A case for Zim’s cattle industry
I left school in 1957 I started work on a tobacco farm in the Headlands area. I did a season there and then moved back to my home province of Matabeleland. There I took up a job on a small cattle ranch outside the City of Bulawayo in the Nyamandhlovu district. Two years later I went to Gwebi College and got a diploma in agriculture. After a spell moving people from the basin of the Kariba Dam built in 1958, I went back to the City of Salisbury (now Harare) and completed a university degree in economics.
After fighting the 1969 national Constitution referendum, I joined the Agricultural Marketing Authority as an economist. In that capacity I was given responsibility for the livestock industries and under that portfolio, the Cold Storage Commission (CSC). Nick Spoel was the general manager and CSC was a very large corporation — 5 000 employees, 250 000 hectares of ranch land and a national network of abattoirs which could handle 2 800 heads of cattle a day.
CSC was born in 1937 when the Rhodesian government decided that a State-controlled organisation was required to handle the seasonal surges in cattle sales and to manage national export activity. At the time we were in the Sterling zone as a country and as a consequence the main markets being serviced were the market for frozen sides of beef in England and the domestic market. The abattoir in Bulawayo was augmented by a massive canning plant at West Nicholson run by the British company Liebigs.
As the cattle industry expanded over the next 40 years, so the national activities of CSC grew. Persistent losses eventually led to the recruitment of Nick Spoel from South Africa who had spent his whole life in the beef industry. In six months, Nick had the commission making money. He ran the organisation on this basis until 1980 when he retired. He and I became close friends and I spent a great deal of time with him in Bulawayo helping with economic and marketing strategies.
I was made general manager of CSC in 1983 and served in that capacity until 1987 when I resigned to manage the rehabilitation of the Beira Corridor on behalf of regional States. As the GM I continued the modernisation of the abattoirs and upscalling the CSC infrastructure across the country. When I stepped down all abattoirs had been brought up to international standards. We were producing up to 150 000 tonnes of beef in various forms, exporting up to a third of this volume to some 20 countries and supplying 70% of the beef products consumed in the country. We handled a million cattle hides a year along with some 12 000 tonnes of canned products, mainly for export to Europe. I had an amazing management team such that we held together through the turbulence of newlyindependent Zimbabwe.
By then the cattle industry had grown to eight million heads. Farmers sold nearly a million heads a year — three quarters to CSC and the rest to the local private abattoir network. We ran a substantial financial enterprise called the Cattle Finance Scheme, which funded 500 000 cattle every year. We had 287 sale pens in the communal farming areas — servicing the 5 million heads of cattle in those areas along with the 2,7 million small stock. We attended all sales providing a basic support price on all livestock and paying cash for all purchases. It was quite an operation.
In times of severe drought, we bought all livestock that farmers without grazing had to sell. In one year, we bought 250 000 heads of livestock and 784 000 of stock for slaughter. We were selling shiploads of beef in that year to move the surplus to the market. ●