Government forced to admit critical food and malnutrition levels

By Lance Guma
08 September 2006

A normally intransigent Zanu PF regime is cracking under pressure and now openly admitting the seriousness of the crisis facing the country. Just weeks after former army general Vitalis Zvinavashe complained over food levels and how government was handling the matter a state sponsored demographic health survey for the 2005-06 period admitted malnutrition had increased by 3 percent. The report says, ‘stunting, a measure of chronic malnutrion, is reported to be 29,4 percent in 2005-06 compared to 26,5 percent in the 1999 survey.’

Health Minister David Parirenyatwa told state television that the mortality rate for children under 5 dwindled from 102 per 1000 births in 1999 to 82 for 2006 before conceding that the vaccination coverage for children had fallen from 67 to 53 percent. Cynics have already started pointing out that Parirenyatwa’s admissions are designed to be an appeal for the re-launching of donor-sponsored feeding schemes, scrapped after Mugabe boasted of a bumper harvest. In an interview with Sky News he infamously declared, ‘We are not hungry. Why foist this food on us? We don't want to be choked.’

Health experts warn that the country’s health delivery system has since collapsed and this was the reason why government officials were trying to promote the use of traditional healers. Once frowned upon as mere witchcraft practitioners the healers have now been given the authority to grant sick notes for their patients in a sign of their growing significance. Shortages of basic commodities, galloping inflation, foreign currency shortages and high unemployment levels caused by poor policies have all combined to impoverish the majority of the population.

Bulawayo Mayor, Japhet Ndabeni Ncube, has meanwhile urged all the country’s mayors to lift the veil of secrecy over the number of people dying because of hunger related-illnesses. A Zimonline report quotes the mayor as saying 19 people died in Bulawayo in May alone bringing to 155 the total that have succumbed to hunger in 2006.