The Sunday News
THE ongoing debate and ideas about taking away the responsibility of collecting cattle levies from local authorities begs for thorough considerations before haste decisions that can have a lasting negative outcome are taken.
It is a public secret that most local authorities have failed dismally to discharge this mandate. Some local authorities simply cannot enforce the cattle levy collection and there is serious revenue leakage as private buyers are left to roam around the districts with no restraint and nothing is paid to council. In some cases local authorities charge ridiculously outrageous levies just to finance their salaries bill and in the process scare away buyers.
Local authorities need to begin to use the revenue collected from the cattle levies for what it is intended for. Admittedly this is one of the income sources of local authorities but certainly some of the money is supposed to be used for development of cattle related infrastructure such as handling and sale pens as well as watering points.
However, what is happening in most local authorities is that they view their mandate as merely collecting and munching the money and leaving the infrastructure development to non-governmental organisations. This is what is making powers that be think of relocating the cattle levy collections to the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development. Let me hasten to say I am no fan for that decision simply on the basis of the inherent defects of centralised collections and distributions. Soon we will be crying of “cattleless” districts receiving more allocations from the cattle levy than districts with cattle simply because some bureaucrat said so!
My vote is with local authorities collecting the cattle levy but they need to know that for them to continue collecting the levies they need to develop and improve conditions for their producers. Producers need to feel that they are benefiting from the levies collected as a result of their commodity. I know local authorities always like to point out that the levy is charged on buyers not producers and hence producers should complain less. However, anyone who did basic business management knows that buyers factor in the cattle levy when they bid and thus the farmer pays the levy indirectly as buyers suppress the buying price so as to manage the cattle levy bill.
Talking about buyers biding, I recently attended a local authority organised cattle sale and I walked from the sale pens with a bad taste in my mouth. The sale was erroneously called an auction yet there was only one buyer. The whole idea of conducting an auction is to have buyers bidding and the highest bidder getting the right to buy the item on sale. In other words for it to be a legitimate sale there has to be more than one buyer so that there is competitive bidding.
This ensures that farmers get the highest possible value for their animals. It is such blatant disregard for elementary principles that discredit local authorities and they get viewed in the negative by farmers. Surely how does a local authority allow a cattle sale with one buyer to go ahead packaged as an auction.
This is not different from private buyers who negotiate with farmers behind dip tanks and kraals. If the local authority really understood its mandate in so far as organising livestock markets, they would draft a contract which prohibits such sales when engaging an auctioneer. Surely it’s not rocket science to understand what an auction is and a simple clause in the contract stating the minimum acceptable number of buyers in auction could prevent such a chicanery.
Local authorities need to understand themselves as critical players in ensuring commercialisation of smallholder livestock producers and this entails adopting a development and mutual benefits approach as opposed to this extractive and exploitative approach.
Make efforts to develop the farmers working with relevant ministries and ensure a conducive trading environment for your farmers. As a local authority you cannot be seen aiding and abating exploitation of farmers. If your auctioneer is failing to attract more than one buyer while other auctioneers command up to 10 buyers in one auction, is it not time you reviewed the performance of your auctioneer?
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