Jubie Matlou
Papi Nkosi (58) cuts a humble figure. He does not mind taking a seat on a concrete slab for a press interview, nor does he hesitate to draw water from a tap with the palm of his hand.
Such character and personality contrast sharply with Nkosi’s recently found fortune: exporting 800 tonnes of lemons a year to Coca- Cola in Atlanta for the next 20 years. The first batch of 400 tonnes of produce is expected next March.
The crop will come from a 20ha farm, Peebles, that Nkosi acquired with an Agricultural Credit Board loan he secured three years ago.
Nkosi is no novice to the highly demanding world of export and the attendant vicissitudes of foreign currency exchange. He honed his mana-gerial skills at Agriwane from the 1980s to the mid- 1990s, when the parastatal, based in the former KaNgwane homeland, was dissolved. It was at Agriwane that Nkosi developed an interest in citrus farming, and lemons in particular.
Farming is in his blood. He grew up on a farm leased by his father from white farmers in the Nelspruit area, where he was compelled to lend a hand in various activities, from ploughing the fields to milking the cows.
The Coca-Cola deal came about two years ago when the multi- national sought suppliers of lemons – and as South Africa was one of the vogue countries at the time, the company looked towards these shores.
Nkosi said Coca-Cola insisted on giving business to black emerging farmers. “As a prominent member of the National African Farmer’s Union, I became one of the emerging farmers in Mpumalanga that Coca- Cola explored business interests with, until the deal was finalised.”
However, for many of the emerging black commercial farmers, the contract to export lemons to Atlanta is only a stepping stone in the empowerment drive. Nkosi holds very strong views on the subject and believes that the creation of a black commercial farmer class would not be possible without government support.
“The successful profile of many Afrikaner farmers was built on the support provided by the former National Party government to redress inequalities between the English urban middle class and the largely rural Afrikaner farming communities. In the same vein I think the current government ought to provide the same support to black farmers,” he said.
Nkosi identifies credit security as the main obstacle in the empowerment of black emerging farmers, and unless banks and other financial institutions employ different criteria in the granting of loans to previously disadvantaged farmers, all empowerment policies and programmes will remain a pipe dream.
“The allocation and granting of loans and credit should be based on the viability of a business plan – as to whether a farming project is sustainable or not. The allocation of resources can’t be based on emotional factors alone,” he said.
Nkosi views the recent farm invasions in Zimbabwe as irrelevant to the genuine restoration of land and its redistribution to those who have been deprived for many years.
“Even if the landless can invade land, such invasion won’t help much when they don’t have the necessary credit to work the land. Low-interest credit and loans are the prerequisite towards building a group of successful farmers from the black community.”
According to Nkosi, recent government pronouncements after the floods are “nothing but lukewarm responses” to the disaster. To date, the government has only assessed the damage inflicted on the infrastructure such as roads and bridges. “In the past, white farmers were even subsidised for damage to crops.”
However, he commends the government for coming up with new policies that seek to tilt the scales in favour of emerging black farmers, and for taking strides to consult with them in developing a new agricultural dispensation.
Nkosi earned a post-matriculation diploma at an agricultural college in Alice in the Eastern Cape. He also acquired building skills along the way and abandoned farming for a while to take up a job with a construction company involved in building the match-box houses that came with the emergence of black townships around Johannesburg.
Nkosi saved enough money to lease grocery shops around Mpumalanga. He returned to farming in response to the 1973 drought, when yellow maize meal became the norm in the place of the conventional white maize meal.
“The re-emergence of yellow maize meal, the type I saw and ate as a teen-ager, triggered nostalgic memories when I used to work in the fields under the supervision of my father. The homeland system was taking shape at that time, and I reckoned that the chiefs still had pockets of land in some of their areas. With the savings I made from the leased shops, I gradually drifted back into farming.”
In addition to Peebles farm, Nkosi manages two other farms of 90ha outside Nelspruit which are used for vegetable crops and grazing livestock