LIMPOPO – The municipality has an unemployment rate of 60% with young people, women and disabled in the majority. The area is blessed with about 80 % of the marula tree and every year in February, local people use the marula fruit to make beer.
“Our aim is to use natural resources such as marula fruit from the marula tree to fight the scourge of joblessness to swell the local economy. We believe this fruit can help locals, especially the unemployed to fight poverty in their families and in communities, which they live,” Thobejane said.
Thobejane said the marula trees grow naturally. She said the tree does not necessarily need piped water or fertiliser.
“It also provides us with the necessary shade that acts like aircondition during the scortching summer heat. The fruit can be used by others to make oil and body lotion,” she explained.
Thobejane, who is passionate about the fruit tree said the municipality encourages local people, especially the unemployed youth, mothers and fathers loitering the streets of Maruleng and elsewhere to seize opportunities availed by the tree, to create jobs.
A 59-year-old unemployed woman, Magareth Letsoalo of The Willows village, a stone’s throw away from Hoedspruit in the Greater Maruleng Municipality has over the years used marula beer as her only means of survival. Letsoalo, who is the only breadwinner after the untimely death of her husband in 2015, is looking after four children of her own and two orphaned children who lost their parents a few years ago.
“Since the death of my husband, I have never had the opportunity to say I want this and I don’t want that. My life has been totally channelled like that of a hardworking donkey. Since I was taught how to make marula beer, my life and that of my children have changed dramatically for the better,” she said.
According to Statistics SA, about two million people in Limpopo go to bed on empty stomachs daily.
The report also stated that more than 72% of Limpopo residents live under the upper-bound poverty line meaning they earn R992 per month. And 57% of residents live under the lower-bound poverty line earning R647 per month and 40,3 % under the food poverty-line at R440 per month.
