PLUMES of smoke, easily visible from a distance coupled with the wafting clouds of dust from bellicose caterpillars and front-end loaders give a clue to some serious work being carried out on the vast land adjacent to Tokwane-Ngundu Irrigation Scheme, in Masvingo.

Dotted along the highway linking Ngundu Halt and the sugar-growing bastion of Chiredzi, are small fireplaces manned by teenage boys and girls who regularly confuse motorists with their mundane races to and from the highway to solicit customers for their roasted maize cobs. The source of the maize is the nearby irrigation scheme.

Seemingly oblivious of the droning of the caterpillars across the highway the teenagers continue with their business of selling cobs, fulfilling a routine they have known for years after borrowing the practice from their parents.

Most of their parents retired from selling cobs to take a more lucrative and challenging venture across the highway where, the Zimbabwe Bio-Energy, is in the process of starting a project that will bring a semblance of modernity in the area.

The magnitude of the bio-energy project being set up at Nuanetsi Ranch will definitely be a landmark development, which will forever transform the face of Mwenezi.

Mwenezi East legislator Cde Kudakwashe Bhasikiti reckons that the bio energy project at Nuanetsi was exactly what the doctor prescribed for a district whose soul has been crying for a window to actively participate in the socio-economic orbit of the country.

Cde Bhasikiti said the people of Mwenezi had long yearned for development and the bio-energy project being established at Nuanetsi Ranch by ZBE would indeed bring immense social and economic benefits to the poverty-stricken district.

"'The people of Mwenezi fully support the bio-energy project because already we are beginning to see some benefits like employment for the locals. This district has not been able to record any meaningful investment since independence so it was is our hope that at last we might begin to appear on the Zimbabwean economic map," said an apparently ecstatic Cde Bhasikiti.

Indeed, Cde Bhasikiti, has every reason to be happy because, once it is fully operational, the bio-energy project has the potential to create a conurbation stretching from Masvingo city to Rutenga Growth Point, right in the Mwenezi hinterland and extending to engulf the Lowveld towns of Triangle and Chiredzi.

Once fully operational, the bio-energy project would provide the missing impetus to Masvingo's economic engine which has been struggling to take-off the ground due to incessant choking by the inertia-induced forces that are attributed to lack of investment.

Lack of meaningful investment in Mwenezi, in particular and Masvingo in general since the turn of the millenium, has been regarded as one of the reasons why the scar of underdevelopment has not healed in the province.

"Rutenga Growth Point in Mwenezi will grow 10 times and that way create employment and urban facilities like banks, hospitals and modern shopping centres, among other facilities, that have been the missing link in Mwenezi. People in remote areas like Maranda and Neshuro will afford a smile at last because at the moment it is all hopeless.

"The people in this district also need to participate in the economic activities of the country," added Cde Bhasikiti.

As part of the package by ZBE, the company has undertaken to complete the construction of the stalled giant, Tokwe-Murkosi dam from where irrigation water for at least 100 000 hectares of cane to make sugar and bio-fuels, among other things at Nuanetsi Ranch will be drawn.

Apart from watering the sun-baked plains of Nuanetsi for agriculture, completion of Tokwe-Murkosi dam will open up vast tourism opportunities at the dam, which will arguably be Zimbabwe's biggest inland water body.

The tourism spectacle at Tokwe-Murkosi will come in the form of hotels and casinos that might be built by investors taking advantage of the proposed dam area's topography dotted by large granite hills.

Addressing a meeting of political leaders in Masvingo recently, the vice chairman of the Development Trust of Zimbabwe board, which is one of the shareholders in ZBE, Dr Liberty Mhlanga said that the company would diversify into crocodile farming, cattle breeding and wildlife.

Dr Mhlanga said there were plans to create, Africa's biggest crocodile rearing project at Nuanetsi, which when at full throttle would be home to over 600 000 crocodiles that would be processed mainly for the export market.

"Besides production of sugar cane, we also have an interest in crocodile rearing and the breeding ponds are being built at Nuanetsi. At the moment, we have between 60 000 to 70 000 crocodiles and we hope to increase the figure to over half a million.

"ZBE is also into beef rearing and wildlife farming and at the moment we have over 500 buffaloes for our wildlife programme," said Dr Mhlanga.

ZBE at the moment has in stock over 100 000 crocodiles in artificial breeding ponds out of which 1 000 of them are already ready for harvesting. The firm has also constructed an artificial river course, which is home to nearly 700 crocodile artificial breeders at the moment.

As part of its long-term plans, ZBE has also expressed a keen interest in raising finance for the construction of Runde-Tende dam.

Scores of families from Chisase communal lands in the area have already started to reap the fruits of the ZBE investment as over 50 families will soon be incorporated in the sugar cane production outgrowers' scheme that will feed into the company to quench its huge appetite for energy.

However, despite the excitement about the ZBE investment, there are still problems related to water shortage.

But to the investment-starved people of Mwenezi and those in Nyikavanhu communal lands in Masvingo District, the bio-energy project at Nuanetsi is surely an economic pedestal on which they should continue to climb for many years to come.