28/04/2016
Young entrepreneur breaks into poultry business
Maseru - While the media in southern Africa is abuzz with controversy surrounding imported chicken, with some alleging the imports are injected with carcinogens, a local brand Ndu Fresh Chicken has entered the market to serve Lesotho organic chicken.
Ndu Letlatsa Kalaila, a 37-year-old entrepreneur, already employs 19 full-time employees and six others on a part-time basis in a chicken farming business. Kalaila started off in 1996 working in South African mines as a labourer and kept on developing his skills until he ended up at the Wits Business School where he studied accounts.
"I only worked in the mines so I could take care of my brothers and sisters since our mother, who was the bread winner, left us when I was doing Form E so I took over from her," Kalaila said.
He revealed that he has always been highly motivated to start business since childhood when he used to sell apples and other foodstuffs on the streets of Maseru.
"They used to call me "ice cone" as I was selling ice cream after school," he added.
He said his passion for business never died and he ended up leaving the mines in 2014 to live his dream. Kalaila told Public Eye Online that he started chicken farming in 2013 and never looked back since then.
"I started with as little as 100 chickens and now I have capacity to raise 15,000. I never got any external financing; I only used my own money and kept ploughing back the profits," he said.
He told Public Eye Online that there have been a lot of challenges and there still are because this business is very capital extensive. He said chicken farming needs a lot of knowledge and experience.
He assured Basotho that Ndu Fresh chickens are fed with chemical-free feeds mainly maize and soya, further disclosing that at Ndu Fresh Chicken Enterprise they do not use multivitamins or any chemicals to boost the chicken's growth making their product purely organic.
Pricing and imported chickens, he said, are also a major challenge as we have to sell at low prices, which is not easy to achieve since chicken feed is expensive due to lack of feed mills in the country.
"Feed is extremely expensive. We started packaging our meat late 2014 making only chicken chunks with a sticker on," he said.
Speaking about his lifetime goals in the business world he showed that he wants to develop this business until the brand is so well marketed that it can sell outside our borders.
"We are currently running two farms one at Ha Mabote and another at Koalabata. We also have a mini-abattoir with the capacity of handling 3,000 birds per day at its full capacity," he said.
