Come and sit with me under the Msasa tree, where the new leaves are soft and green, and listen to my strange story, where nothing is as it seems and where a gift is not a gift. Sometimes eyebrows go up, oftentimes lips are sealed, and always we have to read between the lines. This is one of those stories.
A couple of months ago, Zimbabwe's Lands and Agriculture Minister, Anxious Masuka, announced that we'd had a bumper harvest, producing 2.9 million tonnes of maize - well above our national requirement of 2.2 million tonnes. The government then introduced a ban on importing grain.
But somewhere along the line, something wasn't right, because a couple of weeks ago Blue Ribbon Foods, Zimbabwe's second-largest milling company, halted operations at its Bulawayo plant, because there was an acute shortage of grain on the local market.
"We have seven silos outside that hold about 180 tonnes each. They have all been empty since April," they said. Blue Ribbon Foods normally runs two shifts a day, producing up to 60 tonnes of maize meal a day. "Our workers are hanging in the balance," they said, while reports came in that several other milling companies had already downsized or laid off workers due to shortages of maize.
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"We used to get maize locally, easily," said David Moyo, chairman of the Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe's Southern Region. "Some days, all we get is two or three 50kg bags. It can take a whole week just to fill a one tonne truck. Right now, these regulations [the import ban] are making a bad situation worse.
"We don't want to shut down permanently. We want to feed the nation," Moyo said.
Meanwhile, back in the dusty village, tempers were frayed. Government officials had arrived and called a meeting.
Each of the 200 homesteads in the village had to surrender 10kg of maize in what was called a 'mandatory contribution.'
Announced at a Zanu-PF meeting in Masvingo in late June 2025, this was a new directive whereby beneficiaries of agricultural inputs under the Presidential Inputs Scheme now have to pay back their gift in the form of 10kg of grain, which will go into the country's Strategic Grain Reserve they were told. Villagers did not know about this new directive, they had thought that a gift was a gift.
But the Ministry of Lands' Permanent Secretary said it was a "mandatory contribution" and "a gesture of appreciation to President Emmerson Mnangagwa."
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The government took 2 tonnes of maize from that one village that day. No one knew if their 'mandatory contribution' had anything to do with what was now a very obvious shortage of maize available for millers to keep producing maize meal.
Next came reports from Jacques Pienaar of Commodity Insight Africa, who said the government's reluctance to lift the ban on imports was "political" and could trigger a major food crisis if it wasn't urgently reversed. He estimated Zimbabwe needed to import an extra 1.1 million tonnes of maize.
"If the government does not move with speed to reopen the borders for grain imports, the country will be in the throes of a shortage within weeks," Pienaar said.
A few days ago, the government reversed their ban on grain imports, but added a levy to imports at the same time, meaning that prices will inevitably have to go up for ordinary consumers.
The last words in this strange story are from Zimbabwean economist Tinashe Murapata who said: "Zimbabwe's maize production was around one million metric tonnes, and not the 2.3 million metric tonnes the 2025 budget envisaged."
He added: "The rather big question is how did we get the numbers so flagrantly wrong?"
Gifts that aren't gifts, mandatory contributions, and numbers that are flagrantly wrong are the words. The sights are those empty silos, empty grain depots, and empty pallets that we can all see every day as we go past Zimbabwe's grain storage facilities.
© Cathy Buckle
