“Hard Times” Matabeleland: urban deindustrialization – and rural hunger

A pregnant woman stands in her empty kitchen, rural Gwanda, October 2011. “No food, no work, no money. If only I could get cattle to help me plough.”

SPT Report

Nationally, Zimbabwe is more food secure at the end of 2011 than it has been for several years. However, parts of Zimbabwe suffered serious crop failure earlier this year and a million people are still predicted to need supplementary feeding. In Gwanda, Matabeleland South, the authors found that almost half of households indicated a day without food in the recent past.[1]  Only 17% of families reported eating three meals a day, meaning that 83% of households were, weeks before the onset of the official “hungry season in October”, already making food compromises daily. Grazing is critical, and people are traveling further to find water. This has been one of the hottest Octobers on record. Several families reported that baboons were killing and eating young goats and chickens, as the hunger now affects all living creatures in this area. Several families had no livestock left at all, not even one chicken.

Of concern by the end of October, is that supplementary feeding has not yet started, nor has the distribution of seed, yet the first rains have arrived. If people are to avoid yet another season of crop failure, there is an urgent need for free agricultural inputs to roll out now. Furthermore, many families are in desperate need of food now.

Deindustrialization in Bulawayo

This hunger – already so extreme ahead of the recognized “peak hunger season” that officially lasts from October to February – is taking place at a time when Bulawayo, traditionally the source of employment and resources for Matabeleland, has seen a cataclysmic loss of jobs in industry in the last two years. This means that part of the greater support system for rural Matabeleland is highly compromised. The report traces...Read more

The Hard Road to Reform

Zimbabwe lawyers fail to gain access to their clients, accused of treason: Harare High Court, February 2011.

Since the signing and initiation of the Global Political Agreement in Zimbabwe in September 2008 and February 2009 respectively, the politics of the country has been convulsed with a recurring set of problems even as it has allowed for a certain political and economic stabilization. The agreement, with its attendant Inclusive Government, was set up to establish the conditions for a free and fair election. However it was always clear that, in a more determinate sense, it would provide the site for intense struggles over the state between the contending parties, with Zanu PF always in an advantageous position because of its control of the coercive arms of the state. It is thus not surprising that the Mugabe regime has used its control of the police, security and military sectors to contain the constrained promise of the GPA to open up democratic spaces. It is also clear that both MDCs have made strategic mistakes that have added to the already difficult challenges that confronted them at the outset of the process. Moreover the problems of the GPA have, on occasion, been compounded by the different roles of SADC and the West.

In recent months the Zimbabwean crisis has been somewhat overshadowed by the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the violence that has broken out over the contested election in the Ivory Coast. Both events, but particularly the developments in North Africa, have predictably forced comparisons with the Zimbabwe situation. This has often lead to over-optimistic hopes for an ‘Egypt moment’ in Zimbabwe, that are based less on a concrete analysis of the conditions in the country, than a desperate yearning that Zimbabwe’s authoritarian state face such a reckoning. The complex politics of the GPA in the context of the particularities of Zimbabwe’s history make any simple comparisons with North Africa difficult to sustain. This report thus sets out...Read more