Obert Chifamba
Utterly gullible! Yes, incredibly naïve. This aptly sums up the behaviour of some tobacco farmers once they sell their produce and receive payment. For some strange reason, they close all their faculties of reasoning once they get their monies and impulse takes over.Every year, thousands of tobacco farmers go home licking bruised egos after losing all or part of their season’s earnings to scheming hookers, cons and unscrupulous middlemen and these misfortunes have always been in the public domain for everyone to learn. Yet the farmers continue to fall for the same tomfoolery year in, year out.
Stories are told of how the farmers willingly part with huge sums of money, as they try to cool off a bit after spending weeks at the floors either waiting to sell their tobacco or to get their payments. Usually cons and hookers will be watching the developments at the floors and following them closely.
Some even come to stay within the precincts of the floors. They rent rooms close by while some have even secured permanent accommodation in nearby residential areas such as Glen Norah, Highfield and Hopley to where they can easily take clients before milking them clean. In some cases the farmers throw away the cash willingly after taking one, too many beers while others are actually robbed or searched without them even noticing.
Some of the hookers just descend on the floors every evening from their bases in town. This is usually the most dangerous group, as they have no traceable history once they make a hit and disappear.
They normally rent apartments near the floors where they take the unsuspecting farmers, the majority of them ‘first-timers’ around town and pretend to be the owners of the apartments allowing the farmers the freedom to do whatever they want including bathing or taking a decent nap.
It is during such pretentious acts of benevolence that the farmers lose everything to hookers who disappear without trace. On the one hand, cons come selling a little bit of everything including cars that would have been brought for sale by their owners. Many farmers have given away cash for such cars, especially trucks, to cons who then disappear under the guise of going to collect the book from a colleague inside or home.
A few years back, a group of farmers was allegedly stopped while crossing Willowvale Road at the traffic lights opposite Southerton Police Station and threatened with arrest and detention by suspected cons who went on to pretend to be taking them into the police station only for the farmers to beg for lenience, which they only got after paying a ‘guilt admission fee’ to secure their freedom. They were being accused of crossing the road at traffic lights, a charge which the cons said would attract a custodial sentence if taken to court. Such farmers need to spare a bit of their earnings to improve their academics, as well as take time to visit towns in the company of people who know them and learn the dos and don’t so that they are not victims of chicanery.
Some farmers do neither of the above but are slaves of alcohol. Once drunk, they do not know where they go to sleep or who they court for company. In most cases such farmers lose cash to thieves who search them while dead drunk or attack them before making good their escape with the loot. It is also this group of farmers that chooses to travel to places far from their drinking halls even in the dead of the night but sadly thieves will be in tow.
I hear such farmers display wands of cash in bars and always brag about their capacity to earn more and even buy all the beer in the bar for everyone. Thieves will in the process be taking note and watching all movements or even befriending the unsuspecting ‘Temba comes to town,’ as the farmers are often called.
The cons and hookers’ scourge seems to be growing by the day, as more and more cases of such unfortunate incidences are being recorded every year. Right now the farmers are busy reaping and curing the early planted irrigated tobacco crop in readiness for the marketing season and the aforementioned predators are also watching and salivating from the horizon.
In January, the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board (TIMB) will register buyers. The buyers will be thoroughly vetted to ascertain their capacity to buy tobacco using cash from offshore accounts so the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) will also be very active in the registering process.
The more the buyers, the higher the competition and so will be the prices under normal circumstances. It is only unfortunate that buyers have also joined the list of predators seeking the farmers’ scalp in recent years, as they allegedly collude to erect price ceilings and offer very little leaving farmers short-changed grossly.
It is abundantly clear that the tobacco farmer turns prey to these marauding people the moment they bring their golden leaf to the floors, as everyone fights for a piece of them. But the gullibility of the farmers under the onslaught of these tricksters is always incredulously conspicuous.
They don’t even seem to learn from what happens to their colleagues even if the stories are told in papers, radio and television. They still want to explore and find out for themselves.