Financial Gazette (Harare)
18 November 2004
opinion
Harare — So, the saga of Zimbabwe's phantom bumper crop harvest continues. The latest twist, according to press reports over the past week, is that the parliamentary portfolio committee on lands and agriculture has disputed government claims that Zimbabwe would realise a harvest of 2.4 million tonnes of maize.
This would make the nation self-sufficient in terms of food until next year's harvest.
Indeed, on the basis of these projections, the government has publicly rebuffed would-be donors, telling them they should take their food aid elsewhere because Zimbabwe did not need their assistance.
However, the portfolio committee has established that things are not as rosy as the-powers-that-be have indignantly sought to suggest. The committee has, in fact, painted a completely different and, I dare say, disastrous picture.
It has pointed out that when everything is added up, including "covert" food imports, Zimbabwe will only have 574 000 tonnes of maize. This represents a critical deficit, according to the committee, which means there would be enough food to meet national needs for only three-and-a-half months.
To arrive at this conclusion the committee, among other things, conducted a sample survey in five provinces. This showed that what farmers would deliver to the Grain Marketing Board would be 2.3 percent of what the government was projecting.
Like other bodies that have clashed with the government over its grossly inflated figures, the committee questioned some of the methods used to make the projections.
These included using an average yield of 1.5 tonnes per hectare to arrive at an overall figure without taking into account the different climatic profiles of the country's five ecological regions which have an impact on yields.
Predictably, the government has dismissed the committee's findings as inaccurate and insisted that farmers, who are already pre-occupied with preparations for the imminent new planting season, are yet to deliver the bulk of their produce to the GMB.
A real cock-and-bull story if ever there was one.
The government's insistence on its figures being correct in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary suggests that food abundance is one more"reality" being imposed on Zimbabweans by government decree rather than on the basis of observable and verifiable facts.
The bumper crop yields the government has touted over the last few years are, of course, designed to demonstrate that the land reform programme has been a huge success. The government has gone to ridiculous lengths at incredible expense to maintain that illusion.
These have included unrelenting propaganda and the incredible resort to covertly importing grain in a bid to supplement vastly reduced local output.
It is clear that far from focusing on national needs and interests, the government's single most important goal is now to prove it is always right regardless of whether what it says is logical or not.
And the less the government's claims and pronouncements jibe with the situation on the ground and the evidence of the people's own eyes and experiences, the more aggressively they are propagandised and presented as the only truth. Those who see things as they really are have been called all sorts of names and labelled prophets of doom.
The powers-that-be prefer to offer spin that tallies with their sense of infallibility and invincibility even when it would be easier, not to mention cheaper, to tell the people the truth.
The trouble is that there are now so many red herrings floating around that it is a challenge even for the spin doctors to untangle the maze of unlikely tales they have spun so far.
The question is, where will it all end?
Surely, the government apologists know that they cannot fool all the people all the time. For a start, they are in grave danger of running out of untruths to bandy about, having exhausted all possible angles without winning a single person with an iota of intelligence over. What is tragic is that billions of dollars are being channelled into this unnecessary propaganda war. These national resources should instead be used to solve some of the self-inflicted problems Zimbabwe is facing courtesy of official expediency and intransigence.
A bumper harvest should, for example, be a self-evident fact, not a "virtual reality" existing only on television and in the fertile imaginations of propagandists.
When will the government realise that what weary and cash-strapped Zimbabweans need is food in their bellies. They are not impressed with the childish obsession to score points at their expense.
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