Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe on Friday urged his supporters to vote for his party’s candidates in crunch upcoming parliamentary elections regardless of any of its shortcomings.
”You can’t afford not to vote Zanu-PF. It doesn’t matter that the party may have failed to fulfil certain promises, such as employment,” Mugabe told thousands of his supporters in the small town of Norton, close to his home village, 40km west of the capital.
”We know that at times life gets tough, but you can’t say because things are difficult you vote for the [opposition] MDC, forgetting that you were once oppressed by whites,” said Mugabe of the Movement for Democratic Change, which he calls a ”puppet of former colonial ruler Britain”.
The MDC is the only opposition party in the Southern African country, posing the most serious challenge to Mugabe’s rule since independence from Britain in 1980.
”You can’t disown your parents because they do not have enough to provide for you,” Mugabe told his supporters.
”Problems are there, yes, we have not had good rains and there will be hunger, but we are preparing for that,” said Mugabe, whose government admitted this week that the Southern African country is importing food to avert severe hunger due to poor rains.
Mugabe warned that he will kick out the few white farmers still operating in Zimbabwe if they ever ”despise” his government.
”We are not saying whites should not have any farms, but we are saying the whites should not despise our government,” he told cheering supporters at a stadium where he also handed out 60 state-of-the-art computers to schools in the town in what has become characteristic of all his campaign rallies.
Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, represented by his nephew Patrick Zhuwao, will try to wrestle the Norton seat from an opposition MDC lawmaker elected in 2000 polls.
Another nephew of Mugabe, Leo Mugabe, is also running for election in a separate constituency in the same Mashonaland West province.
The elections due in less than two weeks are closely watched to see if Mugabe will honour his promise to comply with regional electoral norms he penned last year.
The polls are also expected to consolidate his hold on power.
Zimbabwe’s last two polls in 2000 and 2002 were widely slammed as being tainted by violence, fraud and intimidation.
Empty food promises
Mugabe this week ran into a critical weakness in his campaign for parliamentary elections on March 31 when he was forced to admit his promises of a bumper harvest were empty, reports Jan Raath.
There were also increasing reports that Zanu-PF is withholding supplies of scarce grain to force MDC supporters to vote for Mugabe.
”The main problem here is one of drought and shortage of food,” the 81-year-old Mugabe told a rally on Thursday in the populous district of Gutu in Masvingo province, south of Harare.
In front of him, among the crowd of 7 000, there were loud mutters of ”nzara, nzara, [hunger, hunger]”, despite the presence of scores of secret police agents and heavily armed soldiers, said journalists allowed to cover the rally.
Earlier, Josaya Hungwe, governor of Masvingo, told Mugabe there had been ”no food in the province for a month”.
”I promise you, government will not let anyone starve,” Mugabe said.
”We are going to work out a hunger-alleviation programme for you,” he promised, and said the government will be importing food, ”if necessary”.
Humiliation
Observers said it was a humiliation for Mugabe who in May last year declared the country was reaping a record harvest of 2,8-million tonnes of grain and that there would be no imports of food. He also ordered the World Food Programme to wind up its food-distribution operation.
”Why foist food on us?” he demanded. ”We don’t want to be choked.”
Agricultural monitoring agencies, farm unions and even Zimbabwe’s own Parliament six months ago dismissed the government’s claim of a ”bumper harvest”, and forecast output of about 700 000 tonnes of maize, the national staple. National consumption is about 1,3-million tonnes.
Human rights organisations say that since 2002, the government has established a deliberate policy of taking total control of grain supplies, restricting movement of supplies and raiding farms and seizing their stocks.
With famine-relief agencies barred from providing food, the state grain monopoly, the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), has become virtually the sole distributor of maize in rural areas where most Zimbabweans live, selling at depots to the rural poor.
It has become an established practice to sell grain to people only if they can produce a Zanu-PF membership card, human rights agencies say. Handing out bags of maize at polling stations to ruling-party supporters is also common, they say.
”People are starving in at least four of the country’s 10 provinces,” said Renson Gasela, the MDC’s shadow agriculture minister. ”We know the regime successfully stopped all food aid, so that they are the only ones with food during the elections.”
Zimbabwe was known as ”the breadbasket of Africa”, supplying African nations with its surplus production, until 2000, when Mugabe launched the lawless seizure of white-owned farms, precipitating the collapse of the agricultural industry.
According to official statistics, Zimbabwe now imports more food than it produces.
Food for Zanu-PF
Pishai Muchawaya, the MDC spokesperson in the eastern Manicaland province, said on Thursday that ruling-party youths have been deployed at GMB depots all over the province ”to vet people coming to buy food”.
”A Zanu-PF card has been declared the first requirement to be considered for buying food,” he said.
The privately owned Zimbabwe Independent reported on Friday that in the eastern town of Chipinge the local ruling-party candidate, Enock Porusengezi, was issuing badges to people who attended his rallies, and had ordered the local GMB depot to sell food only to people who could produce his badges.
In the nearby Mwenezi district, Zanu-PF candidate Isaiah Shumba has stopped the GMB from selling directly to the public, and ordered that sales be controlled by ruling-party officials.
In the constituency of Makokoba in the western city of Bulawayo, journalists overheard ruling-party candidate Sihle Thebe telling residents in front of Vice-President Joyce Mujuru that they will be denied maize if they vote for the MDC.
Earlier this week, the National Constitutional Association, a lobby group pressing for constitutional change, said a study it carried out has unearthed widespread use of food as a political weapon. — Sapa-DPA, Sapa-AFP