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Hungry future leaders
Marko Phiri
February 14, 2006

School children have become the hardest hit as Zimbabwe goes through acute mealie meal shortages. And these are people the president likes to remind everybody by refering to them as future leaders, especially during this time of the year when he is all excited about Febraury 21 the day gods presented him to this earth.

Mealie meal is the country's stable food, and school children are known here to take porridge each morning before they leave for school. Teachers report children failing to concentrate, and the situation has been compounded by the refusal by the government to allow non-governmental organisations to carry out feeding programmes.

The government ordered these stopped last year claiming no one was in dire need of supplementary feeding, and even if that was the case, the government itself was going to do it, officials said without bating an eyelid.

Despite reports by teachers of some children fainting in class due to hunger, the government still has not stepped in to help these young minds. Efforts by faith-based humanitarian agencies are also being frustrated with the government accusing them of working in cahoots with the opposition Movement for Democratc change, a charge the agencies deny.

At a school in Bulawayo, the head mistress told me in the past children would bring packed lunch, but today the lunch boxes are fast disappearing. Even teachers themselves complain of standing in front of the children with their own grumbling stomachs. Now, if teachers being adults are silently and grudgingly taking the hunger pangs, one has to wonder the extent to which the children are enduring hunger during their classes.

But these are the kinds of questions that get one into trouble with authorities here. They are better left unasked even though the government of Robert Mugabe still insists it is people-friendly. Despite previous warnings by food security monitoring agencies and other humanitarian bodies that Zimbabwe would need to import food or better yet make international appeal for food aid, these fell on deaf ears.

Today, it is the school children who are bearing the brunt of government's intrasigence. But other vulnerable groups here include the elderly with no other source of income.

Last year, the Bulawayo Archbishop Pius Ncube and the city's mayor Japhet Ndabeni Ncube reported elderly people dying of starvation but the government rubbished these claims as work of people interested only in tarnishing Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu PF.

These stories continue today as the country faces acute mealie meal shortages. Only less that four months ago, a 10kg bag of mealie meal was sold at $25,000 (about US25cents on the official market). Today the same pack is sold for anything between $450,000 (US$4.5) and $600,000 ($US6) on the thriving parallel market. But then these prices are cited at the time of writing, a week or fortnight later it could be double that a sign of the country's ridicouls hyperinflation.

Independent economists estimate that by year end, the country's inflation will hit the 1000 percent mark. But the obvious victims of all this have become the youngest in Zimbabwe's society who expect a warm meal, a roof, clothes: the finer things in life. Sadly, the truth is they have been denied all this by a government that has refused people of goodwill who can help these children permission to touch and change their lives.

"I am sure that the problems are not serious in the President's mansion. Perhaps the President would like to come and have dinner with us here?" these words were attributed to Chief Abadi Kokari of a village in Niger last year amid reports of mass starvations in the worst drought to hit the country. He was responding to President Mamadou Tandja's claims that all the talk about mass starvation in Niger was part of vicious "foreign propaganda."

The chief said it I didn't.

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