The Sunday News
Judith Phiri, Sunday News Reporter
LOOKING deep in thought, almost mentally absent probably thinking about how he will manage school fees for his three children, two in university and one doing ‘A’ level, Mr Aaron Mleya (not his real name) a National Railways of Zimbabwe employee has been struggling to balance his earnings and his basic needs.
He earns $24 522 as salary and at 58 years, he is left with about two years to retire, but his headache is that he has not made any meaningful investment and is struggling to provide for his family.
For his two twin boys at the National University of Science and Technology, the fees are pegged at $32 000 each and for his last-born daughter doing ‘A’ level at John Tallach Secondary School he has to pay $30 000 fees excluding other requisites for a boarding school. Mr Mleya’s salary is only close to 20 percent of the total amount for school fees, which excludes food and other necessities.
Having started working at the parastatal as an artisan in 1990, following in the footsteps of his father who worked at NRZ from 1964 to 1979 and passed away in 1983, Mr Mleya still has a very good childhood memory of the good old times when his father was a worker at NRZ, which was one of the best employers in the country at that time.
He recalls that the company would even build houses for its employees in different suburbs like Sizinda, Tshabalala, Matshobana and Newton West in Bulawayo and Rugare in Harare, among other places.
“The house l live in with my family in Tshabalala is the house NRZ built for my father. I grew up here and l have always wished to extend the house one day. But when l started working for NRZ a lot had changed and l could not fulfil my dream,” said Mr Mleya with sadness written all over his face.
NRZ has been weighed down by a number of challenges, most of them linked to low business as a result of illegal sanctions imposed on the country by the West.
“Even though l started working for the parastatal when there were signs of it plummeting, we hoped that as time went on it will get back on track and l always hoped to get an early retirement at 55 years so that with the retirement package l would buy a farm that l would use to generate some income for my retirement years. My wife has never worked, she is just a vendor. We have struggled a lot educating our children and my worst fear is walking away with peanuts as a retirement package. I don’t even know if l will be able to take my daughter to university because as it is things are very hard, l don’t want to lie,” he said.
Nonetheless, a ray of hope flickers for Mr Mleya and many in his situation after the Zimbabwe Railways Artisan’s Union (RAU) Bulawayo branch came up with a retirement preparation training for members to find business opportunities in agriculture. Mr Mleya attended the training and said it was an eye opener.
“It has motivated me not to be a cry baby and to think in other terms. The union has always been there to protect us as employees and it has taken a step further to organise and provide us with knowledge on what we can do post retirement.”
RAU president Mr Sikhumbuzo Dube said having noted that most employees were earning below the poverty datum line and were becoming destitute after retirement, they decided to assist them on how they can utilise the available opportunities to live a decent life.
“Research done by the Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe says we are way below the poverty datum line. The question is how do we escape the poverty, what appropriate tool do we use to do that?
Let us not be prisoners to our qualifications, sometimes we prison ourselves by how we were trained and where we were trained, but l challenge employees to get out of their comfort zone and do something new, and look where the money is,” said Mr Dube.
He added that venturing into projects such as horticulture and poultry, among others as individuals or small groups would ensure that the employees will have back up plans to rely on once they retire. He said they can start projects while still employed.
Mr Dube highlighted that the training was also targeted at alleviating some of the problems workers were facing such as high rentals, school fees challenges and day to day expenses by generating extra income. Taking the workers through the training, an agronomist and head of horticulture at Hamara Foods, Mr George Mlilo said poverty was defined as a state of lack, not only of substance but of ideas and networks.
Mr Mlilo challenged employees that as they plan to unlocking productivity, they had to focus on something which has to be intensive. He said they had to look for something different such as chickens and drip irrigation of maize, tomatoes and potato as a starting point.
“Did you know with just US$10 you can get 100 birds at point of lay. For the layers model these birds can give you 90 eggs per day and if you multiply that by seven days you will get 630 eggs per week. You then go on to sell, let’s say 21 trays at US$4.50 per tray and per week you can generate US$94.50. For the 100 birds you can use something like US$49 for feeds. That translates to more than 100 percent profit from the US$10 that you would have started with,” highlighted Mr Mlilo.
