Harare — THE Department of Veterinary Services is facing serious financial and logistical challenges that have grossly crippled its capacity to carry out extension services and forced the bulk of its skilled personnel to search for greener pastures.

Director of Veterinary Public Health, Diagnostics and Research in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development, Dr Unesu Ushewokunze-Obatolu said problems of staff retention and the absence of a vibrant communication and transport system had left the department discharging less than 10 percent of the expected mandatory duties.

"At the moment the department is faced with the mammoth task of training staff, the bulk of whom are coming in without the prerequisite qualifications to fill the void left by qualified personnel.

"This exercise involves a lot of movement and with only 20 motor bikes especially for the cattle branding programme that is done annually, the operations become very difficult," noted Dr Ushewokunze-Obatolu.

She said the bikes were grossly inadequate to effectively cover the 1 200 posts that currently exist for the programme in which one officer was expected to cover 10 dip tanks each covering a radius of 5km and thousands of cattle.

"It is also very difficult to supervise manpower while the risks of failing to detect communicable livestock diseases are very high since extension agents cannot meet regularly to exchange notes or alert each other on the outbreak of diseases.

"This is a serious threat to the cattle industry that is currently trying to re-build after years of severe battering by diseases and malnutrition inspired deaths," she added.

Additionally, the department has had to contend with the harsh prices of chemicals and vaccines and the huge capital requirements to mobilise the human resource component necessary for the control of diseases like anthrax and foot and mouth.

Dr Ushewokunze-Obatolu said special programmes like cattle branding needed to be taken seriously if the national herd was to be re-built to the expected numbers.

"Branding is a special tool in tracing origins of cattle from the province, district right to the owner because the brands normally differ from province to province and from district to district.

"It also helps in the fight against stock theft as the police can easily identify stolen animals and trace them to their farms of origin," she observed.

Easy disease detection is also one advantage of branding cattle, which in a way curtails losses that usually come with the strenuous efforts needed to contain outbreaks especially during hard economic patches like the one the country is currently going through, said Dr Ushewokunze-Obatolu.