The Sunday News
Mhlupeki Dube Farming Matters
A FEW weeks ago, I wrote about the cumbersome nature of the process of trying to clear one’s animals for sale and how it is likely to have negative unintended consequences such as opening avenues for corruption and stock theft and people evade the red tape associated with the process.
A new dimension is surfacing adding to the complication and the pain a farmer has to endure when trying to clear his animals. This is the increasing unavailability of the clearance forms especially on the outlying police base stations. It is increasingly becoming very common and frustratingly for farmers to find that the police station which is supposed to clear their animals has run out of the required stationery. This has become quite prevalent in some districts of Matabeleland North province where some farmers even as I write this submission are still failing to move animals they bought during an auction sale with the intention to take them into a feedlot a couple of weeks ago.
Farmers just need to move the animals from a neighbouring ward into their ward where the feeding pens are located. Elsewhere it is also reported that one cattle buyer had his animals which he bought from a council sale detained for three days because the police had no clearance forms.
The purpose of this submission is not to lambast and castigate the police why they run out of clearance forms but to challenge the laid back approach that is adopted by some of the officers in some of these stations in trying to address the challenge of forms.
It is the mechanical application of the law which makes the well-meaning and well-intended law become constraining to the farmers and inevitably resented by the farmers.
Law enforcers need to exercise discretion and creative and be solution providers such that they are found to be enablers not people who prohibit progress. It defies logic why a police officer would allow a livestock auction to go ahead when he/she knows that he/she does not have the clearance forms which will be needed at the end of the sale as animals are being cleared from seller to buyer. In some cases the forms have been reported to be available at district police stations but not sub stations. Is there no way that can be done so that the forms can be collected or sent from the district to sub stations.
In my books it is irresponsible, heartless and unintelligent for the person in charge at that station to just say to a farmer “we don’t have clearance forms” and leave it there without making initiatives to try and get forms from wherever they are available.
It should not be a farmer’s problem that the station has no clearance forms and it cannot be presented as such. I am sure with better discretion and application of mind, a solution can be found to the problem of unavailability of clearance forms without inflicting pain to the farmers as if they are the ones who print the forms!
Speaking of mechanical application of provisions of legislation I am reminded of the problem of stray cattle and their unfair auctioning. I have received numerous pleadings from farmers pertaining to the issue of stray animals, the import of the pleadings being that the motivation should not be about disposing of the animals but finding the distraught owner. The existing practice being that the stray animal is kept for three months from the time of reporting after which it is sold by public auction conducted by the local authority. The local authority on their part advertises the existence of the stray animals and the intention to sell them on a set date. My problem which resonates with that of many farmers is that the emphasis put by local authority is on selling the animal not locating the owner of the said animals.
Admittedly it is not the business of local authorities to go around looking for the owners of stray animals but the method or medium used for advertising the stray animals has no chance in hell or heaven of helping the owners of these stray animals the majority of whom are in rural areas with no access of financial means to afford a newspaper daily because you don’t know when they will advertise the stray animals.
Honestly, how is a farmer in Zuzaphi, Makorokoro, Jopembe, Makwatheni, Siabuwa and Ndimimbili just to mention a few, expected to be served by a notice put in a daily paper which has no circulation in those areas. Are there no other means of information dissemination that can be adopted so that we service the intended target?
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