In the dry lands of Buhera and the low-slung valleys of Matabeleland, the earth remembers how the maize stalks curled and browned before the cobs could form. It remembers the dust storms that stripped the topsoil away, and the cattle that dropped dead beside empty boreholes.
That disaster was supposed to be the exception. Now it looks like a rehearsal.
On 1 September, the South African Weather Service warned that a powerful El Niño is developing and could become the strongest event “in living memory,” with sea surface temperature anomalies already crossing the threshold for a very strong event.
Days earlier, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center put the probability of a very strong El Niño at over 90 percent for the coming season, warning it could surpass every event recorded since 1950.
SADC’s regional climate forum, meeting in Namibia in late August, forecast below-normal rainfall across the bulk of the region from October through December, with above-average temperatures compounding the dryness.
The World Food Programme has already flagged Southern Africa as one of the most vulnerable regions on the continent, warning that acute food insecurity here could climb by nearly 75 percent.
To live through a climate emergency once is a crisis. To watch the same instruments point toward a worse one, thirty-six months later, is something else.
It is a slow eroding of the spirit — the transformation of the natural world from a dependable partner into an adversary that keeps returning.
What makes this round more frightening than the last is not only the weather. It is that the traditional buffer against it has thinned.
Columnist Tendai Mbofana has documented that WFP funding has collapsed by roughly 40 percent from its peak globally, forcing the agency into emergency triage consisting of reduced rations and millions dropped from its rolls. In previous emergencies, Zimbabweans facing a bad season could count on that pipeline filling gaps the state could not. That assumption no longer holds.
And the state’s own position is harder to read than it should be. In late August, the Grain Millers Association’s southern region chairperson wrote to the Ministry of Agriculture reporting that Blue Ribbon Foods and twenty-three other millers in Bulawayo had halted operations, unable to source local maize — some blaming Statutory Instrument 87 of 2025, which requires millers to pay a levy upfront before importing, on terms local millers say they cannot meet. The government rejected the claim within days, calling it a fabricated narrative pushed by import interests, and pointed to an audited harvest of 2.82 million tonnes for the 2025/26 season, the largest in the country’s recorded history, confirmed across two Post-Cabinet briefings, with an 851,000-tonne reserve built specifically ahead of the coming El Niño.
Both things can be true at once, and that is the more troubling possibility. A record harvest can sit in farmers’ granaries and government silos while mills two hundred kilometers away run dry, if the incentives to move grain from one to the other are broken.
Reporting from Mashonaland West has found farmers holding several times their household need in traditional storage, waiting out prices, while millers in Matabeleland fill trucks two bags at a time. If that is what a good year looks like — plenty of grain, badly distributed, argued over in public letters between an industry association and a ministry – the question is what a bad year does to a system already this brittle.
Even setting aside who is right about April’s silos, the deeper pattern Mbofana points to is 1992, the year Zimbabwe lost its claim to being the breadbasket of Africa. Officials then also dismissed early warnings, also insisted reserves were ample, and also exported surplus for foreign currency in the months before drought reduced the country to two days of grain in reserve. The mechanism that turns denial into catastrophe is not malice. It is the ordinary human tendency to keep believing the story that requires the least change, for as long as the story can survive contact with the evidence.
Climate fatigue does not show up in the figures that measure tonnage or reserves. It lives in the smallholder farmers who spent the past two winters patching broken fences and selling off assets, and who are now watching the same instruments point at the same sky. It shows up, too, in how ordinary people are already hedging against the state’s uncertainty rather than trusting it.
In online farming circles, men who watched tomato prices spike this year are now urging each other to buy and store maize now, at roughly $350 a tonne, before scarcity drives the price beyond reach, a private, informal insurance policy built because the public one feels unreliable. Darker jokes travel alongside that advice, about what females will be reduced to bartering if the harvest fails again. The jokes are not funny.
When rain fails twice in three years, the relationship between a community and its land changes category. Farming stops being a way of life and becomes a wager with worsening odds. Families start dividing their labor between the fields and illegal gold panning or cross-border trading, hedging against a harvest they no longer trust. Young people leave for the cities or for South Africa, and the rural population left behind is older and thinner on the ground for the next fight.
Governments speak of resilience as though it were a something that can be legislated or imported on request. But resilience is closer to an emotional reserve than a budget category. It requires a baseline of security to regenerate, and when shocks land close enough together, that reserve does not recover between hits. A society cannot simply bounce back when the floor keeps dropping. What it does instead, if the pattern is allowed to repeat, is quietly lower its expectations of the floor.
The coming El Niño is a test of whether a state under pressure will spend the next two months resolving a dispute over where its grain actually is, or spend them the way it did in 1992, arguing about the story instead of the supply chain. The clouds have not yet refused to gather.
There is still time to find out whether the 851,000 tonnes the government says it is holding can reach the mills that say they are empty. That is not a question with a partisan answer. It is a logistics question, and logistics questions have deadlines.
Kumbirai Thierry Nhamo || Social Justice Activist
Email: kumbiraithierryn@gmail.com
Portfolio: https://muckrack.com/kumbirai-