The Zimbabwe Situation

The Politics of Food

At last we have a composite picture of the basic food needs of the country – after months of wrangling it is now agreed by all concerned – except Joseph Made who lives in a different world, that in the next 12 months (July 2002 to June 2003) we will need 1,5 million tonnes of maize, 280 000 tonnes of wheat and 60 000 tonnes of crude vegetable oils. The total cost – about US$500 million. It is expected that the government will bring in about a third, the donors a third and the private sector the rest. In the past six months we have had up to 500 000 tonnes of new crop maize, 250 000 tonnes of last years wheat harvest and 270 000 tonnes of imports of one kind or another. It is now assumed that on the 1^st of July, that we will have zero stocks of maize, 50 000 tonnes of wheat and very little else. So from now on its imports that will feed the country.

Peak imports by the GMB and others has barely reached 60 000 tonnes a month in the first six month period of this food crisis – a mere third of what is needed to feed the country in the next 12 months. It is a real issue as to whether or not we have to capacity to move the food – especially given the very large quantities already moving over regional road and rail systems for Malawi and Zambia.

Slowly and reluctantly the government is waking up to the extent of the crisis. There are three possible explanations for this – they are reluctant to admit the extent of their failure in this critical area or they still believe their own propaganda about food supplies. The third possible reason is so Machiavellian that it’s difficult to believe but it may in fact be the real reason. This is that they want the country to be hungry – really hungry and totally dependent on supplies from state (read Zanu PF) sources. They also want to use food as a weapon to punish those who have voted against them in the past two years.

Lets look at the actual position from this perspective: -

They have set up complete monopolies over wheat and maize supplies to the extent that people with surplus food cannot move it to their relatives without food in any part of the country without running the risk of having it confiscated. They intend to maintain this monopoly, hoping to persuade the international community that this is the only way forward. I understand that Made is totally adamant on this issue.
They have sufficient foreign exchange available to them to handle the total import bill but are restricting imports to the minimum – 270 000 tonnes in the past six months and another 330 000 tonnes planned – 130 000 tonnes already purchased and 200 000 tonnes about to be contracted. This gives the GMB enough food to feed the Zanu PF faithful in rural areas and is being tightly controlled down to family level where it is being sold to the beneficiaries.
They have set up a system controlled at the top by the head of the Central Intelligence Organisation (Goche) and with military and CIO operatives working at every level of the GMB national system. In South Africa the head of the Airforce (Shiri of the genocide in Matebeleland in the mid 80’s) is in charge of procurement and logistics.
They are permitting the international community to feed those who cannot pay for food – children, the elderly and other target groups, but are tightly controlling all other distribution efforts – the refusal to allow the Catholics to operate in the Binga area because "their programme is the same as that of the State" is the prime example.
The immediate objective of this food programme is to restrict the gains by the MDC in local government elections in all rural district councils due in August. They are doing this by using food as a weapon – if you are known Zanu PF you are given preferential access to food. Zanu PF officials are used in all cases at the local level and are allowed to claim full credit for what food is made available. MDC counselors and Members of Parliament are banned from all food distribution activities and in many rural areas are now effectively banned from even visiting their constituencies.
Chiefs and Headmen – all of whom are on the government payroll and under close supervision, are required to facilitate this exercise and in many cases are even drawing up lists of families needing food aid for NGO’s and international food agencies – the lists being weighted in favor of Zanu PF members and sympathizers.

Key constituencies such as the farm workers and their families – 1,5 million people, who are now totally destitute and are not in any system such as those which operate in the Communal areas, are deliberately refused any assistance. Only the farmers themselves are helping this group plus one or two agencies, such as the Farm Family Trust, which is farmer funded, are targeting this huge population.

It must be remembered that Zanu PF used food as one of its weapons against Zapu in the 80’s. There were several periods in the 80’s when Zanu was trying to force Zapu into an alliance, where food was denied to Ndebele population groups for months on end. This coupled to state violence and genocidal attacks on Ndebele leadership at local level (20 000 people are thought to have died in this period) were ultimately successful when Joshua Nkomo signed the "unity accord" in 1988. This ended their years in opposition and opened the way to a one party state – long a Mugabe objective.

Despite all the pressure from the international community – including the UN, the Commonwealth, the major western nations plus South Africa and Nigeria, Zanu PF has not modified its behavior towards the commercial farm sector in any sense. It remains racist (only white farms are targeted), unconstitutional (private property rights are entrenched) and destructive in every sense. Why? Because their political future depends on it. It is the same for food – why starve your own people – because it makes sense politically from their point of view. Will they be deflected from this goal by words, of course not? They only understand power. Will the west use its power – no, because if they did they would be accused of being neo-colonialist? Will South Africa use its power – not if its behavior over the past three years is anything to go by? Where does that leave us? It leaves us alone in the kraal with this suicidal maniac regime. It leaves us to fight a monster, which is fully armed, with nothing but our heads, hearts and hands.

Mugabe is gambling that the west will buckle and allow food to come into Zimbabwe on humanitarian grounds that will be available for him to use in his campaign for survival. If donors withhold food in response to the conditions that the State here demands, then they will face the wrath of their own people who will see the pictures of starving children and ask why? In the end, Mugabe is only afraid of two things – that the Courts, faced with the overwhelming evidence of his electoral fraud will nullify his election and call for a re-run; and, he is afraid of his own people. Mass action will be the inevitable response of the people of this country if the international community does not use its power to force change in Zimbabwe. We are ready for this and are waiting to see if the AU and the leadership of Nepad will offer us a viable alternative path to the path of non-violent mass action. I am not optimistic. As for Mugabe and his cronies, they are right to be terrified. We will not let them get away with genocide this time and we will not facilitate their rape of the land by joining any government of "national unity".

Eddie Cross

Bulawayo, 1^st July 2002.

Mugabe’s ramshackle cavalry rides on many lies. One in particular seems to serve them well. It is the claim that every white farmer has been allowed to keep one farm and has been encouraged to carry on farming it. This claim is utterly untrue: hundreds of farmers have lost all that they have ever owned already, illegally evicted by Zanu PF supporters. Mugabe’s chaotic fast track resettlement process makes no distinction between one of the thousands of farms it would destroy, and another. Mugabe’s henchmen and supporters are equally unfettered when they set off into what was once commercial farmland in search of plunder. Yet Mugabe and his mouthpieces continue to spout the lie. And some African leaders choose to believe it.

Gaborone, November 2000: wounded by the (then) Zimbabwean Supreme Court’s contemptuous rejection of Mugabe’s fast track land resettlement policy, his security chief, Nicholas Goche, tells the SADC conference that Mugabe’s clear intention was to abide by the findings of the 1998 donor’s conference and acquire only those farms which meet certain criteria: an absent owner or one who owns other farms, under-development, proximity to a communal area. The same line has been trotted out at every SADC or AU conference since. Every visiting delegation, every interested head of state, the UN, the EU, all have been subjected to the same plausible, reasonable, argument. Mugabe was at it again last week, telling the visiting Human Rights forum that every farmer would be encouraged to farm one farm. Often delivered more in sorrow than in anger, these lines suggest a benign administration, resolved to repair a crippling colonial legacy but stymied by the reactionary resistance of a rump of feudal white land owners. African leaders, increasingly concerned as Mugabe slams down the cards of death, famine and war, are reassured by his trump card, ‘land’ - faded and unconvincing though it may be - and, yet again, sink back into inaction and ineffectiveness.

Some argue that Mugabe speaks from the heart, that he really believes that out there on the farms brave, resettled, indigenous farmers are defending rich fields of maize and sprouting wheat against the prowling Selous Scouts and Rhodesian Light Infantry. His henchmen, particularly the spectacularly incompetent Minister of Agriculture, Joseph Made, and the rest of the boys, keep the truth from him. He knows nothing of the wasteland that Zimbabwe has become, of the tens of thousands of farm workers now homeless and unemployed and the millions waiting to join them, of the most competent farmers in the world swept out of their homes by a tide of racism and violence. It is certainly true that Mugabe and his inner circle now inhabit a neo-Maoist cell, luxuriously appointed and utterly remote from the hungry Zimbabwean family on the Masvingo road. But can it really be true that Mugabe has no idea how his policies are being implemented? Let us hear from the man himself:

"Whatever the courts might say, the land is ours and we’ll take it." (November 2000); "The courts have no role to play in the resettlement process." (January 2001); "This is the land-based 3rd Chimurenga (liberation war)." (April 2001); "To those of you who support whites, we say ‘down with you’." (September 2001); "This is war, this is not a game. This is the 3rd Chimurenga. We must do without the white man in this country"; (December 2001); "To those farmers we allowed to continue farming…we have reconsidered. We have no mercy left. We are going to take all the farms. All of them." (February 2002). "White settlers have not repented…the British should keep their pink noses out of our business."(March 2002); "Land redistribution is under attack from radical and reactionary (sic)…racist commercial farmers" (June 2002). This is pretty conclusive. Neither Mugabe, nor his threadbare apologists, can claim that he does not know what is happening on the farms when his public utterances so enthusiastically direct his followers to throw the white farmers off their farms, and throw Zimbabwe into poverty as they do so. He wishes to see all the white farmers gone from Zimbabwe: that is his policy and it is implicit in every howling drunk outside a remote farmhouse, every confused and mis-directed despatch from the Ministry of Lands, every battered family leaving its farm village and shuffling off to poverty and hunger.

To Mugabe, truth is whatever he says it is, whatever is of use to him. In conversation with the leaders of Africa he is a nationalist freedom fighter who, nevertheless, is prepared to include the agricultural expertise of the whites in his land plan. In Zimbabwe he is a war leader who will destroy his country rather than yield power, brandishing the banners of race and land until he drops. It is bizarre that anyone should still believe a word that Mugabe says. His land reform programme is illegal, unconstitutional and incompetent. The parliamentary majority that passed the laws that license it, and the self-styled president who signed those laws, owe their position to stolen elections. Mugabe’s Supreme Court judges, who seconded those laws, have personally benefited from the programme. Constitutional practice, legality, due process, all lie shattered in its path. Human rights and natural justice have been ripped up in the interests of Zanu PF and plunder. The incoherence and the randomness of the land programme beggar belief. Already Zimbabwe is hungry. Soon it will starve. Mugabe’s land policy may be a lifeline for him, but for Zimbabwe it is a suicide note. When will the likes of Mbeki, Chissano, Obasanjo, and Kofi Annan look at the facts and, by so doing, see Resident Mugabe’s lies for what they are? For how much longer can he make fools of them?