This newspaper and its Bulawayo-based sister, Southern Eye, last week carried articles on the drought that has ravaged the people of Manicaland and Matabeleland North regions.
LandScape with Tangai Chipangura
At some village around Hot Springs near the diamond-rich Chiadzwa mines cattle, goats and people scramble for water from a single source, a borehole which, at the time of our visit to the area, had broken down. The people in this area literally live on the dry baobab fruit.
Across the country, near the western border with Botswana, the San people in the semi-arid areas of Tsholotsho and Plumtree, Matabeleland, spoke about hopelessness and “waiting to die”.
This human tragedy, brought to the attention of those that rule this country through newspaper pages, has for ages remained unknown, even though those that fight for votes must have gone to these areas looking for these people’s support.
We visited these areas (they are certainly not the only ones where humanity and livestock are on the verge of starvation) three months after elections and, as the people of these forgotten lands said, they see no hope for their patched lands and hunger-stricken children.
Meanwhile up in Harare, where the rulers of this country live, the ministers that carry the responsibility over the lives of the millions of our hungry people carry their bloated bellies around speaking from behind their desks about plans to import food.
Some of them threaten non-governmental organisations that are already distributing food to the starving people with ejection from the country allegedly because they talk politics “to our hungry people” — to quote Abedinico Ncube, the Minister of State for Provincial Affairs in Matabeleland South.
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Once renowned as Africa’s breadbasket, Zimbabwe has reduced itself to a basket case, perennially begging for food to feed millions of its citizens that now depend on food handouts like destitutes.
True, drought and uneven weather patterns have attributed to this grim state of affairs, but then such climatic vagaries have affected the whole Southern African region, and most of the continent — not just Zimbabwe. Yet we now must be fed by countries like Zambia and Malawi — countries that history will tell you used to eat from our trough year in and year out not very long ago.
The once proud Zimbabwe is now top priority subject of the World Food Programme (WFP) — not as a benefactor of regional starvation as it used to be just over a decade ago — before 2000, but as a desperate beneficiary of food handouts.
Last month, the WFP issued a grey statement over the state of the food situation in Zimbabwe. An estimated 2,2 million people in this country, a quarter of our rural population, will need food donations in order to survive between now and the next harvest, around April/May next year.
“This is the highest, since early 2009, when more than half the population required food support,” the WFP said.
Part of the reasons for this looming food crisis besides bad weather, is the unavailability and high cost of agricultural inputs such as seed and fertilisers. Which is why Zimbabwe’s regional neighbours have managed food self-sufficiency — even affording excess to give to hungry Zimbabweans — despite sharing the same adverse weather conditions.
The economies of these countries are stable — good enough to ensure adequate supply of agricultural inputs to their stable agricultural sectors where real farmers occupy good farmland and utilise it optimally.
We have been told government has this year secured several million dollars for agriculture, but as has happened countless times before, this money would have been forgotten about when the next harvest tells us we are once again headed for another poor harvest.
Already, part of that money has been earmarked for “rehabilitation of Arda tractors”! Those that know the history of these so-called Arda tractors can tell that those millions have gone down the drain. As far as we know, these Arda farms were stripped of all equipment, including the tractors that allegedly must be “rehabilitated”.
The massive plunder at these farms involved people in very high offices in the ministries to do with national agriculture and other top party officials. Equipment and machinery was stolen in broad daylight and there is nothing to rehabilitate at these Arda farms.
One thing about Zimbabwe is that theft of State money is done right before the eyes of everyone. Money is put in a bank where only well-connected politicians can access it. When they get the money (without collateral or any assurance of paying back), they do with the money whatever they want and then pray something goes wrong with the rain patterns. Whatever happens, however, the officials, most of them, go back to the bank and claim they harvested nothing. That would be the end of the story.
We have not forgotten the Zimdollar era when the nation’s comatose economy was mercilessly drained by the same chefs that, through the central bank’s quasi-fiscal activities, took free money, free fuel, free machinery and equipment and free inputs — which they used to enrich themselves without planting a seed on their equally free-gotten huge farms.
It is because of this culture of impunity, corruption and outright theft that we must pay the price today.
