinogaramombe. The parastatal charges $25 per beast for slaughter and processing.
Chinogaramombe also said plans were at an advanced stage to unbundle the CSC into three units as part of efforts to revive the company.
He said they were now only waiting for the government’s approval to conclude the deals with investors willing to inject about $90 million. “We need to break the CSC into three companies for investors to come in. The first company being Chinhoyi and its farms, second being Bulawayo and its farms and finally Masvingo and its farms,” Chinogaramombe said.
Board member Sibongile Sibanda said they were pushing for a level playing field as they were operating under stringent regulations as compared to private abattoirs. It was also established during the tour that the board had never met with Agriculture minister Joseph Made since its inception in 2011. The CSC depot in Bulawayo is the biggest in the country although it is still using machinery donated by the European Union in 1990 when it was still at the peak of meat processing and export.
The CSC owns abattoirs in Bulawayo, Masvingo, Chinhoyi and Kadoma and several cattle ranches across the country. However, only two abattoirs are operational while the farms carry a herd of 8,533 animals of which 7,741 are owned by tenants while the CSC has only 792.
The CSC has slaughtered only 5,600 animals in the first five months of this year, which is 5, 8 percent of the total number of animals slaughtered in Zimbabwe during that period.
Online Reporter