Gogo (local Ndebele language for granny) MaNgwenya says her village got word several weeks ago that some international relief agencies or, as she likes to call them, donors would soon be delivering food aid in the area.
But we haven’t seen anything yet, all we can do is just wait, the 60-year old lady said, her ashen and gaunt features no doubt a result of age as much as they are a product of many days surviving on very little food or nothing at all.
To visit Dongamuzi village, 150km north-east of Zimbabwe’s second largest city of Bulawayo, is to come face to face with a humanitarian disaster that is steadily unfolding in Zimbabwe’s hunger-stricken villages as the country’s political leaders continue to bicker over how to share power in a unity government.
Analysts see a government of national unity proposed under last month’s power-sharing agreement as the first step to ending decade-long food shortages and economic crisis in Zimbabwe.
Fresh efforts to end a deadlock between President Robert Mugabe and opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party leader Morgan Tsvangirai over control of key posts in the unity government flopped on Monday because the MDC leader could not travel to a regional summit in Swaziland to discuss the matter after the government refused him a passport.
A new summit has been scheduled for October 27 to try to save the power-sharing deal from collapse.
Back at Dongamuzi, the desperation visibly etched on the face of a neighbour as he/she begs for food from another, who is lucky to have a little to spare from supplies sent from abroad, is hard to miss.
Many young Zimbabweans have responded to their country’s crisis by fleeing abroad where conditions of living are better. The exiles have become a vital lifeline for family and relatives back home by regularly sending food packs and cash to those left behind.
But very few families here at Dongamuzi have had the luck to have a child living and working abroad.
With no food in the shops and nothing coming from the government’s bankrupt Grain Marketing Board (GMB) or from international relief agencies – as yet – the majority of villagers are simply surviving on wild fruits and whatever little else they can lay their hands on.
Umkhuna, a yellowish-brown fruit indigenous to the area has become a staple for many families.
Some villagers pound the fruit, squeeze out the juice and mix it with a bit of mealie-meal to make porridge. The sweet juice is a good substitute for sugar, which, like every other basic survival commodity, is in short supply in the country.
Other families just drink the sweet-tasting wild juice, which they say is refreshing and energising. Umkhuna can also be eaten as dried fruit. Villagers also survive on the marula and baobab fruits that are common in Dongamuzi.
But the widowed Gogo MaNgwenya – who is taking care of her four orphaned grandchildren whose parents succumbed to HIV/Aids – says death is knocking at the door for many in her village because even the Umkhuna is fast becoming scarce.
What has been saving people from starving to death is the fruit umkhuna, but the fruit is running out and we are staring death in the face, she said.
Moffat Moyo, a neighbour to Gogo MaNgwenya, said the children and the elderly who are no longer able to hunt for wild fruits are the worst affected by hunger. He said he had withdrawn his four children from primary school after one of them collapsed in class because of hunger.
It is useless for children to go to school as they collapse at school due to hunger. They have to walk 10km to school and that is energy sapping, Moyo said, adding that several of his neighbours had also stopped their children going to school.
International food agencies – that are only resuming operations in some parts of Zimbabwe after Mugabe’s government lifted a ban on the relief groups – say millions of Zimbabweans have already run out of food or are surviving on just one meal a day.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) about two weeks ago called on international donors to make available US$140 million in emergency food supplies in order to prevent Zimbabwe’s food shortages from deteriorating into a disaster.
The WFP expects hunger to worsen around January 2009 when an estimated 5.1 million Zimbabweans or about 45 percent of the country’s 12 million population will require food aid to avoid starvation.
But Njabuliso Mguni, the Member of Parliament for Lupane West constituency under which Dongamuzi village falls, believes things could get worse in his constituency well before January unless food aid was urgently made available.
Mguni, who belongs to the MDC party’s breakaway faction led by Arthur Mutambara, told ZimOnline: There is no food for the people. The GMB has nothing and people are exchanging their livestock for grain . . . very soon people will start succumbing to the hunger.
The parliamentarian urged the government to send out a new appeal for food aid to the international community.
However, mobilising food aid for Gogo MaNgwenya and her four orphaned grandchildren may not be exactly what is on the minds of Zimbabwe’s political leaders engaged in a high stakes battle for the spoils of the September 15 power-sharing deal.
ZimOnline
Post published in: News