Resolve Chisumbanje ethanol project issue as soon as possible

All Zimbabweans are asking for is the implementation of agreed policies to reduce the strain of the fuel import bill on the country’s resources.
We believe there is consensus that blending of petrol will reduce our fuel costs as a country while improving the livelihoods of sugar cane farmers and employees of the ethanol plant in Chisumbanje and their families.   
It then follows that we need to get our politics right on the Chisumbanje ethanol plant for us to start reaping the benefits of blending.

So bad has been the procrastination on the fate of the Chisumbanje ethanol project that villagers have now called for the intervention of President Mugabe, accusing his emissaries of failing in their delegated task of rescuing the project.
While the country has a template on the handling of the ethanol project, it would appear very little is being done to fit the missing pieces.

We were told that to increase the uptake of ethanol locally, a statutory instrument was needed to make blending mandatory, and that was done after a very long time but now the story has changed since mandatory blending, that has now been gazetted, will only be implemented once Government agrees on a shareholding structure with the private investor, Macdon and Ratings.
It does not appear there is a definite time frame, since Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, who heads the interministerial committee on the project said last month an agreement was yet to be reached and “that is work in progress”.

The same DPM Mutambara has in the past said there was a lot of politics around the Chisumbanje ethanol project.
However, what use is politics if it does not address the needs of the people?
The Chisumbanje community has lost jobs since work stopped at the ethanol plant after the company, Green Fuel, stopped production after its storage facilities filled up against low uptake by the market.
The villagers say as if the loss of jobs at the ethanol plant was not enough, even the 240-hectare irrigation scheme established by Green Fuel was not benefiting the community due to squabbling over the allocation of plots.

“The people who are disrupting the allocation of these plots are not from this area and we know that they are being hired to settle political scores.
“We are suffering in abject poverty yet we have irrigation that has been developed for us here,” said Headman Chinyamukwakwa.
Our plea to the Government is that it must get its act together and conclude negotiations on the shareholding structure of the joint venture project in line with indigenisation laws without further delay before it loses the people’s confidence.

It is not the optimistic speeches and setting up of countless committees that the people are interested in but concrete action that addresses their needs in terms of creation of jobs and improvement of their standards of living.

And due to the national nature of the project, once the Government addresses those community concerns it would be on its way to reducing our fuel import bill that in the long term could stabilise our prices since the percentage could in future be increased from the mandatory five percent ethanol, thereby saving the economy a lot of foreign currency.