THE TRUTH ABOUT ZIMBABWE
FAMINE STALKS THE BELOVED LAND

Famine Stalks the Beloved Land

14th June 2002

We all remember the BBC pictures in the early 1990’s of a child dying in its mother arms from hunger in Ethiopia. The images flashed across the world and money and aid poured into agencies that suddenly had to scramble to catch up.

I was a part owner of a ranch in Zimbabwe in that era and in 1992, the rains here simply did not happen across vast swathes of the country. The sugar cane crop died in the field as water dams dried up and the summer cropping programme was almost a complete failure. I can vividly remember that year – for 150 kilometers in every direction from our home in the Lowveld, you could not have found a blade of grass alive. I think we had something like two inches of rain in a period of 15 months. Yet not one person died of hunger, we never ran out of food. It was a remarkable experience.

I can remember the community effort at the time – communities with resources, helping out those who had nothing. Convoys of farmers with their trucks loaded with grass and food, driving to areas where the hippo’s that were still alive were being kept alive in farm reservoirs and swimming pools. All they asked was a beer, a braai and a bed before they drove back to their farms in the north.

I can remember the wild life – normally afraid of man, standing next to the road we used to feed the cattle, waiting for the tractor so that they might also live. I remember the liner trains snaking up from the Ports of East London, Port Elizabeth and Durban, Maputo and Beira with desperately needed food for the people. The orderly distribution systems use of both commercial and government resources. The regional co-operation between the countries of southern Africa, making possible the movement of massive quantities of product, in time to avoid disaster.

Everyone played their part – we tried to do something in our own backyard with a scheme to sell pulpwood to Sappi in South Africa and were able to put about 2 000 people to work. Many of these had to be fed before they could be employed as they were simply too weak to undertake any kind of labor. We lost millions on the exercise, got no thanks but I think if we were faced with the same situation today, we would probably do the same.

Behind the scenes there were many remarkable performances – the Chief Executive of the Grain Marketing Board – Rensen Gasela, now the shadow Minister of Agriculture for the MDC and his Chairman, Cephas Msipa, now the Governor of the Midland Province, saw the problem coming. They persuaded government to act early and started to import well before local stocks ran out. The Chief Executive of the Railways set up a crisis group which co-ordinated the arrival of ships in harbors and marshaled wagons and locomotive power so that the product could be unloaded and moved inland. The private sector took in these vast quantities of raw materials and converted them into packaged food products for consumption. The donors picked up some of the cost but the country carried the bulk of the burden of financing the food situation.

Hey, this is Zimbabwe I am talking about – 10 years ago! What has happened, how can things go so wrong? You might well ask and the story is a sad one for all concerned.

Where do we start? Corruption in the GMB has meant that all experienced and competent mangers have left or are on suspension. New management has not got the background or the experience to deal with these massive problems. The Board has collapsed. It’s the same for the Railways. Government has ignored all the warnings and even the advice of that wise old sage Cephas Msipa was ignored in favour of the views of a rather misguided Minister of Agriculture who is completely out of his depth in any skills except those of praise singer.

Zimbabwe has allowed itself to run out of food stocks completely. It’s left the supply situation so long that it is no longer physically possible to get enough food into the country to feed the people. The private sector, which played such an important role in 1992, is very much weakened by price controls, rampant inflation and demotivated management that it is not in any position to help significantly.

The government itself has a national debt that now exceeds twice that of the GDP, is struggling to cope with existing obligations and certainly does not have the resources to pay for what is needed in any serious way. Foreign exchange receipts have fallen by 40 per cent and there are no resources available for imports on the scale required.

We have insulted our friends and supporters abroad so that even the Scandinavians have given up on us and said we are beyond redemption. We have violated every rule of good governance in the book and are a pariah state by any measure on the word. In the past two years we have destroyed a commercial farming system that was the pride of Africa 20 years ago and the huge resources of these thousands of farms lie idle and destroyed.

Now suddenly the cold dawn of reality. This week supplies of the last remaining foodstuff in free supply, wheat and bread, has been cut by 50 per cent to try and eke out stocks which were about to run out despite repeated assurances from our genius of a Minister that "stocks are enough". I fully expect that this will be the trigger of massive, nation wide food shortages on a scale we have never seen before. Before you blame the weather for this, or accept Mugabe facile explanations in Rome, we have full dams, no water shortages, plenty of grass in most areas, rivers are still running and if our farms were working, the capacity to feed ourselves from irrigated land alone, if this was required. In fact all the crops that were grown under normal conditions – tobacco, soybeans and cotton are all yielding between 70 and 90 per cent of their potential. This is not a repeat of 1992 in any way and attempts to draw parallels do not do justice to the situation.

What does bear thinking about is the future for Mr Mugabe. In the Ethiopian drought it was Mengistu’s attempt to use the food situation to cow his people that led to his overthrow and subsequent flight to Harare where he has lived in exile and comfort ever since. In Rumania it was a collapse of the domestic economy to the point where life simply became unbearable for the majority that led to the Presidents overthrow and death at the hands of his own people. Even in Madagascar, it appears that the last President who had been in power for over two decades has now fled in a French jet to Paris and I do not think we will see him back in the region for a while.

When our people wake up the full extent of the failure of the Mugabe regime in the next few weeks, the sense of national anger and outrage will become overwhelming. We see it in every MDC rally – the people are very angry and are tired of being treated as some kind of Zanu PF supporters club. When urban workers find their entire family from the rural areas at their doorstep because "there is no food at home" all hell is going to break out. Mugabe and his close colleagues and family will bear the brunt of that anger and I am afraid there will be casualties. This situation has simply gone too far to be stopped.

Us, we are trying to do what we can through our Church and our own network – so are others, this time it will not be enough. Mengistu recognises the signs, I hear he has done a runner; he does not want to be around when this curtain comes down.

Eddie Cross
Bulawayo, 14th June 2002.