Many face starvation

 When man-made disasters correlate with natural phenomena, there can only be one outcome: total collapse of whatever is in question.

Such is the case for the Zimbabwean economy, where the man-made policies spearheaded by President Robert Mugabe are positively correlated to what nature has bestowed on the southern African country. This year there is going to be drought in Zimbabwe, and this at a time when government does not have a budget to import maize
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That President Mugabe’s policies have been largely disastrous cannot be disputed by anyone in the know. You only have to look at the potential the country has and compare it to what it has achieved, to see how far the current government has taken the country downhill.

Examples of economic decline abound. There is talk of the collapsed manufacturing sector now operating at a capacity utilisation level of about 36%. The unemployment rate is as high as 95%. At least nine banks have closed since 2011, two of them this year.

Talking about food, this year Zimbabweans are going to starve with government having already declared 15% of the food crops planted this season as complete write-off. Coming from government we know the figure is a conservative one; the actual outcome is much worse. What is however more scary is that on its own, government is unable to raise the cash needed to fund the grain deficit.

The government has therefore started issuing maize import licences to companies as part of efforts to avert food shortages, following a dry spell that has dampened prospects of a good harvest in many parts of the country. There is no question that erratic rains affected the harvest, but it is also a fact that the looming food crisis has several causes. Besides drought, there is the issue of lack of productivity following the land reform programme and government policy failures in agriculture.

Back in the day, farmers would have turned to irrigation to avert a national crisis, but some of the farmers who were given land destroyed the infrastructure that was on the ground and cannot turn to irrigation in times of drought. The other problem on the land is that farmers do not have security, hence they cannot put money into such businesses.

Farmers - whether black or white - are still losing farms, with those politically connected pitching up at successful farms with dubious offer letters. No one in their right mind would invest significantly in a farm politicians could claim any given day.

It’s high time that these greedy Zanu-PF backed politicians realise that “it’s not the hoe in someone’s hand that is ploughing, but it’s the strength of the ploughing.

 One of the Mugabe policies that has brought nothing but cheap shoes and clothing that might not even last a day on your back is the Look East Policy.

While other African countries  while most Zimbabweans have managed to weather the storm and hang on through the hard times, the scary thing is that worse is yet to come. The tobacco farming season, which has been touted as a beacon of success for the land reform programme, is slowly losing steam.

 This year, overall output is not expected to surpass the 216 million kilograms that were achieved last year are getting the bulk of their FDI from the West, Zimbabwe is getting nothing from the favoured East.