The Sunday News
Mhlupheki Dube
OFTEN, I see communal smallholder farmers struggling with a challenge which could be easily solved by putting minds and resources together.
One common but negative characteristic that you find among communal farmers is the inability to pool resources together and work as a team and the irony is that these are communal lands which by definition mean most resources are shared.
It could be grazing lands or drinking water for both livestock and domestic use. Due to this reluctance or inherent inability to work together or pool resources together smallholder livestock farmers are usually burdened by challenges which are in actual fact very surmountable.
I have seen communal livestock farmers in some deep ends of Bulilima District, like Khame and Gala areas watering their animals from boreholes and the sight is pathetic. I have seen the same in Nkayi at Mkhalathi and others, in Lupane, Ngombane area and many other districts across the country.
Imagine there are more than 200 animals and they are waiting by the borehole for community members to pump into a watering trough.
This is a very tedious task which is very exhausting and hence some animals may go without drinking because people simply got tired of pumping and in some cases the boreholes are not exactly light!
The question is why do community members continue to do things the hard way when there are newer and easier methods?
Why is the community failing to pool resources to solarise the borehole and water their animals in a less strenuous way? Wouldn’t solarising the borehole make their lives easier even for access to water for domestic use?
You will find that the cost of buying all the required equipment to solarise the borehole will be very insignificant when shared among all those households who use the borehole. I know for a fact that putting solar panels and water tanks and other equipment to solarise the borehole will cost something in the region of US$6 000 and this is a very small figure when spread to a whole village that drinks at that borehole.
You could be talking about management of communal grazing lands, these get quickly depleted because of haphazard grazing which cannot be controlled because there are no paddocks. In some cases, the settlement pattern is organised in a manner which allows for erection of paddock fences but this fails to happen not because it’s very expensive but simply because communal farmers are too individualistic to be actually domiciled in a communal set up.
Again if the cost of paddocking their grazing lands is shared and spread among the communal members it reduces to a very small fraction which an average household can easily pay.
In some cases, farmers lose a lot of livestock from crocodile attacks as animals try to drink from crocodile-infested pools along major rivers like Shangani. If this is the only source you have as a community, why not put a water reticulation system that will cart water from the crocodile-infested pools to some safe drinking place away from the river? Again this will require the community to pool together resources and invest in a water reticulation system.
My point is, it’s about time we help to reconfigure the mindset of our communal farmers. Extension agencies should impress upon communal farmers that as long as they are in shared resources set up they need to think and work communally.
This thing of trying to work individually as if they are in privately-owned farms is hindering their progress. We need to build communal culture in a way that it provides solution to a number of small problems that are affecting our livestock farmers.
If farmers begin to understand the capital and power they have as a combined unity as opposed to individual entities, they will definitely go a long way in managing their communal resources.
Even livestock marketing will become much easier as farmers will simply put their animals together, hire a truck and take them to the abattoirs directly without dealing individually with middlemen. The sooner we redefine communal set ups in terms of their benefits and strengths to livestock farmers as opposed to their weakness, the better our farmers will become.
Let’s assist communal farmers to tap into the strength of their combined energy for their own benefit.
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
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