Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has admitted for the first time that famine exists in his country.
”There is hunger in the country and a shortage of food,” he was quoted as saying in the state-controlled weekly Sunday Mail.
He was responding at a rally on the weekend in the arid district of Plumtree in western Zimbabwe to appeals from regional governor Angeline Masuku and local ruling party functionaries who, according to the newspaper, had ”pleaded” with Mugabe ”to ensure the speedy distribution of food in the province as people were running out of food”.
Observers say the admission is unprecedented as Mugabe has previously dismissed reports of famine as ”Western propaganda”.
In 2006, when questioned in an interview about a critical shortage of maize, the national staple, he said: ”We have heaps of potatoes.”
On Sunday, Mugabe admitted that there were food shortages, not only in the chronically dry western provinces of Matabeleland, but also in areas in eastern Zimbabwe.
International aid agencies have been feeding about four million people.
Following a summer season of record heavy rains that washed out crops, followed by almost a month of no rain in the critical growing season for maize, experts fear shortages may be worse than ever before.
Zimbabwe had a reputation as ”the breadbasket of Africa”, with regular surplus harvests of grain that were drawn on to supply aid agencies feeding famine stricken countries elsewhere in Africa.
However, the country’s agricultural industry began to collapse in 2000 after Mugabe launched a campaign to drive the community of about 4 500 white farmers from their land and replaced them with ruling party functionaries.
Output by the country’s agricultural industry has fallen since then by 70%.
Mugabe said Sunday a total of 530 000 tonnes of maize had been ordered from neighbouring countries, but due to ”logistical problems”, only 30 000 tonnes had been delivered.
Zimbabwean government officials had been despatched to Lusaka, Zambia, to help load on to rail wagons, because, he said, Zambian workers were ”taking their time” on the job ”as they did not understand the severity of the problem in Zimbabwe”.
He also promised that trains carrying maize on the southern railway route from Zambia would be authorised as an emergency measure to stop at sidings on the way to offload food for local communities. Mugabe’s government declared this summer’s cropping season to be ”the mother of all agricultural seasons”, and claimed it had ample supplies of seed, fertilisers and fuel for farmers.
However, a report issued jointly by the government and UN agencies last week admitted that there had been severe shortages of all three commodities and that only 14% of the targeted growing area had been planted.
‘He left the pieces on the floor’
Meanwhile, a Zimbabwean was jailed for a month for destroying an election campaign poster with a picture of Mugabe, the state-run Herald newspaper reported on Monday.
Tichaona Sande, from the shantytown of Epworth east of the capital, Harare, pleaded guilty on Friday to breaching a section of the electoral law, which prohibits destroying or defacing campaign materials.
Sande, whose age was not given, was with several other men in a local shop when an argument broke out, the Herald reported.
”Unexpectedly, Sande reached for a Zanu-PF poster with the face of President Mugabe and pulled it before tearing it to pieces,” the newspaper said.
”He left the pieces on the floor and went home.”
He was arrested after witnesses reported him to the police.
Passing sentence, Harare magistrate Lazarus Murendo reportedly said Sande’s behaviour could incite political violence and that jailing him until after the country’s March 29 general elections would help maintain political stability. — Sapa-dpa, AFP