The Zimbabwean government this week said that it would take control of the distribution of food aid, provoking suspicion that it will be channelled to supporters of President Robert Mugabe’s party, Zanu-PF, to help secure their votes in the forthcoming local elections.
Minister of Social Welfare July Moyo reversed the government’s previous policy of allowing the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and other international charities to give relief directly to the millions of Zimbabweans who are going hungry.
In a directive to the UN and the charities, he said that rural government officials and village heads would decide who should get food aid.
About 3,5-million people are currently receiving aid, and the government expects the number to rise to 5,5-million by December.
Some people are reported to be eating maize meal raw because they are too weak to carry it back home to cook.
Last year more than seven million of the 13-million population depended on food relief. It was well documented that the government restricted the distribution of its supplies to Zanu-PF supporters.
Videos showed members of Mugabe’s youth militia chasing opposition supporters from the food queues.
The WFP, which directed all the food coming in from other countries, found that the government was also interfering in the distribution of donated food.
At one point it halted deliveries to one district when Zanu-PF officials seized food and handed it to supporters.
This year the government has no stocks and is therefore seeking to control donated food.
It has flatly denied using food aid as a political weapon, but the first-hand accounts of manipulation and intimidation are so numerous that no international agency, or the Zimbabwean public, believes that the government’s distribution is even-handed.
Earlier this month the government admitted that it would need food relief to continue, asking for 450 000 tonnes of grain between September 2003 and June 2004. The fact that Zimbabwe, formerly called ”the bread basket of Southern Africa”, needs another year of aid is cited by many agricultural experts as proof that Mugabe’s land seizures have failed dismally and have left rural black Zimbabweans worse off.
In private, aid workers and diplomats reacted angrily to the government’s new rule, saying the restrictions would make them ”accomplices” in starving the opposition.
They all said that they were working frantically behind the scenes to persuade the government to drop the measure, and therefore did not want to attack it publicly.
A United States government spokesperson said: ”We are satisfied with how aid was distributed last year and we are seeking clarity with our concerned partners in the international community about what these changes will mean.”
The US was planning to donate 225 000 tonnes of grain, about half the government’s total request, according to diplomatic sources.
The director of a large aid agency said: ”These new restrictions are completely unacceptable to donating governments, and are in disregard of the UN mandate to ensure that all food aid is distributed fairly and in a non-partisan manner.
”I would be surprised if the UN could agree to such conditions.”
John Makumbe, chairperson of Transparency International Zimbabwe, a German organisation campaigning for accountable government, said the regulation was aimed at influencing the elections to rural and urban councils, due at the end of this month.
”The government is desperate to regain lost ground in those councils and will stoop to using food as a weapon against hungry families.
”But I do not believe the UN or the aid agencies will have any of it.”
He said the aggressive, antagonistic action might have damaged the delicate negotiations between Mugabe’s party and the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
”The MDC has gone to great lengths to show it is willing to compromise, but the government has done precious nothing,” he said.
”This new action has definitely injured the talks, perhaps fatally.” —Â