admindangerous hairpin curves on crawl, the drivers oblivious of the danger involved.
Msasa trees hang precariously on mountain cliffs, their branches and leaves singing to the eastern winds and so does the brown grass, forever dwarfed by the trees and also starved of food by the thin top soil that is, however, inexplicably pregnant of mineral deposits.
Once in a while ghostly figures of gold panners appear from nowhere and walk on the verges of the road, their clothes hued red by the gold rich soils. Their faces tell stories of a hard work in search of the precious stone. In several holes, they work like moles, in the arduous bid to extract the mineral.
The road continues to wind and unwind until it breaks straight, straight and straight, as if to compensate of the just ended winding. That is the end of Boterekwa Mountain slope on the Great Dyke Range in Shurugwi.
Here it is not recommended for a visitor to venture off road, even on foot, for, in yesteryears, when gold panning had gone out of hand, thousands of deep pits and holes were left unreclaimed. With the grass growing high, one can easily fall into the pits and break legs, limp or necks — in short one can either be injured or killed.
Just as the road breaks straight towards Zvishavane, to the right, the eye is attracted to a green lung of thriving vegetables, tomatoes, potatoes and other vegetables. That is Bush Valley Farm. Nowhere in the neighbourhood of Bush Valley Farm is the lush greenery seen. It is, therefore, outstanding, in a land where gold panning, small-scale and large-scale gold mining is the in thing.
Here, indigenous miner Mr Harold Musvubi has done gully reclamation using graders and excavators and has turned part of the 150-hectare plot into a solar-powered home and irrigation scheme.
He got the land courtesy of the land reform programme but it had already been damaged by gold panners.
Mr Musvubi’s story is that of sustainable renewable energy utilisation and reclamation of damaged land for agricultural use. It is a real example into the future of Zimbabwe, given our energy crisis and the way our past illegal mining activities have damaged our land.
State-of-the-art drip irrigation and macro overheard sprinklers irrigate the plot powered by solar energy. The home, bottle store, piped water system and everything at the plot is solar powered.
“I had travelled to Malaysia when I fell in love with solar power or renewable energy. Two years ago, I started the solar power station here with 18 inter-connected solar panels. I did a lot of consultations with engineers but I did most of the installations on my own.
“It is critical under our circumstances to relieve the national grid of pressure by having renewable energy projects like this one. I irrigate the plot using the Israeli drip irrigation system and the macro overhead sprinklers.
“I powered up this place in January 2011, starting with 12 kilowatts and I am upgrading to 18kW. At first I restricted it to lighting the complex and my accommodation. In October 2011, I then went for water pumping and now I am doing irrigation. This is actually my first crop,’’ says Mr Musvubi.
Mr Musvubi is now working on the installation on back-up systems to ensure that when there are long cloudy skies, he still will have enough power.
“Moving from the national power grid to renewable energy is the reality and the future. I did most of the inline installations myself and I have educated myself a lot of direct current systems. It is very easy.
“This is the future of every rural home in Zimbabwe. Now the final phase of my project is to do with monopoly or back-up system to ensure that even when there is lengthy cloud cover we still have enough power. I am moving to 40kW and that can easily power a village because at the moment I am using just 10kW per day.
“I grew up in the sugar plantations in Hippo Valley, Chiredzi, and that is where I developed a passion for farming. But with the land reform I became a miner and a farmer myself but I had to use graders to reclaim the land here after the gold panners had damaged this place.
“My soils are not good for farming. There is no top soil to talk about so I have to work on my soils again to improve my yields.
“But my message to Zimbabweans is that solar or renewable energy is the future. It is reality. It is sustainable!’’ says Mr Musvubi.
Compared to the rest of the world, there is a general shortage of energy-related information in Africa (on potential of energy sources, actual installed systems and current energy use). In Zimbabwe this lack of information is even more apparent for renewable energies. It is indeed difficult to compare the potential for the different energy options due to the scattered validated information, yet solar power is the future.
Despite a high total population figure in Africa it exceeded one billion as of 2009, the United Nations estimates that most parts of the African continent are sparsely populated, with almost 60 percent living in non-urban areas. This fact, coupled with the low per capita energy consumption and the high rate of non-electrified rural areas, creates a good opportunity for a sustainable energy development based on decentralised renewable energy sources.
When we combined available grid data with the population density and city layers, they showed that populous cities were already grid connected. For the remaining larger part of rural Africa, there is still not enough information on energy access.
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