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No food, no clothes and no shelter
Marko Phiri
June 21, 2005

The past five weeks have added a new dimension to the hardships the people in Zimbabwe have come to know and grudgingly accept. While the majority of the people have had to deal with expensive and scarce food commodities, with the ruling elite virtually enjoying the best of everything, another angle has been added to their ever-increasing woes.

Food, clothes and shelter have been known as man’s basic necessities since the beginning of history, but the failure to access all three is being painfully felt in Zimbabwe. And the absence of a roof is one in the past before people accepted life as perpetual lodgers that pointed to the harsh realities of breadwinners who failed to provide for their families. But then in Zimbabwe beginning especially May, the little families had put in to provide a roof as a refuge from the hostile elements became also a victim of a government many here believe long ago ceased to care about the welfare of the people.

Beginning May - which also harbingers the coming of winter South of the Sahara - homes were destroyed amid growing food shortages leaving many without shelter during the biting winter cold. Before they knew it, hundreds of thousand of people across the country where both hungry and homeless. And that was when the United Nations and other food security agencies had already warned that at least half the population here faced starvation and would need food aid. For aid agencies it therefore meant besides efforts to feed the hungry millions, they were also now supposed to provide shelter for them. And still the authorities said they were not going to allow aid agencies to set up temporary structures to shelter the people from the winter cold. These makeshift structures where also going to be bulldozed as illegal buildings had been in the operation. But is known worldwide when populations are displaced be it by natural disasters or civil war, tents and other temporary structures are set for the affected people while plans are being made to resettle them properly. Zimbabwe therefore appears to offer a case not heard before in the world thus raising a lot of theories about the motives behind the forced evictions and demolitions.

The year 2005 will go down the history of Zimbabwe as one that tested the government’s commitment to providing better life for the people it says elected it into power. But then this has been asked already during the course of the country’s 25 years of independence, and the questions no doubt became even louder when the government unleashed former freedom fighters onto white farmland which saw the beginning of shortages from food to foreign currency. In the natural order of things where food, clothes and shelter compete for their presence in a people’s existence, many agree that they would rather sleep on empty stomachs than have full bellies but with nowhere to lay their heads for the night. They will still prefer having a roof than being naked, but for hundreds of thousands – others say millions – who have been denied both food and shelter by a government that seems to have abandoned the basic human rights tenets they, they still ask why their have been turned into creatures not very different from wild animals roaming the wild.

The past five weeks have seen people being turned into vagrants – not even the volitionally roaming gypsies - overnight with nowhere to go even after they had been allowed to erect those same bulldozed structures by the government. But then it has been known that in politics there are no permanent friends, so these folks who had taken part in the violent seizures of land from white commercial farmers but now saw the structures they had put up to celebrate the reclaiming of their heritage giving in to the vicious blows of the demolition teams should have seen it coming.

Priests across the country tell sad stories about families who approach them for assistance, but with their efforts being hampered by threats from the police that whatever initiative the priests set up would also be demolished as "illegal structures" have been since mid-May, there is very little if anything they can do. In Bulawayo a priest told me he wanted to set up a response to the crisis that has left hundreds of thousands in the city homeless and hungry but was not sure how to go about it. He feared police interference. So while a humanitarian crisis unfolds authorities are still limiting relief efforts and warn that it is the government’s duty to make alternative arrangements for the affected families.

But it has been known over the years that the government here has no capacity to deal with relief efforts and has been aided in those endeavours by nongovernmental organisations. Widows, orphans and young children have been left out in the open by the operation, and it is anybody’s guess how they will end the year 2005. The irony of the increased hardship for the people here is that their homelessness came only a few weeks after the March 31 election won by the ruling Zanu PF based on electoral promises the party was going to better the lives of the people. While governments have as their obligation the betterment of people’s lives, what is happening in Zimbabwe raises many questions about the role of an elected government if its mandate does not extend to social and economic justice. But then, many long ago gave up on expecting the Zanu PF regime to champion people-friendly policies. Muted voices in the streets talk about a possible uprising, and this is even more tragic when such is uttered by old women who by those silent pronouncements imply they are ready to take on the batons and teargas of the security forces. That is how bad a turn this government has made. It is ready to suppress dissent not from hot-blooded youths, but the very women who broke their backs carrying them.

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