Reports of politicians and government officials distributing food aid on a partisan basis or by other unfair or corrupt means ought to be taken seriously and investigated rather than dismissed with undue anger as untrue.
The Standard Editor
Zimbabwe is facing severe food shortages and government, together with international humanitarian organisations and foreign governments, have all done a good thing to source food for the hungry citizens, most of whom are located in rural areas and other remote parts of the country where the drought has hit the hardest.
The issue of unfair distribution of drought relief food is not new in Zimbabwe, which is why President Robert Mugabe himself and all political and government leaders always speak about it whenever they address the issue of drought relief.
Politicians abuse relief food in their areas to influence political direction of the hungry villagers. They use the food to either lure voters to their parties or to punish those that refuse to support them. This is very true, very common and has been reported countless times. This ugly fact can therefore not be thrown out by anyone as “absolute falsehoods”.
Relief food is abused by unscrupulous government officials that are entrusted with food distribution. These people are known to steal the food or inputs and resell them for personal gain. Mugabe has many times castigated this practice which has become as common as corruption in this country.
Zimbabweans will remember reports of a whole cabinet minister who dumped truckloads of inputs into a river. He had stolen the fertilizer and seed from stocks earmarked for donation to poor villagers and he offloaded the hundreds of tonnes of the seed and fertilizer into a river because he had got wind the net was closing in on him.
The point here is that abuse and theft of food aid and or agricultural inputs happens all the time in Zimbabwe.
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The report by the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission that the relief food that is being distributed to hunger-stricken Zimbabweans is being abused by politicians can therefore not be dismissed as lies.
Do we have any other group of people that Mugabe commissioned to go out on a mission to find how the food distribution is going on? If there is no such monitoring system set up to establish this, how then would he outrightly and angrily dismiss a report compiled by people who were sent out there with a mission to monitor what is happening?
Mugabe has not been a very reliable source of information lately. He has on many occasions made statements, including serious corruption allegations against particular individuals, only to turn around and say he had been wrong. The $15 billion saga involving diamond revenue that he declared had been spirited away has been disputed by his own ministers who have given conflicting interpretations and explanations of what Mugabe may have meant.
Now we hear that the president — apparently driven by conspiracy theories that appear to inform most of his reactions to reported bad behaviour by his officials — has rubbished reports of abuse of food aid as lies. He now says the human rights commission whose chairperson he personally picked and whose membership was selected through fair public interviews, is a group of regime change agents seeking to bring instability to Zimbabwe.
Such kind of emotional and poor judgement is not expected from a president. And the language he uses in disputing the findings of the commission leaves a lot to be desired of the head of state. It is wrong for Mugabe to describe the commissioners as “stupid people and their stupid spokesman.” It is not right for the president to dismiss, without evidence, the commissioners’ their report as “completely false, absolutely false!”
To betray the baselessness of his rude remarks, Mugabe then says: “Our Labour minister [Prisca Mupfumira] will explain to us the processes and position [of the food distribution].” Why did he not wait to hear from the minister before accusing a respectable commission of taking bribes in order to make an adverse report meant to remove him from power? Can we now expect the minister to tell Mugabe that the report was in fact true and that it was his own paranoia that had no basis?
What Mugabe needs to do is to put in place measures to stop this partisan abuse of food aid because it is a fact that it is happening.
