Five Years on, Checheche Still Waits

Average Joe had been here before; two years ago in March to be exact. Then the situation in the areas surrounding Chisumbanje Police Station in Chipinge District, Manicaland Province was something approaching pitiful. Dried stalks of maize, sorghum and rapoko stood feeble, withered and beaten under the scorching sun of the Lowveld. By the roadside, thorn bushes – the mark of a parched landscape – struggled to create a safe distance from the  blazing sandy soils and their stunted tentacles all over the area looked like the controlled forest of beard on the chin of an off-duty cop. Even some buildings at Checheche Business Centre looked like they had been torn out of a page from the historical Ottoman ruins that failed to survive the plunder of Greek conquerors.

Just a stone throw away from the shopping precinct is a mighty channel of sand that looks like the very frontier of desertification; this would be the Save River. Yes, really – it is the legendary Save River whose mystical prowess we grew up reading in English text books. Looking at the sandy mass in front you stretching to as fat as they eye, and being told that, you would start to wonder whether there was any grain of truth in the fables you grew up hearing.

But it is the Save, with a tear-thin stream of sluggish water meandering unsteadily as it negotiates its way around the beach-sandy mess. Sometimes it even dries up and has to be resuscitated by the opening of floodgates at Osbourne Dam many kilometres away; such is the Save’s life that resembles that of a comatose patient who is wholly dependent on oxygen tubes and drips and doctors and other life support systems. But the Save River is just a mirror of a dusty Checheche community that seems tired of waiting for the second coming.

Or was; until in 2008 when Macdom and Rating Investments and the Agricultural Rural Development Authority (ARDA) found each other. The result of this private/public sector mating was a multi-billion dollar fuel and electricity plant called Green Fuel. In the build, operate and transfer partnership, ARDA provided the 55,000ha of land under its ownership, while Macdom and Rating came in with the technological expertise and finance to build the fuel plant at ARDA Chisumbanje. At its completion, Green Fuel would produce nearly 105 million litres of anhydrous ethanol, which would equate to 350,000l daily or 14,580 litres per hour. A high pressure Caldema boiler would be used for energy recovery, allowing the sugar-ethanol plant to be energetically self-sufficient and able to produce megawatts of excess electricity.

Obviously, the whole process of planting, harvesting, transporting the sugar cane, crushing it, fermenting it, distilling it, dehydrating it and producing the by-product – electricity – would need people. Thousands of people. General staff, artisans, technicians, management, executive suits; the lot. Green Fuel General Manager, Mr. Graeme Smith reckons his company at full capacity can put food on the tables of over 5,000 families. That is before one even factors in the snowball effects and spin-offs that can visit a place where money is gathered – retail, finance, schools are just a few examples. Surely, this was a marriage made in in the stars, and the people in Checheche were sure to feel the presence of the first ethanol giant in Africa among them.

But that was the easy, roundtable, mathematical scheme of things; the ceteris paribas side of it all that economists and statisticians of this world bombard us with every day to filll our minds with fear and consternation. And the equation was really a master stroke.

“The first days that the plant first opened its doors as a fuel producing conglomerate, this place – that all along had been used to resigned quietness – actually turned on its head,” said the Officer-in-Charge Chisumbanje Police, Inspector Ruzvidzo. “Everybody that wished to be employed there would find something to go with their academic abilities. And suddenly, everybody had disposable income in their pockets, and for once our station began to record less and less break-ins at household premises as our attention was grabbed emerging crimes like assaults at drinking places, and crimes of sexual actualisation – prostitution, loitering for the purpose of prostitution and soliciting. For once, the people of Checheche lived like there was no tomorrow, as they could finally claim that their lives had arrived at long last.”

Sadly, nobody told them that this was going to be a very brief once – like a rare night of thunderstorm in the Sahara – which was going to be cruelly crushed like a cigarette but between the smoker’s heel and the cold hard ground. Shortly after the sneak preview into the future, Green Fuel shut its doors indefinitely as a tug of war erupted in government over mandatory blending of fuel on the local markets. But while the dissenting voices over ownership and blending have exploited media space and captured debate headlines over time, the story of the suffering Checheche residents and others from all over the country who had thought they had finally found their lives after years of soul searching has not been given the importance it deserves. One worker who asked to remain anonymous said it felt like the workers had been placed in front as pawns in the boardroom fights between elephants – and of course, it is the pawns that have failed to survive the war.

“We feel like the crushed saw dust of sugar cane that has outlived its usefulness after a torrid journey through crushing and squeezing machines where its sweet nectar was captured to produce fuel and electricity.” He was stoically gazing at the heap of sugar cane waste product that was growing into the skies after being spit out of the plant. Surely the ceteris paribas from the boardroom was not this heartless?

A sudden drop off the cliff back into the old life of scrounging for morsels of food after a brief spell of Riley’s lavish living standards was a painful experience for the people of Checheche. At first, the workers kept hope that their salvation had just taken a brief sabbatical, and indeed the company retained their services, even when they were not producing. Banks and shops remained defiant, and Checheche Business Centre remained a hive of activity where even top musicians frequented.

But the unthinkable did happen; as the important people in the country still failed to agree on what to do with their humongous project, those on the ground must have realised that this was going to be a very long sabbatical that was already threatening to turn Green Fuel into a white elephant and would end up draining up all company coffers if the whole workforce stayed. About 3,000 members of mainly the general staff who tended to the cane fields and other menial jobs had to be laid off, leaving just a skeletal core of artisans that would look after the welfare of the plant and other maintenance work around the factory. Even these were asked to find means to finance their accommodation in the growth point, as the company was now finding it hard to even find their salaries.

Mr. Smith said as of now, the fuel that formed one of the cornerstones of Zimbabwe’s return to world economics was reduced to just weekly test runs to prevent the machines from going rusty of inertia.

“Then for two weeks after every three months, we run full scale operations of fuel production,” he said. “But all of it is part of our routine maintenance works, until the powers that be decide what is to be done finally.”

Mr. Smith insisted that management at the company kept their workers abreast of the developments on a regular basis, but many an employee have admitted that they have repeatedly had their hopes falsely raised each time they espied fuel billowing atop their company smoke pipes. But the heartbreak will return after two weeks when they wake up to realise that they will not be called back just yet. Everybody was now pinning their escape on the coming elections, which were set to end tensions in government, which has struggled to agree on anything since 2009 when it was promulgated.

“It would be better for everyone, if there was a government soon that would decisively decide the on the matter,” said Mr. Smith.

Said Insp Ruzvidzo; “Cases of theft, stock theft and smuggling have returned to haunt us again. Of course smuggling has been a perennial headache for us, what with us policing a very porous border and all; but the situation has certainly been exacerbated by the plant closure, as people find themselves out of work and out of basic needs. Such a scenario is fertile ground for crime to fester.”

Chisumbanje Police Station itself was in line to benefit from the from the windfall in the south eastern low veld, as a number of houses were to be built as part of the company’s social responsibility programme. Indeed plans were drawn up and foundations were dug as the station geared itself for a new epoch where it would not want for accommodation again. That was two years ago. Now the trenches that help so many hopes of accommodation solutions to the Chisumbanje constabulary have filled up again and grass has grown back again. It is almost as if the earth around the area was never upturned at one point.

But then – dire as it is – accommodation is not the immediate problem at Chisumbanje right now; the police of late have been forced to deal with vandalism and malicious damage of Green Fuel property by mainly villagers from the surrounding areas. The villagers receive free irrigation water courtesy of Green Fuel, and help with the sugar cane crop, which is ultimately bought by the same company at harvest time. But it is said the villagers – especially those from the Chimukwakwa area to the south east – are livid for what they allege is land pinching that was done at the start of the fuel project. Green Fuel took part of their fields and did not bother to compensate for it, they claim. So now and again they stage demonstrations of a kind as they invade the fields closest to their homes and cause havoc.

“Usually they do it during the rainy season, when they know that the police will not get to them in time, as the shortest link between us and them will be slippery and impassable.” Repeated attempts at negotiations have hit a brick wall, but there is a feeling that once the company opens its doors for business again and start buying the rural folk’s sugar cane and employ their sons, there would be no time for hanky panky.

But it is easier said than done. There was hope last March when Vice President Joice Mujuru visited the area and told the workers that they would be working at their factory very soon. But little else has happened after that and the Green Fuel remains closed.

And that sadly translate to Checheche going back to uncertainty again. The people feel like they are in the eye of a storm which has threatened to quench their thirsty for the past three years. Now they are getting tired of holding their breaths. Nocturnal activity has died down as bars remain empty. Banks that had flocked to the area find more and more reasons to leave every day.

Five years since the marriage between Macdom and Rating Investments was consummated, but Checheche still waits. 

Maybe the storm should pass now.