Beyond making these unsubstantiated claims, the Sunday Mail throws numbers into the air, intending to prove that Zimbabwe’s granaries were filled by peasants and not white commercial farmers. As far as maize production is concerned, that may be true but, as the saying goes, man shall not live by sadza alone. The country’s agriculture – ruined at the turn of the century by Mugabe’s chaotic land grabs – was admired the world over for its tobacco, wheat, horticulture, beef, dairy and cotton, all of which have died, thanks to Mugabe’s policy of taking productive land from competent farmers and placing it in the hands of cellphone farmers who live in the city and run their plots via remote control.
Statistics are not necessary when, all along the country’s highways, bushes grow where crops once flourished.
Temba Mliswa has branded Joseph Made a liar. Mliswa questioned the validity of Made’s prediction of a bumper harvest before stating that agricultural officers did not have the resources to carry out field assessments so it was likely that the agriculture ministry had pulled its estimates from thin air. Deputy Minister, Paddy Zhanda, admitted that his ministry had not done any actual inspection.
It is also very strange that Made based his prediction on the quantity of farming inputs distributed. These are after all the very same farmers who, after grabbing fully mechanised farms, proceeded to sell the tractors. During the hyperinflationary era, against all ancestral wisdom – “mbeu haidyiwe/ never eat the seed” – other farmers, faced with hunger, after receiving treated seed maize, rinsed off the green insecticidal coating and ground the seed into mealie-meal. It would shock no one to find that some of the 2013 seed never found its way into the ground.
In other parts of Zimbabwe, drought and floods have nullified government’s inputs distribution scheme. Whether we will have a bumper harvest or reap yet another harvest of thorns will be revealed in a month’s time. April beckons.
Till next week, my pen is capped. Jerà
Twitter: @JeraAfrika
Post published in: News
Most crops “drowned” during the excessive rains in the predominantly sandy soils characteristic of our traditional colonially pegged communal farming area setup. I do not see the bumper harvest anywhere.
The writer and commentators – all suffer from pessimistic approach born out of weird disillusionment. What is needed souls that wish Zimbabwe good luck. The settled farmers had had nothing from the colonial error – except were poor and beggars.
The writer and commentators – all suffer from pessimistic approach born out of weird disillusionment. What is needed souls that wish Zimbabwe good luck. The settled farmers had had nothing from the colonial error – except were poor and beggars.
Propaganda ala-bob is alive and well in the kingdom of fools