"Are we cursed, the people living here? Not a drop has fallen, not one
drop," said Amos Zwane, a smallholder farmer near Lavumisa in the
Shiselweni region in the south. The area is nearing its second decade
of poor rainfall.
But the government insists it can provide for its people. "We are able
to bring water anywhere in Swaziland by using irrigation," said Janice
Motsa, a consultant with the Swaziland Water Services Corporation.
She notes an initiative to dam the Usuthu River to provide irrigation
water to areas like Lavumisa, mainly populated by subsistence farmers
making an impoverished existence from a hectare of maize and a few
cattle.
But such schemes, even if financing can be found in these times of
shrinking credit and hesitant donors, are years from completion, and
will not help those who will gather a much smaller harvest in March
2009.
"November is a time of great want", when the previous year’s harvests
have been depleted and the first fruits of spring are weeks away, wrote
anthropologist Hilda Kuper in her first documentation of Swazi life in
the 1930s.
"Animal cruelty"
This is most true in the crescent of drought that stretches from the
Lomahasha border post with Mozambique in the north, through the Lubombo
region along the eastern boundary of the country to the Lavumisa border
post with South Africa in the south.
Emaciated cattle tread dusty trails, while the corpses of those who did
not survive lie in the sun, representing huge losses to the owners,
whose only real assets are often their livestock. As dams dry up in the
early summer heat, cattle venture into the muddy remnants of reservoirs
that for decades had always had water all year round, and get stuck in
the deadly bog.
"This is like animal cruelty. If the farmers can’t feed and water their
cattle they should put them out of their misery," said Mary, a visitor
from town.
"Do you know it has been over a year since we have had rains that have
truly soaked the soil, so things other than weeds can grow?" said
Teetee Tsabedze, who looks after her two grandchildren in her compound
of twin mud-and-stick huts.
Tsabedze’s sons ploughed her field in October 2007, hoping that the
spring rains would be the start of the season, but no more fell and her
maize plants became withered sprouts in the parched cracked ground.
Better rainfall in other parts of the country reduced the record number
of Swazis dependant on some form of food assistance; a year ago nearly
a half million were in need.
Children from poor rural homesteads often have their only meal of the
day from school feeding schemes run by the World Food Programme (WFP),
which is assisting 177 of Swaziland’s 524 public primary schools, and
expects to reach about 200 in the near future. WFP officials point to
higher test scores from the better-nourished students.
The local press has reported a growing number of abandoned homesteads,
whose occupants have fled across the border to South Africa
A network of earthen dams built by government in recent years was once
seen as the inexpensive solution to the area’s water crisis, but a lack
of maintenance has ruined many of them, and cattle wander further
afield in search of water. Cattle rustling has become so widespread
that the newly reappointed Prime Minister, Sibusiso Dlamini, has called
for harsher penalties for cattle thieves.
Moving out
"Some residents of the crescent of drought have decided for themselves
that the area cannot sustain human occupation without government
investment in irrigation to revive cultivation, and boreholes to
provide household drinking water," Dlamini said.
The local press has reported a growing number of abandoned homesteads,
whose occupants have fled across the border to South Africa, which is
only a few kilometres away and guarded only by a barbed-wire fence.
What remains are roofless mud huts, the blackened grass that once
roofed them scattered across parched fields that would require "a solid
week of intense rainfall to yield any life", according to water
consultant Motsa.
International humanitarian relief organisations like World Vision,
which for many years has distributed food contributions brought by the
WFP from the US and other donor nations, has reported that the days of
tying the food requirements of the people to the probability of
rainfall have passed and might never return, as climate change has
fundamentally altered rainfall patterns in the area.
World Vision has urged the government to invest more in water delivery
infrastructure, so that failed crop plantings when there is too little
spring rain do not become a permanent food shortage, exhausting the
patience of already strained donor groups, and prompting more people to
leave the area. Otherwise, Lavumisa will see more ghost homesteads in
future.