As hunger wreaks havoc in the countryside and hope for a bright future for our agriculture diminishes, we wonder if the drought we are facing could not have been minimised. A failing agricultural system coupled with an industrial sector that is in the intensive care unit spells doom for a nation, all because of Zanu PF’s errors of commission and ommission in governance.
P Maguta
While President Robert Mugabe’s regime hides behind sanctions and climate change as the cause of food shortages, the people know Zanu PF shoulders the blame. The undoing of our agriculture and, hence, national food security is found in the failure of Mugabe’s Cabinet to have a rock-solid and concrete agricultural policy since time immemorial.
By making us survive on food handouts from the international community, Zanu PF has unknowingly turned the country into a colony again. Their objective of sovereignty is being pulled from under their feet by their failures.
Children are getting used to names of non-govermental organisations (NGOs) than the national anthem mostly because NGOs are now the lifeline of communities in spite of Zanu PF’s frontal attacks on them.
Zanu PF has failed. The food situation in the country is testimony to that.
Mugabe’s populist agricultural policies are based on farm seizures and giving of free agricultural inputs and implements to the ruling Zanu PF party members.
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Giving farms to people who do not want to farm simply because they are Zanu PF or indigenous has produced idle farms where fertile land is being left unattended.
What is clear now is that getting a farm does not turn everyone into a farmer and also getting free inputs does not make everyone work on the land. lf anything, it fuels corruption, as everyone who has influence tries to “loot” himself with the items which in most cases are not accounted for.
It is, therefore, important to have a policy where one’s race or political party is not the yardstick to get a farm. Government must allow all law-abiding citizens and foreigners to access land to farm as long as they can turn around our agricultural sector.
Let me hasten to say a sound land redistribution exercise could have produced a thriving farming community for our country. But a politically-motivated, haphazard, hurried and violent theft-infested land-grab process brought agriculture to its knees.
A deliberate plan to encourage planting of drought-resistant crops in areas which receive low rainfall and fair prices for maize farmers could have encouraged people to grow the staple crop and reduce the scourge of hunger. However, Zanu PF had other ideas and focused more on tobacco production.
Instead of wasting time doing politics, a deliberate government drive for dams and weirs construction could have improved water availability in areas like Hwange, Gwanda, etc where domestic animals are reportedly facing serious water shortage.
Failure by Zanu PF to craft policies and implement measures to improve the situation in the agricultural sector, be it in communal areas, resettlement areas or large-scale farms, is what has led us to where we are today: scavengers.
