It appears every tobacco selling season has become a horrible nightmare for Zimbabwe’s new farmers who now constitute 82% of all registered tobacco growers in the country.
Tobacco auction floors have transformed from the orderly and uniquely elite places into chaotic scenes where disease outbreaks are a constant threat.
How this transformation appears to have taken place literally overnight is cause of serious concern.
It seems authorities responsible for ensuring normalcy at the auctions floors are no longer there.
The city’s Health Department is also clearly invisible in all this mess because if they were, the floors should have been closed for gross violation of basic health laws.
Like we have already pointed out, this all started when our agrarian reforms started to benefit the new small farmers who now constitute over 82% of the country’s registered tobacco farmers.
It gives a bad picture – of failure, disorder, corruption and general ineptitude — on the part of the indigenous farmer and the indigenous men and women who now run our tobacco auction floors.
The key headaches at our auction floors include congestion, disorder, prostitution, lack of hygiene, corruption and general sleaze.
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The Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board pledged last year to introduce interventions to bring sanity to the auction floors but when the floors opened this season, there was clear evidence the situation was pretty much the same, if not worse.
Harare sex workers have turned our tobacco floors into “red light districts” where they are fleecing gullible sex-starved farmers who would have stayed at the floors, sometimes weeks more than they had anticipated.
NewsDay reported Friday that police were allegedly facilitating queue-jumping at an average $40 per vehicle to “assist” desperate farmers get their tobacco through the gates fast.
Farmers literally live at the auction floors, sometimes with their children – for days – without ablution facilities or any basic health requirements.
Boka Auction Floors and the Tobacco Sales Floor (TSF) have become dreadful health time bombs.
What Zimbabwe needs to address urgently is the issue of capacitating our tobacco floors to make them able to serve the growing numbers of the gold leaf producers in a way that they do not have to camp at the floors.
Lack of capacity brings about congestion, corruption, health hazards, prostitution and various moral challenges.
Our farmers need to be educated on the need to abide by such requirements as booking their crops before coming to the auction floors. It has emerged that out of about 52 000 growers of the golden leaf, less than 30 000 had registered to sell their crop this year.
The rest opted to do that at the auction floors where they have ended up spending days, losing money to unscrupulous vendors, corrupt police, robbers and prostitutes.
It comes as good news that a third tobacco floor is expected to open as early as Monday. Millennium Tobacco Floors is due to open its doors in Msasa, a development that should ease the pressure on Boka and TSF significantly.
