The Sunday Mail
The Zhuwao Brief of June 14, 2015 was lambasted for offering suggestions to the leadership of Harare Metropolitan Province on how human excrement could be processed in a manner that provides electric power to the city and also allows the city to stop the discharge of raw sewerage into its water reservoirs.
I was reminded that I head the Forestry Commission and that I should focus on strategies that are aimed at revitalising the timber industry as well as addressing the deforestation caused by tobacco farmers, of which I am one.
That was a fair observation.
How can I be offering recommendations on how other entities should conduct their affairs, when the forestry sector for which I have been given the responsibility to lead has lost more than 60 percent of its formal employment (15 000 employees in 2000 to less than 4 000 currently)?
If the Zhuwao Brief is a think tank worth its salt, I should be able to articulate a strong vision for the revitalisation of the forestry sector.
This week’s Zhuwao Brief will discuss the manner in which the forestry sector can contribute toward an empowered society and a growing economy.
The conversation will interrogate the nexus between psychomotor skills and intellectual knowledge generation.
The Zhuwao Brief will illustrate how this nexus provides the basis for economic transformation and development.
The Zhuwao Brief recalls how the opposition and other retrogressive detractors scorned the introduction of a ministry to address psychomotor skills.
I am also certain that there were some within the ranks of Zanu-PF who secretly questioned the wisdom of such a portfolio.
Coming at a time when Zimbabwe was still reeling from the effects of a significant downturn in the economy, some felt that the direction of the new cabinet should focus more on efforts to redirect the economy.
Soon after the announcement of the 2013 cabinet, Zim-Asset was launched. How would the new Cabinet implement Zim-Asset?
What was the relevance of such ministries as the one responsible for psychomotor skills? How would Zim-Asset be funded considering that the chapter on funding and debt management was made up of a full two paragraphs comprising of six glorious sentences on a single rainforest saving page?
Was the Zanu- PF Government serious about the economy? Did the powers that be have any clue on how to address the economy?
The first sentence of the Zim-Asset chapter on funding states that “Government will mobilise funding from domestic resources, which are in abundance and readily available for full exploitation and utilisation”.
This is in conformity to the last sentence of the first paragraph to the Zim-Asset foreword in which President Mugabe indicated it “will be largely propelled by the judicious exploitation of the country’s abundant human and natural resources”.
Which resources? How would these resources be exploited?
The Zhuwao Brief is convinced that we need to go beyond conceptualising resources at the mineral levels only.
For example, the geographic and weather conditions of the Eastern Highlands lend themselves to commercial and industrial timber production.
The Forestry Commission must, therefore, mobilise human and intellectual capital to exploit these natural resources.
To illustrate this notion, I will utilise the case of a gentleman by the name of Titus Mangezi.
Mr Mangezi joined the Forestry Commission in 1972 as a research enumerator. In 1981 he acquired a certificate in Forestry Management, which he augmented with a diploma in 1986 from the Zimbabwe College of Forestry.
Titus Mangezi is the research station manager at Forestry Commission’s John Meikle Research Station in Manicaland.
John Meikle Research Station sits on altitudes ranging from 700m above sea level to 1 900m.
This unique geographic feature enables the research station to conduct various experiments and field trials at different altitudes.
But this unique environment is useless unless there are people with the requisite intellectual and psychomotor skills to exploit the resource for benefit.
Mr Mangezi has been able to select pine trees with superior characteristics and grafted these onto root stalk material to ensure genetic purity of those specimens.
He has gone further to develop new pine hybrids that are not only adapted to the climatic conditions of Zimbabwe, but that have the specifications that are required by the timber industry.
Mangezi’s work has been recognised worldwide with some South Africa fellow having been arrested after attempting to steal the genetic material he developed at the seed orchard and progeny field trials at the research station.
On the energy trees front, Mr Mangezi has developed a eucalyptus hybrid variety that matures in four years compared to up to 15 years for other varieties. This development offers tremendous potential for the tobacco growing sector which is using indigenous trees for curing.
Coupled with the fact that the John Meikle Research Station has capacity to produce 1,3 million seedlings, Titus Mangezi’s work could provide a solution to the problem of deforestation caused by the resurgence of the tobacco sector.
What are the implications of the biography and works of Mangezi to the developmental and transformational aspirations of Zimbabwe?
The Zhuwao Brief posits that Titus Mangezi personifies the realisation of the nexus between intellectual excellence and psychomotor skills for the benefit of the Zimbabwean economy.
The development of superior pines hybrids provides Zimbabwe with an opportunity to be more competitive within the timber sector.
The country will be able to address the decline in employment within that sector primarily because of faster growing and structurally stronger timber resources that take advantage of the geographic and climatic conditions of the Eastern Highlands.
Similarly, on the wood energy front, Mr Mangezi’s intellectual excellence offers an opportunity for addressing the deforestation being caused by tobacco farmers.
Tobacco farmers not only use their psychomotor skills in tobacco production, but they also benefit from Mr Mangezi’s psychomotor skills that have been symbiotically fused by his intellectual excellence.
However, Mangezi’s work needs to be enhanced by ensuring the outputs of research are implemented within the economy.
There is need to ensure that the varieties developed by Titus Mangezi and his colleagues at the other three Forestry Commission research stations are planted. Over and above planting these trees, there is need to process the trees and add value to that timber.
Zimbabwe used to employ over 15 000 people within the timber sector. The land that produced that timber is still there.
Thanks to the psychomotor skills and intellectual excellence of people like Mangezi, we are able to grow superior varieties of trees.
We are, therefore, poised to not only surpass our previous levels of employment and production, but to also realise the Zim-Asset vision of an empowered society and a growing economy.
Zim-Asset: Iwe neni tine basa. Icho!
Patrick Zhuwao is chair of the Zhuwao Institute, an economics, development and research think tank focused on integrating socio-political dimensions into business and economic decision-making, particularly strategic planning. He can be reached at [email protected]
