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REPORTS that the strategic Cold Storage Company is on the brink of collapse are mind boggling and call for immediate action to be taken to save the beef processor and marketer.
While it is not the first time that we have heard of the sorry state of CSC, we feel the problems facing the Bulawayo headquartered company have taken too long to be solved.

Only yesterday our Harare Bureau reported that the beef processor is left with only 600 cattle at its nine farms across the country, translating to 66 beasts per farm.

The parastatal, which had thousands of cattle in the 1990s, has fallen on hard times due to alleged mismanagement and corruption and lack of innovation to deal with competition from private meat players. Since its inception in 1937 CSC had been the leading processor and marketer of beef not only in the country but also in the region.

In fact at its peak it generated more than $45 million per year, supplying Europe with 9,100 tonnes of beef annually. The company still had brilliant facilities across the country, which included abattoirs in Bulawayo, Chinhoyi, Marondera and Masvingo.
The company also had a capacity to slaughter up to 600,000 head of cattle per year.

However, things have over the years been on a free fall, turning the once giant company into a butchery somewhere in the countryside.  Indeed the company is now a pale shadow of itself.

While we agree that the economic situation resulting from the illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the West because of the country’s land reform programme might have a hand on the problems besetting the CSC, we firmly believe something should have been done to turn around fortunes of the parastatal.

We strongly believe the management at CSC lacks new ideas to take the company forward. It is not innovative enough to fight off competition from private players. It looks like people at CSC have just given up on transforming the company into a formidable force to reckon with.

We say so because we believe the management at CSC should take advantage of the state of the art machinery at its disposal to regenerate the face of the company. In fact the management should be embarrassed that it is losing business to private abattoirs, some of them with far less capacity.

However, we also call upon the government to come forward and assist CSC by coming up with a recapitalisation programme so that the company remains afloat.