Mugabe harvests lies as Zimbabwe faces shortages

A LARGE baboon in the dusty lorry stop near Zimbabwe’s border with Zambia daily lays bare the origin of President Mugabe’s purported “bumper harvest”.

Squatting on top of a bulky trailer, he rips open the heavy tarpaulin cover and stuffs his cheeks with maize until he can push no more in.

Drivers here say that every day for more than a month up to 30 heavy trucks have been crossing from Zambia with 30-tonne consignments of maize bound for government silos. Grain trade executives report that at least 400,000 tonnes are on order — some of it almost certainly grown by white Zimbabweans who moved to Zambia after being driven from their farms by Mr Mugabe’s land seizures.

“That man (Mr Mugabe), he made a big mistake to chase the white man,” said Kennedy Phiri, a truck driver who was driving a load of maize.

Similar cargo is crossing the Beitbridge border post with South Africa. The South African Grain Information Service says that 168,000 tonnes of American, Argentine and South African maize, and more than 50,000 tonnes of wheat, has been shipped into Zimbabwe this year.

How Zimbabwe’s bankrupt Government pays for these surreptitious imports is a state secret, but they give the lie to its claim that the country’s farmers will produce a record harvest of 2.4 million tonnes of maize this year. In a recent interview Mr Mugabe even suggested that the World Food Programme should redirect its efforts to other countries. “Why foist this food upon us? We don’t want to be choked. We have enough,” he told Sky News.

By contrast, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation predicts a maize harvest of barely 900,000 tonnes, and estimates that 2.3 million people in Zimbabwe’s rural areas face starvation.

Mr Mugabe’s opponents have no doubt why he is importing such large quantities of grain, while rejecting the help of international aid organisations whose food distribution programmes he cannot control. They say that he intends to reward supporters with food before next year’s parliamentary elections, and withhold it from famine-stricken areas that support opposition parties until they cave in through hunger.

“They have a plan to starve people to death for political ends, to get everyone aligned to their party at all costs,” Pius Ncube, the Catholic Archbishop of Western Zimbabwe, said this week. Indeed, Mr Mugabe once remarked that “absolute power is when a man is starving and you are the only one able to give him food”.

In truth, the emptiness of Mr Mugabe’s claims about Zimbabwe’s food production — and of the state radio propaganda jingle that “Our land is our prosperity” — is everywhere apparent. A tour of what was once Zimbabwe’s most intensive farming region shows that Mr Mugabe’s mythical agrarian revolution has instead reduced what was once the breadbasket of southern Africa to subsistence agriculture and desperate poverty.

In July the land around Banket, about 70 miles north of Harare, used to be a panorama of stunning green winter wheat. Today there are a handful of green patches, the work of the two white farmers still able to farm, and a few black “A2 settlers” — state and ruling party officials who have taken over white-owned land.

Ben Hlatshwayo, the High Court judge who last month dismissed the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s challenge to Mr Mugabe’s fraudulent election victory in 2002, occupies the lands and homestead of Vernon Nicolle, formerly one of the biggest wheat and barley producers in the country, who is now in Australia. The judge’s summer crops consist of a patch of stunted maize and sunflowers. He has planted barely any winter wheat.

Massive rotating watering systems stand gaunt above fields of maroon buffalo weed and elephant grass. The 1,000-tonne steel grain bins are empty and vandalised, their function usurped by the rickety wooden cribs of peasant farmers holding perhaps a tonne of maize cobs.

“Some of them have made it, but they are few and far between,” said a white farmer who asked not to be named. “They don’t have capital or know-how. The Government hasn’t delivered the fertiliser, seed and fuel it promised. They farm at weekends. They planted late and their yields will be hopeless.

“They will be able to feed themselves, but that’s all. There will be no profit to farm with next season. It’s poverty replicating itself.”

Nearby, the tattered plastic sheeting over the ribs of a desolate 30-acre horticulture greenhouse flaps in the wind. Six months ago the owner, a widow, was forced off by soldiers with AK-47s.

Other agricultural sectors are in similar straits. Zimbabwe was the biggest exporter of tobacco in the world, producing 245,000 tonnes in 2000. This year’s crop will be a quarter of that.

At the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair in April in Bulawayo, the heart of the country’s cattle industry, the sole entries in the livestock section were two donkeys.

There are about 300 white farmers still able to farm, says John Worsley-Worswick of the Justice for Agriculture organisation, but the Government has recently passed laws to seize farmers’ machinery and to hasten the procedure of “compulsory acquisition”.

Lists of farms for seizure are published with increasing frequency. “We’re losing one or two farmers every day,” said Mr Worsley-Worswick. “It’s a very real possibility there will be no white farmers by the end of the year.”

"In terms of what was going on next door, Rhodesia was a far better option for a black African."

That sounds reasonable. Still, it was hardly a paradise. Give me Senegal or Ghana any day.

"Personally, if I was black and educated in that time I would have simply left (which many did and perhaps that's why southern Africa is in the state that it is in)."

That's becase life was tough then and that's what's happpening when life is tough in Zimbabwe now. Most of those who can leave are leaving, which means the wealthiest (well, not THE wealthiest...) and most highly educated people are elsewere. It will be hard times for Zimbabwe even after Mugabe is gone. Ironic that in just 10 years Zim went from having 90+% literacy to persecuting the free press. Most everyone can read, but there's so little worth reading.

Ghana yes... Kenya sure... there are still countries reasonable enough to live in without having a small contingent of security staff. Rhodesia wasn't a paradise, but if you were a laborer or other such househelp that wasn't educated and not going anywhere you didn't particularly mind not voting. That's another thread altogether. Anyway, the folks that I know that are still there and NOT leaving have jobs in other industries not farm related. And yes you're right about the free press and now they're allegedly scrubbing email too. One man I'm thinking about is a white man working in the mining industry who changes his emails regularly.

Why doesn't Bush speak out against this?

He did speak out about Mugabe last June when he visited Africa, specifically, he gave Prime Minister Mbeki of South Africa one year to produce results.

What will be next, after this soft ultimatum, is anyone's guess.

Zimbabwe must be de-ZANU-fied.

There's more from whence Mugabe came.

The entire doltish Black Elite in that country needs a comeuppance.

"Rhodesia wasn't a paradise, but if you were a laborer or other such househelp that wasn't educated and not going anywhere you didn't particularly mind not voting."

Maybe so, but voting or not voting should be a personal choice and not that of the government.

"And yes you're right about the free press and now they're allegedly scrubbing email too. One man I'm thinking about is a white man working in the mining industry who changes his emails regularly."

This is the first I heard of email scrubbing, but I don't doubt it one bit. Censorship is getting worse and worse there, soon there won't be much more printed material to left uncensored. Then they'll really clamp down on the people.

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