As millions of Zimbabweans fight a daily battle against hunger, it has emerged that critically needed aid from South Africa is being misused to benefit Robert Mugabe's ZANU PF cronies, and millions of rands of aid has gone to waste.

The South African government last year pledged a R300 million aid package to be handed over when an internationally recognised unity government was in place in Zimbabwe. The package was made up of mostly seed, fertiliser and fuel from South African companies but has been sent despite warnings from Zimbabwe agriculturalists that most of it was too late for the planting season, and unless distributed carefully would be abused. Most of the seed arrived months too late to plant and is being eaten, while the wrong fertiliser was reportedly ordered for annual crops like maize to mature.

The package, which reportedly started being distributed before Christmas last year despite the lack of a unity government in Zimbabwe, has since been mysteriously transformed into a Southern African Development Community (SADC) package under the foundation of the Zimbabwe Development Assistance Framework. The framework, which is not yet fully operational, was established to channel agricultural inputs to Zimbabwean farmers, but its impartiality is now being questioned as its distributors are reportedly comprised of ZANU PF aligned organisations.

According to a report by the UK's Sunday Independent, the monitoring framework mostly comprises three church groups, closely aligned to ZANU PF, while a senior civil servant working in the state run support network for farmers, Agritex, has confirmed that South African aid was often only available to ZANU PF supporters in parts of the country. This is because it is distributed by traditional chiefs who are invariably loyal to ZANU PF. Meanwhile, the aid was arriving in country via the state run Grain Marketing Board's various depots, run by the ZANU PF loyal military, making it likely that opposition areas have been neglected on the basis on political support.

Abdenico Bhebe, MDC MP for Nkayi, explained on Monday that his constituency had received no SADC aid packages, and confirmed that SADC aid is being diverted "and being abused by the ruling party." He argued that he has 'lost hope' that any SADC aid would reach his constituency or others like it despite a unity government being formed between the MDC and ZANU PF, explaining that food aid would be 'politicised' regardless.

"The structures being abused by ZANU PF, like aid distribution, are through the District Administrators office which is in direct control of traditional leaders," Bhebe explained. "The traditional leaders in turn are politicised to ZANU PF and therefore the food is politicised too."

The news comes as the UN has said that more than seven million Zimbabweans are in critical need of food aid and the UN World Food Programme itself has been forced to cut aid rations to accommodate as many starving Zimbabweans as possible. There are growing reports of people across the country not receiving any food for several weeks.

It would appear that despite the unity deal, SADC food aid is still dependent on ZANU PF loyalty which has more weight than the threat of hunger and starvation