Mugabe's genocide on the cheap

Christina Lamb, Times:

GRANDMOTHER Ndlolo Dube sits on the dusty ground outside her mud-and-pole hut and looks out on a land that has never seemed so dry and unforgiving. The field that was supposed to feed her and her four orphaned grandchildren is littered with dead broken maize stalks.

“No rain,” she says, as she shows the half-full 50kg bag of maize that is all the family has harvested this year. It is the third year running that the harvest has failed, but this time is by far the worst. “It’s just enough to last two or three weeks, then I don’t know what we’ll do.”

At every hut, every village, it is the same story. Plumtree and Figtree sound as if they should be verdant places but severe drought has left the area, like much of southern Zimbabwe, with 95% crop failure. People sit with dazed expressions, fuddled with hunger. The United Nations World Food Programme estimates that 4m people will need food aid.

Shortages are no longer new in this country where President Robert Mugabe’s violent land seizures have seen the destruction of commercial farms that provided work for millions and food for the whole region. But this year they come amid inflation estimated to have reached 10,000-15,000%.

By the end of June prices were doubling daily. Last week the government sent in police and militia youths to force shopkeepers to lower prices. Many responded by locking their doors and suspending business.

Dube has no idea how she and her family will survive for the rest of the year. “I have no cow, no goats, nothing,” she says.

When I ask how often they eat, she replies: “Morning and evening.” Surprised, I ask what they ate that morning. “Nothing,” she says. And the previous evening? “Nothing.” It turns out that they often go for days without eating.

Sometimes the children get so hungry they chew green fruits from a tree known as African chewing gum, even though they know they will end up with stomach ache.

Two of Dube’s grandchildren — 10-year-old twins Kwenza Kele and Flatter — take me with them to collect water. They are smaller than my seven-year-old back home. The water-hole has a fence of twisted logs to prevent cows defecating but it is green and putrid water, topped with scum.

This year’s maize harvest is expected to be 500,000 tonnes, compared with the 1.4m tonnes needed. But Pius Ncube, the Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, believes the shortages will help Mugabe in the run-up to elections next March.

“The government is very happy about the food situation as they know they can use food to make people vote for them again,” he says. “They use every advantage.”

At the next village, Grandmother Dedi Ndlovu is complaining about pain in her legs. She harvested just 20kg of maize for her nine grandchildren, eight of whom are orphans. “Not even half a bag,” she says. “In the past we would get six or seven bags. Sometimes I think, what if I get sick and die? What will happen to these children?”

It is a while before I notice something even more eerie than the impending famine. These are villages of grandparents and grandchildren. There is nobody of my age. In a whole day we meet only one person between the ages of 20 and 50.

“All the young people have either died or gone,” explains Pastor Raymond, the local clergyman.

Many have fallen victim to the lethal combination of Aids and hunger. Others are part of an exodus of 4m Zimbabweans forced for economic and political reasons to leave their country.

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People are cheering the despot in his international meetings, in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, but not in the communities struggling for survival. There Mugabe has already won. there are no military aged men to fight him and those who remain will trade their votes for some food to survive a few more days.

Robert Mugabe has to be one of the most corrupt despots who has ever ruled, yet there is no one with power willing to challenge him with the use of force which is the only way to save the people who remain alive. For all those anti war liberals who say war is not the answer, it is clear that all Mugabe is offering is the peace of the dead and the dying. Why don't they go to Zimbabwe to demonstrate?

The BBC reports that two people were killed in a stampede to get sugar in Zimbabwe's second city Bulawayo.