Bongani Majola
Tears of joy overwhelmed Monica Shandu when she accepted the overall award of Grower of the Year in the 2001 Umthombo Agricultural Finance Awards in Mount Edgecombe, Durban, last week. Shandu manages 1,5ha of umoba (Zulu for sugar cane).
“Empilweni yami yonke angikaze ngilale ehotela kodwa ngilalile ngenxa yoMthombo [In my whole life I have never slept in a hotel, but I will be able to do so with the courtesy of Umthombo Agricultural Finance],” she said
The awards were intended to recognise the efforts that small-scale sugar-cane growers are making towards the improvement of their farming businesses and the effect this has on job creation and economic upliftment in the rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and the northern part of the Eastern Cape.
The competition has been running for three years and this year’s overall winner walked away with prizes including a “learning trip for two to Mauritius”, a cash prize of R6 000, a hi-fi system, a free weekend in one of the sponsoring hotels and a host of other prizes.
The event punctuated by song and dance produced by Themi Venturas, which featured a hybrid mixture of Indian, traditional Zulu and Western music boasted SAfm’s amiable Tim Modise as master of ceremonies.
The awards are also intended to promote the repayment of loans and this was built into the criteria for selection of the candidates. The winner and runners-up, who had already won at regional levels, were Shandu, Robinson Masango and Girwar Mahadeo all from northern KwaZulu-Natal.
Echoing a sentiment that sat well with everybody in the audience, guitarist Madala Kunene said: “Those who tend the lands must never stop. They must teach the young ones because the future is agriculture, we must never put our hope on cash money.”
Words of caution and encouragement abounded. Last year’s winner Emma Sambo gave the government and mainstream banks a serious drumming. “They [many funders] reject you. They will not give you loans or help, until you win an Umthombo award, then everybody wants to be seen to be helping you.” she said.
In his address, chairperson of the South African Sugar Association Bruce Dunlop remarked that “with a 95% loan-repayment rate and a bad debt write-off of less than 3% of the loan book, Umthombo stands tall in the rural finance sector.”
What was made evident by the awards initiative, said the Department of Trade and Industry’s Linda Mvanana, “is the fact that the sugar industry is an important vehicle for black economic empowerment in some of the poorest regions in South Africa.” She said that the industry is a major contributor to the gross domestic product in the rural areas. “In the 1999/2000 season sugar contributed R1,3-billion to the country’s total foreign exchange earnings,” she said.