Roger Boka’s recent move into the tobacco industry signals an attempt to break up the white-dominated cartel, writes Jan Raath
ROGER BOKA’S way of hating is unnerving. What he has said and written is crude, full of bad grammar, unreason and errors of fact. You think it has boiled up from brimstone in the pit of his stomach.
Last year he filled hundreds of pages of the local press with advertisements containing small print which seethed with loathing for whites. He will be best remembered for the message beneath a photograph of a huge python crushing the life out of a crocodile; this was what blacks would soon be doing to the whites and their economic ascendancy.
It wasn’t even funny that he called the crocodile a “predator mammal”.
Yet there he was this week, being chummy with CG Tracey, the hot-potato-accented retired tobacco executive who embodies white patrician tobacco money in Zimbabwe. Tracey, luminary of the Harare Club, who keeps racehorses in France, presented him with a basket of fresh pumpkin leaves for the relish that is favoured in the musango [bush] back home, and Boka thanked him for it.
Tracey was one of a surprising number of whites at the opening this week of the Boka Tobacco Auction Floor (BTAF), the launch of Boka’s war against the small group of powerful tobacco companies that for decades have dictated the ups and downs of the industry. Tobacco helped keep Rhodesia in helicopters and oil during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence period and now Zimbabwe is the world’s largest exporter of tobacco.
In the vast unfinished shell of his US$20- million building, Boka, who suffers from severe diabetes, moved slowly on his stick to talk to Cees den Boer, a Dutch tobacco farmer from Headlands to whom Boka’s United Merchant Bank lent money to finance his crop last year when the other banks wouldn’t help.
Then to Andy Gibb, the floor’s marketing director and one of a dozen experienced whites that Boka lured with offers of lavish income from Tobacco Sales Floor (TSF), the smoothly functioning old floor that tobacco insiders say is learning the cost of years of complacency as the sole market place for the business.
A young blond grower in boxer shorts and velskoen from Beatrice who wouldn’t give his name was one of many white tobacco farmers Boka has visited personally in recent months, asking him to give his new floors a try. Boka told him that his fearful advertising campaign was “just politics” and the start of the campaign against the white exclusiveness of the industry.
“We are worried about it. He may force us to sell here, they could change the law,” he says. “This man has caused more racism than anyone else since independence. He said whites must get out of the country. Now he is begging us for our business.
“But I’m in farming for business. If the prices are good here, we will sell here.”
Joe Malaba, the floor’s general manager, says that “what Boka has really done is to try to prick our consciences, and asked, is the industry open to everyone? The realisation will come that it has been closed.”
With real competition in the trade for the first time, the racist polemic will recede, he says. “This is not about racism, it is about business.”
Growers have fought in vain for years against “the business” that for the small group of the powerful tobacco companies – now only three – has been to agree on how to share the volume of leaf between the European and United States cigarette manufacturers they represent, and to agree on the price.
“The auctions are very quaint, but they are a bit of a sham,” confessed a senior agricultural union executive. “Real competition only comes in when they make mistakes.”
Between the price paid to the grower for his leaf and what the tobacco company gets from the manufacturers, there is an enormous differential, says Malaba. “The grower isn’t benefiting. The auction floors aren’t benefiting. It’s the cartel.”
Taking a cut on profit margins and paying the grower more is Boka’s plan to attract the farmers from their old market place.
“Roger Boka is coming in as an independent buyer to ensure a real market price that is fair,” says Malaba.
TSF’s first bales went for US$3,18/kg. Boka’s were 33% up at US$4,10/kg.
TSF has already been stung into action. Selling on its floors earns you a chance in a draw for Chinese motorcycles. The free coffee in the restaurant at the floors even seems to taste better.
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