Comment from ZWNEWS, 28 July

Nice guy. Shame on his party.

Joshua Malinga is, by all accounts, a nice guy. The Zanu PF politburo member and party deputy-secretary for the disabled and disadvantaged – himself disabled – is certainly no thug, unlike so many others in the party of which he is a middle-ranking official. He and his wife – also disabled - were stopped at London’s Gatwick airport as they tried to travel across the city to make a connecting flight at Heathrow, and were returned to Zimbabwe on the first available flight. Mr Malinga thus gained the dubious honour of becoming the first Zimbabwean official on the expanded EU list of sanctioned persons to be caught since the new, longer list was issued this week. The list covers a wide range of individuals, from the criminal to the merely incompetent, from the bad guys to the nice guys. Even president Mugabe has said so - indirectly. Mugabe would certainly not include himself in the same category as his finance minister, Simba Makoni, who he regards as little short of treasonous. Both Mugabe and Makoni are on the list. And there are many, such as provincial governor Peter Chanetsa – incomparable with Joshua Malinga - who are not covered by the EU measures. Unfortunately, it seems that in this case, nice guys come first.

Jonathan Moyo was his predictable sanctimonious (and inaccurate) self yesterday morning: "This is the clearest example that the Brits have gone bananas and are harassing disabled people who should be assisted. To detain someone you don’t want in your country, especially who is on a wheelchair, when all you can do is deny them entry or facilitate their exit is the height of madness." (Malinga and his wife were not detained, unless being booked into an airport hotel pending their return flight qualifies as detention.) As usual, Moyo’s outrage is a sham. Zanu PF is not noted for its assistance of the disabled – if they happen not to be truly loyal to the party. As a matter of unarguable fact, Zanu PF has swelled the ranks of the disabled and disadvantaged over the last two-and-a-half years, as party thugs have run amok across the country, beating and permanently maiming with impunity. It is a little perplexing for Mr Malinga to say that he did not know he was on the EU’s expanded list. The list has been widely publicised in Zimbabwe, and it is beyond doubt that Zanu PF itself knew precisely who is and who is not on the list. It is also a little puzzling for Mr Malinga to express surprise at the accusations of violence levelled against his party.

But be that all as it may, there is another issue more important than Mr Malinga’s interrupted travel plans. Mr Malinga – like all other Zimbabweans, able or disabled, advantaged or disadvantaged - can choose. He can choose whether to support Zanu PF or not, choose to lend credibility to the current Zimbabwe regime through his patent personal decency - or not. Coming from Matabeleland, and as a former mayor of Bulawayo, Mr Malinga is well aware of what happened in the mid-1980s, and since February 2000, in his home provinces – at the hands of Zanu PF. Joshua Malinga should know better. Many of his compatriots, in more disadvantaged circumstances than he, have made the choice. Take Mr Anderson Mupinda of Binga. 79 years old and blind, he has been denied food aid by Joshua Malinga's party because the Binga district voted overwhelmingly for the opposition in the presidential election. Mr Mapinda's views on the government and the president have not changed,  despite his having to survive on leaves.

Nice guy, Joshua Malinga. Shame on his party.

From The Sunday Telegraph (UK), 28 July

Stricken by hunger among the lush fields

Shorter than the dead wheat all around her, 18-month-old Alice sits in a field toying with the corpse of a tiny mouse. Tears spill silently from her large eyes. For this is not a game. Alice is hungry and her mother Brenda and aunt Winnie, who has an even younger baby strapped on her back, are hunting field mice. Scrabbling in the red earth, they pull out the tiny creatures which they will roast on a fire with salt, their only meal of the day. There are similar scenes all over southern Africa, where the worst drought for a decade has left millions facing starvation and prompted Britain's leading aid agencies to launch an emergency appeal last week. Yet there is something not quite right about this picture. For the field in Zimbabwe's Mazowe valley in which the starving women and their babies are mouse-hunting overlooks Mwenje dam, which is overflowing with water. There are two more small dams on the farm itself. On the properties all around, extensive sprinkler systems are watering lush green fields full of mangetout that will end up on the shelves of Sainsbury's. There are plantations of roses, too, and acres of ripening wheat.

Of the 14 million people on the brink of starvation in southern Africa, more than six million are in Zimbabwe, half the country's population. Yet travelling thousands of miles across the country from Matabeleland in the north and west to Mutare in the east, posing as tourists - the regime refuses to allow in British journalists - The Telegraph found the vegetation green, dams full and rivers flowing. There is no doubt, however, about the lack of food. Villager after villager took me into huts in which there was absolutely nothing left to eat and showed empty granaries. Four weeks without rain at the critical germination phase has led to the failure of their small crops. There will be no harvest again until next June. The inescapable truth of the famine in Zimbabwe is that it is man-made: and the man who is making it is President Robert Mugabe. The lush fields belong to those white farmers who are now cultivating their crops illegally, and the stricken farms are those that have been handed over to so-called war veterans or officials of the ruling Zanu PF party.

Already, the country has run out of maize, the staple food for most of the population. According to a director of Lobels, the country's biggest bakery, soon there will be no wheat left to produce the bread which people are buying instead. Cooking oil is in such short supply that it now sells at Z$900 (£10) a litre, a quarter of the average monthly wage. In Bulawayo, I saw queues for sugar, in which women with babies had waited from 4am until mid-afternoon in the baking sun - only for a government official to come and take away the lot. "Average rainfall for the last farming year was only down from 24in to 22in and we only had four weeks without rain," said David Coltart, the legal affairs spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.For Zimbabwe's commercial farmers, who grow 90 per cent of the country's food, those four weeks made no difference as there was plenty of earlier rainwater available for irrigation.

Unfortunately for most of the farmers, Mr Mugabe has used his mobs and laws to make it either impossible or illegal for them to work their land. As a result the amount of staple maize under cultivation has been slashed. This year's cereal harvest is estimated by the United Nations at 687,000 tonnes, less than a third of the annual needs of 2.3-2.5 million tonnes. Two years ago, output was 2.48 million tonnes - enough to feed the whole country and still have enough left over to export to its neighbours. "This is Mugabe's famine," said Marcus Hale, whose family farm used to produce more than one per cent of the country's wheat needs, but who was forced to leave last month after two years of violence, which culminated in the "war vets" digging a grave for him outside his front door. "This year we would have produced 3,000 tonnes of wheat, but we produced nothing because we weren't allowed to," he said. "It's total insanity that one would close down the very producers of food at the same time as begging for food aid," said Jenni Williams, from Justice for Agriculture, a breakaway group of farmers who intend to contest the seizures of their farms in court.

Yet in his opening-of-parliament address last week, Mr Mugabe said: "No one can fairly blame us for the situation of want, naturally caused." He accused Britain of "using the drought to try to undermine the country's sovereignty" and proclaimed the land-reform programme "an unparalleled success story". With 90 per cent of arable land in the hands of 4,500 white farmers, almost all agreed that land reform was necessary. But as the August 9 deadline for farmers to abandon their land draws near, many of the war veterans who occupied the farms are also being thrown off to make away for Mugabe supporters and cronies. More than 110 government ministers, senior military officers and their wives, mayors and police chiefs have now taken over farms. "This is not land reform - it's theft," said Liz Coulson, whose tomato farm in Matabeleland has been taken over by a police superintendent.

Among the many new farm owners around Harare is Mr Mugabe's brother-in-law, Reward Marufu, who took over Leopardville Farm, and Jocelyn Chiwenga, wife of the army chief, who seized Shepherd Hall Farm. When Hortico, the local wholesale company, refused to export her roses, she seized that too, although this has subsequently been returned. On most of the "liberated" farms, previously planted crops have gone untended and no new ones put in. Some of the occupiers have even asked the white owners to manage the farms for them for a share of the harvest. At Glenwood, the farm on which Brenda and Winnie were hunting mice, the owner had fled to Ireland. Field after field of paprika for export is dying. The original war veterans who occupied the farm were recently replaced by Elijah Gumbo, the owner of a dishwasher factory, and some police officers. Mr Gumbo's brother Paul, who was manning the gate, admitted that they had no idea how to run the farm. "This is not our environment," he said. "I used to work on a white-owned rose farm and get a monthly salary and that was better. Now I have no money." It is not only the farmers who are losing their homes. The law requires all farmworkers to leave, too. More than 76,000 have lost their homes and livelihoods since February and more than 500,000 will be homeless by August 9.