The Namibian Police in the Zambezi region have advised the country’s leading meat-processing and marketing entity Meatco to urgently beef up its security at the Kopano Quarantine Camp, where stock theft has become rampant.
Meatco has over 900 cattle quarantined at the Kopano Quarantine Camp, which is a government facility in the Zambezi region.
Multiple cases of stock theft have been reported at the facility over the past three weeks, where about 12 camps are home to hundreds of Meatco’s cattle.
The procurement officer for Meatco in the Zambezi region, Domonic Majakube, said the quarantine camp lacks proper security to guard the large area, apart from the entrance and a few cattle herders employed to take care of livestock.
“The first incident happened last month… we lost 14 cattle – and just a week after, they came back again. Those people were armed. They came back, and they took another 14,” he shared.
Of the stolen herd, seven have been recovered by the Zambian Police, who informed their Namibian counterparts
of the discovery last week.
The ear tags and branding of the animals were reportedly tampered with by the unknown thieves.
Chief inspector Charles Mayumbelo explained the difficulty in returning livestock after they have crossed into Zambia.
He said while police from both sides work together to solve these cases, a lack of resources, particularly transport, delays the process.
“And the other thing that I would like to request is for Meatco to meet us halfway in purchasing a drone so that area can be monitored to make everything easier. It’s a bushy area. It’s not easy. Even for them, it’s not easy, so here we might keep on blaming each other, but we must get a solution. When I’m proposing for a drone, it’s something that will assist us because it’s on air,” said Mayumbelo.
Meatco’s livestock procurement manager Timotheus Kativa said such incidents hold financial implications for the corporation.
“We are talking about a total of 38 animals that have gone missing, of which seven have been successfully recovered. We are talking about a loss of about N$300 000 – and this is a big loss, and it is threatening our operations, which means that we need to pause and see how we are going to address this with the stakeholders and our law-enforcers and Meatco.”
He said it is now for the veterinary services to decide on the fate of the animals recovered.
“According to commodity-based trade, animals are supposed to be quarantined for 30 days, and that means the animals must be in the quarantine camp for the duration of 30 days. In any case, if animals go out of the quarantine, it means they have broken the quarantine protocol, meaning that those animals can no longer qualify under commodity-based trade like these ones, which were recovered from Zambia. They will not go back to the quarantine camp for them to continue with the quarantine process.”
– NBC News