Church in the World

Archbishop predicts Zimbabwe famine

Africa

SOME 200,000 Zimbabweans could starve to death within months due to destructive government policies, rampant inflation, drought and limited food aid, Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo has warned.

The Archbishop told a news conference in Johannesburg on 19 October that this figure was a personal estimate and based on his views of the effect of severe food shortages on a population ravaged by HIV/Aids and extreme poverty at a time of hyperinflation and near 80 per cent unemployment.

The news conference was organised by the Solidarity Peace Trust, an organisation set up by Southern African church leaders two years ago and chaired by Archbishop Ncube. It particularly highlighted the consequences of Operation Murambatsvina (Operation Drive Out Filth) which, since May, has left at least 700,000 Zimbabweans trapped in a spiral of poverty, hunger and displacement, after the poorest people in the country were driven from shanty towns around the urban centres and had their rudimentary homes destroyed. Secret film footage was shown of the hardships facing former shanty town dwellers and street traders evicted from their city homes without resources and dumped in rural areas ?where they are unknown and unwanted?. It demonstrated that hunger is turning to starvation, contradicting assurances by Robert Mugabe?s Zanu-PF Government that this is not the case. The Revd Ray Motsi, president of Zimbabwe?s National Pastors? Conference, said people who at first found refuge in churches were dislodged by armed police in the middle of the night and forced on to trucks that took them to rural areas. The clerics said the Government has refused its victims food aid and restricted the work of international organisations and Churches seeking to help.

The informal economy, which fed 40 per cent of the people, has been wrecked and between four and five million people are internally displaced. ?Eighty per cent of those displaced people who were sent to rural areas have not yet acquired any permanent settlement,? Fr Albert Chatido, a Bulawayo priest, told the news conference. He reported that of the people whose homes were destroyed in Bulawayo's Killarney squatter camp, 70 per cent said they had nowhere else to go. He added that demolitions were continuing in Killarney, after people rebuilt the shelters that had earlier been demolished. He said between 500 and 1,000 people were still living in the open in various parts of Bulawayo.

At the news conference Archbishop Ncube suggested that Mugabe should be forced to step down from power. ?Let the man get banished if you don't want Zimbabweans to die,? he said, adding that Zimbabweans could do little without international help.
Ellen Teague