With the Zimbabwe Agricultural Show set to roll in the next one day, most exhibitors were busy putting final touches to their stands when Business Events visited the Business Hub (formerly the Exhibition Park), the venue of the exhibition, yesterday.
The show, which has been transformed into a business to a business event to manage the number of visitors in line with COVID-19 regulations, is set to run from Wednesday to Saturday. The official opening date has been moved forward by a day from the traditional Friday to Thursday. However, the Zimbabwe Agricultural Society (ZAS) indicated that details of the identity of the guest of honour, who would officially open the show, were not yet available.
When Business Events toured the fairground, service providers were busy putting final touches at many companies and organisations’ stands. Workmen were seen at Mimosa Mine, Zimplats, Grain Marketing Board and Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority and the City of Harare among others. While most of the work involved sprucing up existing stands, Greendale Engineering was building a new brick and mortar stand for Zimplats Mine from the ground up.
The story was the same for some halls where shell scheme modular stands were already up with suppliers such as Kuumba Creators customising some of the stands.
Kuda Takura of Matte Black could not contain his joy with the opportunity for his company to be able to provide its services again after six months of lockdown.
“We are very happy. This is our first job since the country went into lockdown at the end of March,” he said. Matte Black Events was putting together an LED screen in one of the exhibition halls.
Some exhibitors, while acknowledging the need to manage visitor numbers to flatten the COVID-19 curve, felt that a business only show would work against their show objectives given that their target market were individuals.
“Yes, we appreciate that the adoption of the business show model was necessitated by the pandemic but for us, exhibiting here has always because of the crowds of individuals and families which throng this place and not business executives,” said an executive with a building materials company who asked for anonymity as he was not cleared by his management to talk to the media.
Other would-be exhibitors complained that, despite leasing trading space in the Business Hub, they could not afford to take advantage of their tenancy to exhibit during the show because the costs of renting a stand from ZAS were prohibitively steep. At the time of publishing this story, ZAS’ Public Affairs Department was yet to respond to the issue of high participation costs.
