fresh trouble at Nestle Harare plant

HARARE – Swiss multinational firm Nestlé looks set for fresh trouble at its Harare plant after two senior managers claimed they were being victimised because they are black.

Nestlé temporarily closed its Harare factory last December, complaining of harassment by authorities after it refused to take milk supplies from a farm owned by President Robert Mugabe’s family. The factory was re-opened last month after Nestlé received assurances from the government that its operations would not be interfered with.

But the Swiss-headquartered milk processor could find itself embroiled in a new wrangle with the Harare authorities after the black executives wrote to the Ministry of Labour claiming they were being fired from their positions allegedly as part of a “racial cleansing” exercise to remove all local blacks from managerial positions.

In a letter to the labour ministry written by their lawyer, human resources manager Saymore Gopo and supply chain manager Godfrey Dube claimed they were being dismissed to pave way for expatriates.

They said: “The entire sequence of events surrounding this matter is deeply rooted in the racial cleansing which is being driven by some forces in the management of Nestlé as a company who are orchestrating a plan to eliminate black African managers from the company.

“The former managing director designate of Nestlé Zimbabwe, one H Tilley, has been on record for clearly bragging that they will wield the axe on all black managers and bring in expatriates to fill their vacancies.”

ZimOnline was unable to last night to reach Nestlé’s Nairobi-based spokeswoman on Zimbabwe, Brinda Chiniah, to get the company’s response to the claims of racial victimisation by the two senior workers at its Harare plant.

But sources said Nestlé’s Equatorial Africa regional head for human resources, who they identified only as H.K Singh, was expected in Harare on Thursday to try and resolve the two managers’ case before it gets out of
hand.

Nestlé, which until last October had bought between 10 and 15 percent of milk processed at its Harare plant from Gushungo Dairy owned by Mugabe’s wife Grace, stopped accepting milk from the farm after international media coverage of the milk purchases put the firm under the spotlight.

Some human rights groups incensed at what they perceived as Nestlé’s support for Mugabe’s controversial farm seizure programme had threatened to call on consumers to boycott the company’s products if it did not stop buying Gushungo milk.

Grace was allocated Gushungo under her husband’s chaotic and often violent land reforms that also saw senior members of the military and Mugabe’s ZANU PF party, their friends and allies handed some of the best farms seized from whites.

Nestlé came under immense pressure from Mugabe’s militant supporters to reverse the ban on milk from Grace’s farm but they relented after the company closed the Harare factory, putting about 200 jobs on the line, while
analysts warned the shutdown was damaging the country’s efforts to attract foreign investors to help shore up its battered economy.

Labour Minister Paurina Mpariwa, from the more business friendly MDC party of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, is certain to give Nestlé fair hearing in the dispute with its workers. But the allegations of racism will afford Mugabe’s allies an avenue to launch fresh attacks against the company. –