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Government blocking NGOs from feeding the hungry
Tererai Karimakwenda, SW Radio Africa
October 18, 2005

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news181005/ngofeeding181005.htm

The government has been limiting the activities of NGO’s, including their feeding programmes in remote areas gripped by starvation. What is surprising is that many NGOs are going along with it, leaving people to starve just to keep the peace with government officials.

A classic case is that of Save The Children. We found out that for over three years, the people of one particularly poor region had been receiving a life-saving monthly food handout from Save the Children UK. Everyone over the age of 55 relied on a generous allocation of mealie-meal, cooking oil and beans.

But ever since the introduction of the ill-fated Non-Governmental Organizations Bill in 2004, the Mugabe regime banned humanitarian organizations like Save the Children from continuing with their general feeding programmes. Save the Children UK was allowed to continue with developmental work only, such as digging wells to provide drinking water. But they were ordered to discontinue the feeding.

Local ZANU PF officials accused the NGOs of engaging in a subversive political programme in support of the MDC. Our elderly sources in this one area said this was absolute nonsense. They confirmed that NGO officials had not been talking politics to them at all. It is a known fact that Zanu PF want to use food to buy votes and many observers feel the regime is involved in a slow form of genocide, by starvation.

Audrey Gaughran of Amnesty International said all people have a right to food and in the case where a government itself is unable to feed them, it is obliged to use all the means at its disposal and allow the international community to step in and help. As for the government’s paranoia, Gaughran said there is no evidence that any credible NGO in Zimbabwe has used food as a political weapon. She said on the other hand there is plenty of evidence that the Zimbabwe government and the Grain Marketing Board have politicised the distribution of food.

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