Together with the cooking oil, beans and high-protein meal for porridge also stored here, there is enough to feed hundreds of thousands of people. But Robert Mugabe had banned aid agencies – saying they were using food aid to campaign for the opposition. The ban meant that officials of the Red Cross had little choice but to ignore the evidence around them – the brown and withered fields, the beggars on the streets, and the hungry faces in townships less than 2kms from the warehouse, one of several the Red Cross maintains in Zimbabwe.
This is a critical period for these communities, said Peter Lundberg, the head of the International Red Cross delegation in Zimbabwe. They have already faced months without enough food and, for many families, the situation has deteriorated drastically in recent weeks.
The Red Cross swung into action last week, with 383 metric tons of food aid bound for vulnerable communities across the country, following the signing of the power-sharing deal.
Controlling the food supply has long been used as a political tactic by Mugabe’s party, according to observers and human rights activists, who say that his latest BACOSSI scheme rewards supporters with food hampers in the countryside and withholds them from opponents.
One recent morning at a primary school in Chipinge, students lined up with empty bowls in their hands. Awaiting them were steaming pots of an enriched maize and soya porridge, courtesy of the Red Cross. It was nearly 11 a.m., and for most of these children, it was their first meal of the day. They sat on brown grass, not far from dried cow dung left by cattle sharing the school’s field, and scooped food into their mouths in the traditional way, with two fingers. Through such targeted programs, the Red Cross still hopes to provide food to 550,000 Zimbabweans.
But unless the new government liberalises the distribution of food and allows aid agencies to do their work without hindrances, most aid agencies do not intend to restart the general feeding centres that once fed 10 times the current number.
The government wants to be the one giving out food, said John Makumbe, a political science professor at the University of Zimbabwe. You have your party card, you get your food. You don’t get your party card . . . you don’t get your food.