Nestlé Zimbabwe: It’s back to serious business
EDITOR - Nestlé Zimbabwe is back to serious business. The giant Swiss firm is not looking back on meeting the satisfaction of its market. At a time other companies are whining about a harsh economic environment, Nestlé is casting its eyes beyond the horizon.
Nestlé has gone extra strides in capacitating its supply chain. The organisation has embarked on a one million dollar heifer project to boost milk production in the country. The heifer project is meant to benefit diary farmers across the country. The country has for the past years importing milk from neighboring Zambia and South Africa to meet domestic demand.
Over and above procurement of the heifers outside the country, the company is also bankrolling the training of beneficiary farmers to ensure maximum output. Nestlé Zimbabwe has departed from the rogue investor attitude of crying foul over everything yet there is much more to do inside the business environment. Are there no businesses in Syria today? If businesses are still open in Damascus, why should an organization with a sound management fail to operate in Zimbabwe which is teeming with hoards of peace?
Enemies of Zimbabwe have since the land reform been harping about a failing agricultural sector. And then what? If the agricultural sector is failing to meet local demand, is that not good enough reason to celebrate the birth of a market? The Zimbabwe Association of Diary Farmers report that the country’s annual milk production stood at 120 million liters while production is hovering slightly above half the amount.
It is a misnomer for a country with such a temperate climate to be found wanting in milk production. It is organizations with a mindset similar to Nestlé’s that see opportunity where others are seeing gloom. In the same mediocre thinking, some have been rubbishing the land reform program which has seen a complete overhaul of fortunes for some industrious farmers.
Opportunity does not climb up a tree to be identified, instead, it is those with scanning eyes that see opportunity in the dark alleys of fortune. Such are Nestlé’s eyes.
The government of Zimbabwe has through the Ministry of Industry and Trade gazetted a trade instrument barring foreign produced goods that the Zimbabwean industry has the capacity to produce. This instrument, known as Statutory Instrument 64 of 2016 has triggered a domestic demand boon for local manufacturers especially in the household consumption goods.
Companies that relocated their manufacturing plants elsewhere in the region are salivating and going green with envy over the protected domestic market in Zimbabwe. Case in point, local petroleum jelly manufacturers are smiling all the way to the bank since the departure of one major petroleum jelly company supplying the domestic market. The said organization has moved manufacturing operations from its Zimbabwean firms into the region and has since seen the death of its Zimbabwean market by the hand of SI64.
Closing manufacturing plants and moving machinery into neighboring countries left scores of workers jobless and without any means of survival.
It is quite disturbing to see organizations interested only in enjoying the purchasing power of a people they do not want to support.
If such organizations were aware of the consumption potential of the said market, howbeit that they ignore their need for jobs?
Government-Industry relations must be mutually benefitting and any organization that is not conscious of this reality must not expect to enjoy government’s benevolence. Meanwhile, all kudos go to Nestlé for complementing government’s agrarian reform and for its sensitivity to customers with varied buying powers through designing products in different packages, quality and pricing regimes.
Chigumbu Warikandwa.