WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2002-05-20 Time: 14:33:42 Posted By: Jan
Source:Mail & Guardian (SA)
Published:Mon 20-May-2002
“Those areas where the imported maize is going, is where the people voted for the government. That is why we are not getting food”
Griffin Shea
May is normally a month of plenty in Zimbabwe, as farmers harvest their crops ahead of the austral winter. But this year, rural granaries are as empty as the dusty urban store shelves, and the government has declared a state of disaster because of the desperate shortage of food in most of the southern African country. Nowhere is the crisis as severe as the already dry provinces of southern Zimbabwe. “We didn’t really get anything – only a few melons,” said grey-haired Francis Sibanda. “The rain was not fair, so we couldn’t harvest anything. Now we go for sometimes a week without food,” he said. His wife spends the days scavenging for berries and wild fruit in the nearby mountains. He sometimes sells a chicken alongside the highway that passes 100 meters outside his village, but that money only buys enough maize meal to last a few days, and he is running out of chickens. “If we can find (maize meal), we don’t make the thick sadza, we just make a thin porridge so the mealie meal can last another day,” one neighbour said.
Most people in the villages in Lukosi district, about 130 kilometres east of Victoria Falls, said they were relying on relatives, friends and neighbours to survive – hoping that some distant cousin working in a city or overseas will send home money or food to share with the village. “Now we are waiting for the neighbours, to see if they find some food. We are living communally, to make sure no one is dying,” said Ruth Ndlovu, who was using her cooking pots for stools as she had nothing to put in them. Even in these rural areas, people have heard of government plans to import maize. But everyone in this cluster of villages thinks they know why no food is coming to them – politics. “Those areas where the imported maize is going, is where the people voted for the government. That is why we are not getting food,” Ndlovu said. “Last time when the maize was brought, it was said it was only for the ruling party supporters – the war vets, the army. Sometimes if shops manage to get mealie meal, it’s only 10 bags. When the maize is disbursed, they say it is only for Zanu PF, not for MDC supporters, and they make sure it does not come.”
Voters in southern Zimbabwe turned out strongly in favour of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the March presidential election and the 2000 parliamentary elections. Most of the people in these provinces are from the Ndebele minority, and none of them have forgotten the ruling Zanu PF’s bloody 1980s campaign to wipe out “dissidents,” which left thousands dead or missing. During that campaign, church groups accused the government of using the army to block food deliveries and to destroy food supplies during the 1984 drought. The memories have left a suspicion of President Robert Mugabe that’s hard to erase in this region, especially after the violence-wracked presidential campaign that saw thousands of people – mainly opposition supporters – beaten, abducted or otherwise intimidated, according to rights groups. At least 55 people have died so far this year in political violence, rights groups say.
Aid agencies, however, are trying to respond to the crisis without getting entangled in the political drama. The UN’s World Food Program (WFP) suspended its emergency food deliveries for the two weeks around the March 9-11 election. But the political crisis and international dissatisfaction with Mugabe’s government have overshadowed the growing humanitarian problems. UN officials here fear the famine will act as a catalyst for other health problems, not the least of which is HIV, the deadly virus that has infected one in four Zimbabwean adults. Other diseases like malaria and cholera can also take hold as malnutrition spreads. If international assistance does not come, villagers in Lukosi have resigned themselves to scavenging and hoping they survive to see better rains next year. “We are just waiting to see if next year there is some rain. In the meantime, we just eat wild fruits, berries, some baobab fruit. And we rush to the highway to see if someone is getting down with some maize,” Ndlovu said.