BY FIDELITY MHLANGA
ZIMBABWE’S tobacco industry is set to grow by more than 100% within the next five years under a fresh plan to be laid out by new Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) chief executive officer Meanwell Gudu, Standardbusiness can report.
Gudu’s multi-pronged strategy to consolidate gains made by the industry in the past decade will include a push towards encouraging farmers to stop decimating swaths of the country’s forests for curing tobacco, while scaling up investments into value addition and increase foreign currency inflows from tobacco exports.
“As the incoming CEO, my key objectives are to lead in transforming the tobacco value chain to a US$5-billion-dollar industry by December 2025 in line with the tobacco value chain transformation strategy,” Gudu said, speaking exclusively to Standardbusiness on Friday.
The US$5 billion would be more than double the industry’s current value of about US$2 billion, while another plan to increase output to US$300 million kg will be a huge leap from about 184 million kg attained during last year’s marketing season.
This year, the tobacco farming sector is expected to increase output to 200 million kg.
“(I plan) to work with stakeholders in the industry including other government departments to increase annual production to 300 million kilogrammes by 2025, to increase the local financing of tobacco production to 70% of total costs per hectare, through localisation initiatives, from the current 30% by 2025, to accelerate value addition and beneficiation from the current 1% to 30% by 2025 and to champion sustainable tobacco production by ensuring that 100% of tobacco produced is being cured using renewable energy by 2025,”said the TIMB CEO.
Gudu is one of only a few Zimbabwean CEOs, who have been bold enough to make their vision known from the outset, a huge departure from a culture of secrecy that has dominated executives for decades.
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Perhaps Gudu has benefited immensely from his stint at the United States-based Stanford University, where he obtained executive education before returning to take up various key roles in Zimbabwe’s tobacco sector.
His frank responses spoke of an executive, who is clear about the direction that he wants to take Zimbabwe’s tobacco farming sector, and how he hopes to help thousands of new entrants to the industry create wealth from swaths of farmlands that they have taken over under a domestication plan being pursued by the government.
This could be the reason why the TIMB board chose to tap from within the authority’s ranks for the successor to long-serving CEO Andrew Matibiri, who left last month after leading the tobacco regulator for 15 years.
Gudu had worked within the TIMB as a technical services director since October 2008.
“(I want to) lead the industry in attaining Vision 2030, guided by the National Development Strategy (2020 to 2025) and the Agriculture and Food Systems Transformation Strategy (2020 to 2025) and to improve the credibility of the tobacco marketing system by ensuring 100% compliance to regulations by all players,” he told Standardbusiness.
But if achieved within the next five years, Gudu’s push towards value addition will be a grand step towards transforming tobacco farming, which has struggled for a decade to reach its full potential.
The Harare-based African Institute for Agrarian Studies said in one of its studies that firms importing raw Zimbabwean tobacco ended up earning 14 times more revenue than the value at which they buy the leaf when they sell processed products.
Gudu said his strategy would be guided by a broad plan to transform Zimbabwe into an upper middle income economy by 2030.