Learners in the quiet and remote village of Chesa, 20 kilometres from the world-renowned Khami Ruins Monuments, are abandoning school at the primary level to venture into the illegal business of poaching and selling firewood.
The school dropouts spend most of their time in the forest, cutting down trees and shuttling between Chesa Village and Old Pumula suburb selling firewood to residents.
The firewood is sourced from vast forests stretching towards Nyamandlovu and the surrounding farms.
Mduduzi Nkomo and Makheleni Nkomo, both 18 years old, quit school five years ago when they were 13 and doing Grade Seven at nearby Chesa Primary School.
The boys traded the pen for the axe just two months before writing Grade Seven examinations.
The firewood poachers spend days on end cutting down trees in the forest while hiding from the police, Environmental Management Agency (EMA) officials, and Forestry Commission rangers.
After cutting enough firewood to fill up a donkey-drawn scotch cart, the firewood is transported to Bulawayo at night.
The poachers normally move in groups consisting of usually three scotch carts at any given time.
Mduduzi and Makheleni’s grandmother, Gogo Nkomo, told the Chronicle that almost every homestead in the village has a boy who quit school to get into the firewood trade. She said:
Mduduzi and Makheleni did not leave school because there was no money, their parents are in South Africa so school fees were never an issue.
They are not the only ones who stopped going to school to join the firewood business, a lot of boys here in the village are doing it.
Almost every homestead has a boy who is into the business or left school because they say education will not help them in any way.
Two of my donkeys are used by Mduduzi and Makheleni and I hardly see them for days, if not weeks.
Whenever I want firewood or water, I have to ask their friends to pass on the message when they meet in the bush.
Sometimes they come right away or they stay in the bush and come home when they feel like it.
Thembelani Mathe, a mother of four who works for teachers at Chesa Primary School taking care of the teachers’ babies and cleaning their houses, revealed that her son quit primary school to join the illegal firewood trade.
She said her second-born son, 15-year-old Prosper Mathe, turned his back on school in 2021 halfway into the first term in Grade Seven to join a firewood poaching crew. She said:
What could I do to stop him? He had made up his mind and forcing him to go to school was not going to work.
He was simply going to wake up and pretend he was going to school but spend the day cutting down trees for firewood.
It’s painful to watch my son choose this kind of life but what can I do?
The man that Prosper works for owns a house in Old Pumula so he buys groceries that side and brings them back home whenever he gets a chance.
As a mother I fear for his well-being, he might act tough but he is only 15 years old and works with boys and men way older than him.
Another villager, Ndaba Sibanda, said the community is not lazy but the shortage of water in the area makes it difficult for youths to venture into self-sustaining projects such as brick moulding or nutrition gardens.
Sibanda appealed to the Government to drill boreholes and install JoJo tanks to enable villagers to grow vegetables all year round and take the produce to Bulawayo markets.
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