“We are having serious points of disagreement with Boustead beef,” Majoko said. “And while I am a legal practitioner kwai n’anga haizvirapi so I have sought advice from my lawyers and there is something they are working on to take to court so that we have clarity on (who should be running the company).”
Boustead Beef has been claiming to be reviving the CSC over the past few months and is getting wide coverage from the State-owned media but former workers say this is all bottled smoke.
They said the investor was supposed to revive the plant by buying new equipment and not repairing old equipment that is already obsolete.
Last month Boustead Beef said it would soon start processing by-products from meat production at its Bulawayo plant. It said the CSC’s Bulawayo plant could process up to 15 by-products from meat such as tallow and fat used by cooking oil firms as well as gluten and blood for pharmaceuticals.
A former CSC management employee said one could not talk about by-products before resuming operations and slaughtering cattle. The employee said the CSC only ran the by-products plant when it was exporting beef because only then were large volumes of cattle slaughtered.
“By products are part of a waste reclamation process from intensive mainstream operations. The production of by-products is a process that is meant to avoid the discharge of waste in the form of blood, inedible bones, fats, rotten meat into the environment and council effluent without which one encounters the wrath of the city council and the Environmental Management Authority. The process itself is very costly and requires the accumulation of substantial waste material, accumulated over a long period,” the former employee said.
“One can therefore not talk of producing by-products without first talking of resuming core operations of slaughtering cattle, which is the main activity. In fact CSC only used to run the by-products plants when it was doing exports because only then would large volumes of cattle be slaughtered.
“To put it bluntly, talking of producing by-products is like Dunlop talking of making sandals from used tyres instead of talking about producing brand new tyres for vehicles,” the former employee said.
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