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Richard Muponde, Gwanda Correspondent
THE Grain Marketing Board depot in Gwanda is failing to distribute maize to villagers owing to a shortage of sacks and cash constraints.
GMB needs cash to pay off personnel who load maize onto the trucks and off-load it when they get to the wards.
Villagers in Gwanda, hard hit by drought, are still to receive food aid since last year.
Gwanda is one of the districts reeling from the effects of drought in Matabeleland South province.
The revelations were made on Friday at a full council meeting at Gwanda Rural District chambers when the Department of Social Welfare was giving feedback on the food situation in the district.
In its report, it said GMB officials advised them that the parastatal was facing acute shortages of sacks to pack maize to be delivered to starving villagers.
“They’ve asked villagers to supply three sacks per household so that they’re given their maize for January to March. Maize is there but they’ve nowhere to pack it. They also said that they can’t deliver the maize at our local depot as they’ve no money to pay loaders. So they’ve said maize will come direct to the wards but villagers have to pay the transporter to deliver the maize to their respective wards,” read the report.
The news was received with mixed feelings by the councillors who said GMB was not being sincere as it had enough personnel at its local depot premises which offload their commercial products.
Clr Ephraim Nyathi of Ward 17 said those GMB personnel should be used to offload maize at the various distribution centres.
“They can’t give that excuse when people are starving. They should use their personnel to offload the maize. If they don’t have personnel to offload the maize, who then is off-loading their mealie-meal, beans and other products they sell at the depot?” asked Clr Nyathi.
Clr Peter Smith of Ward 21 said the food aid should be delivered with haste and proper planning be done to have many distribution points established.
He said more of these centres should especially be in resettlement areas where people are scattered.
“In my ward it’s difficult to have one centre where maize will be distributed to all people because people are scattered. It means several distribution centres should be established,” said Clr Smith.
On the issue of villagers paying transporters, Ward 19 Clr Thompson Makhalima said villagers could only afford to pay $2 per kilometre for transport.
“We can’t pay more than that because our local transporters charge $2 per kilometre to transport maize.
So we want GMB to assure us that their transporters will not charge us anything more than that.
Villagers have no money to pay overcharging transporters,” said Clr Makhalima.
The house unanimously agreed that they will only allow villagers to pay a fee stipulated by the government which is $2 per kilometre.
Online Reporter