AFTER this week’s cabinet meeting, government announced it will soon launch a domestic and international appeal for food assistance.
Most of this year’s crop has been wiped out by brutal heat and low rainfall.
The appeal will follow President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s shocking admission in April that two million Zimbabweans are under threat of starvation.
This followed months of spirited denials by ministers that a catastrophe was looming.
It was refreshing to see Mnangagwa brushing dangerous propaganda aside to ask for US$2 billion for food imports.
If those that we entrust with public administration resort to deception to achieve selfish ends, millions of lives suffer.
We have seen this during the past 24 years, when vital economic data was massaged and manipulated, leading to wrong decisions in industries, which triggered de-industrialisation.
They are still playing games with our lives.
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Inflation is still being kneaded to calm the nerves of a shattered nation.
The most recent stance by authorities to ignore a very elaborate decimation of Zimbabwe’s new currency on the black market comes to mind.
It is a total mess.
I should point out that there is a real danger that has been hidden from Mnangagwa.
Today, we are complaining about steep cuts to food output due to drought and climate change.
But unless Mnangagwa wakes up now, it will not take us a decade to start fighting another evil — land shortages.
Across provinces, government and local authorities have opened swaths of prime land to corrupt and greedy land barons to act as they want.
Large pieces of land previously devoted for food production have been parcelled out and turned into affluent suburbs.
The land is being dished out to carefully selected individuals belonging to the ruling elite. And they are decimating our very source of food.
With each year that passes, Zimbabwe’s most productive farmlands are diminishing.
You see this across all provinces and you wonder what has happened to planning.
Corruption has torn through the public administration system, and those entrusted with all sorts of planning have turned into ruthless fortune hunters, aided by equally corrupt politicians.
It will soon come to haunt us.
We will cry for land to grow food, but it will not be there anymore.
If we reach this stage, they will flock to other countries in droves to buy food for their families.
The majority will suffer. They cannot deny this point. We witnessed this during the 2000 to 2008 economic crisis, when they destroyed the currency. Zimbabwe is not short of land for housing.
If Mnangagwa is serious about leaving a legacy, he must immediately take action against the rot in Zimbabwe’s land use planning.
