Mbire: Search for a new legend CEO of Mbire District Council Mr Cloudious Majaya attends to a drip irrigation mechanism at a nutritional garden while a villager, Dorica Mabhaudhi, looks on
CEO of Mbire District Council Mr Cloudious Majaya attends to a drip irrigation mechanism at a nutritional garden while a villager,                      Dorica Mabhaudhi, looks on

CEO of Mbire District Council Mr Cloudious Majaya attends to a drip irrigation mechanism at a nutritional garden while a villager, Dorica Mabhaudhi, looks on

Tichaona Zindoga Senior Features Writer
Mbire, one of the districts on the north eastern extremity of Zimbabwe, close to the border with Zambia, has a legendary and historical idealism about it.
It is home of the salt pans that enticed one of Zimbabwe’s historical patriarchs, Chief Nyatsimba Mutota, to leave the Great Zimbabwe.
The pans are found in Kanyemba.

Mutota never returned.

Today, the Mutota ruins, Tuwuyu Tusere, stand out as some kind of a marker in the historical axis of Zimbabwe.
Mbire is also home to the Mushumbi Pools, which students of geography may enthusiastically trace on the atlas, held by the allure of adventure.

Only the pools are smaller, infinitesimal even; and a pale shadow of the legend; nor is the place around a tourist haven as one would imagine.

This is Mbire.
As an administrative district, Mbire issues from Guruve – often referred to Lower Guruve – and geographically it lies in the dry, tsetse-fly prone, Zambezi Valley area.

Kanyemba, which lies on the border with Mozambique and Zambia, is a small outpost of life and tourism activity in Mbire District, although a torturous distance away from Mushumbi Pools.

In the dry, suppressing heat and an almost still existence, Mbire seems to be begging for a new legend.
The challenges that the district faces are many: lack of infrastructure, scarce water resources for its residents and their domestic animals, poor agriculture and the threat of food insecurity and underutilised tourism potential.

The chief executive officer of Mbire District Council Cloudious Majaya is alive to all these challenges and has now set sights on bringing development to Mbire.

When The Herald caught up with him recently, Majaya projected optimism for a turnaround.
Since the beginning of the year, the council has been on an exercise to rehabilitate boreholes in the district.

Boreholes, a critical water source here, were sunk by the Government through the District Development Fund, the council and non-governmental organisations, but have since broken down and sunk into disrepair.

“At the beginning of the year we set out to rehabilitate 60 boreholes in 11 wards of the district and so far we have managed to repair 43 and we are going to reach the target by December,” said Majaya.

The repairing exercise will continue next year.
“Boreholes are major water sources here and each borehole serves at least 250 people,” said Majaya.

“We actually have a deficiency of boreholes because the Government programmes under which boreholes, road and other amenities were built have since been stopped,” he said.

Majaya revealed that next year, council will be looking at sinking new boreholes.
Another viable option, suggests Majaya, is for Mushumbi Pools to have its water works to supply a fairly growing population.

“We have engaged Zinwa (Zimbabwe National Water Authority) in several meetings for it to regularise the supply of water by establishing water works for Mushumbi Pools.

“Zinwa had not planned for this but Mushumbi Pools was designated a growth point in 2006 and it has a school, government departments and as council we opened up land for private investors in form of stands and this has actually seen the rise in the demand for water,” he said.

He said the population around the growth point was about 3 500 people.
There is also a huge tsetse control establishment at Mushumbi.

Majaya has also committed to tackling the issue upgrading road networks, which have gained notoriety for their states.
The council has two graders that are operational and the challenge has been to ensure their mobility and industry.

Said Majaya: “We have mobilised fuel from safari operators and right now work on the 140km Mahuwe-Kanyemba road is ongoing.
“We have what we call the Social Fund and the Development Fund whose money comes from the Campfire project in Ward 4,” he explained.
Some of the feeder roads that council is working on include the 30km Angwa-Masoka and Chidodo-Muzengezi roads.

The CEO revealed that Zinara, the roads authority, had provided 2 000 worth of fuel in coupons.

Climate change: threat to opportunity
Yet a significant helping help to Mbire may yet come from a climate change initiative dubbed Kariba REDD + Project, which is being conducted by an organization called Carbon Green Africa.

The project targets areas in the Zambezi Valley namely Mbire, Nyamhunga, Hurungwe and Binga and seeks to promote the conservation of forests as natural reservoirs of carbon.

Carbon Green Africa describes the Kariba REDD project as a “forest conservation project aimed at providing sustainable livelihood opportunities for poor communities in northern Zimbabwe, a region now suffering heavily from deforestation, poverty, and drought” and up to 2 million hectares of forest.

The concept is based on the belief that trees help “clean” the air and eliminate toxic gases that cause global warming and climate change.
Low-lying areas face the greatest risks of global warming and climate change as the face more tropical diseases such as malaria and extreme weather events such as flooding and droughts.

But some of these areas hold the key to their own survival: they have massive vegetation cover that will help in the fight against climate change.

Hence, the greater the density of trees, the bigger the contribution to the conservation of the environment.
And communities are reaping from it, too.

Communities are rewarded in form of “carbon credits”, which reflect the density of vegetation and these credits are converted into cash which is ploughed into development.

The rehabilitation of boreholes in Mbire is one of the fruits of the project.
Kariba REDD provided 120 litres of fuel and 49 bags of cement towards the initiative.

Kariba REDD is also promoting the use of “conservation agriculture”, a phenomenon that has gained currency over the years due to its stated goal of maximising use of land and emphasis on minimal disturbance of soil and on the environment.

Kariba REDD provides inputs comprising of a bag of Compound D fertiliser, a bag of Ammonium Nitrate fertiliser, 10 kg bag of maize and 5kg of cowpea.

A pilot project started three years ago, in three wards and with an uptake of 300 households, and is now set to increase.
Villagers here have welcomed what are called “nutritional gardens”, which are a Kariba REDD initiative in its areas of operations.

The gardens are communal plots in which several households own a partition in the cultivation of leaf vegetables, tomatoes, onion and even herbs.

The project provides infrastructure.
For Dorica Mabhaudhi, a 27-year-old mother of three from Sangojena Village, and others in the community, the project is a boon.
There are three such gardens around Mushumbi Pools catering for close to 80 households.

“I used to have a piece of land on the banks of a river but farming was seasonal.
“With this project I do cultivation all year round and the yields are better,” says she.

“I sell my produce at Mushumbi Pools and surrounding areas,” she said.
There are plans to fully mechanise the nutritional gardens and so far, technologies such as drip irrigation are being rolled out to improve efficiency.

Another project being initiated under Kariba REDD as part of providing alternatives for the communities’ source of income and staple diet is beekeeping, which has reported success.

One hive can produce 20kg of honey with a market value of $10 per kg.
Each hive when running correctly can be harvested every three to four months, says CGA.

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