Zimbabweans must come to scratch

Stephen Mpofu, Perspective

They swoop down relentlessly and strategically swam on branches of trees around crop fields with their sharp eyes scanning the fields for detectable grain on which to pounce and satiate their appetite.

Much like a wave of voracious swallows sighted above, weather vicissitudes, namely lean or skeletal rainy seasons, recurrent droughts and floods such as those experienced in Zimbabwe as well as in other countries and spawned by global warming and climate change, have come to roost as it were, and people, particularly leaders who lethargically and therefore diabolically fail to predict the destructive effects of those conditions on humanity and animals in order to take the necessary safety precautions are a liability to both themselves and to the masses who put them in positions where they push potbellies courtesy of the power invested in them by the masses on whom they turn their backs instead of acting as security guards for the electorates who, are in reality, are their masters.

Contextually, therefore, where are the “people’s leaders” in Zimbabwe’s countryside, or the periphery as white colonialists pejoratively called the rural areas where children rendered skeletal by malnutrition have tirelessly been crawling to school, covering long distances on empty bellies while their so-called leaders and their own children belch even in their sleep in celebration of their three square meals a day?

As it is, did it really have to take the nation’s First Lady, Amai Auxillia Mnangagwa, to discover that thousands of rural children — no doubt among them Zimbabwe’s potential future leaders — trudge long distances to school on empty bellies to school to acquire knowledge to prepare them for important roles to play in our nation in the future?

As it indeed happened, there was a small avalanche of positive responses after the First Lady spoke as a concerned mother herself about the plight of malnutritioned children, with some people saying they would chip in with provisions for the benefit of the malnutritioned kids.

But, surely, there must be Members of Parliament who work and reside in urban areas but represent rural constituencies in the August House?

But how come they did not seek assistance for the starving children in their constituencies? Or do they visit their rural homes or constituencies only when the time comes for them to canvas for votes to be returned to their positions as MPs?

Equally important, do leadership structures of both the ruling and opposition parties in rural areas think they were elevated to their positions to sleep: otherwise why have they not mobilised food and other assistance for the under-fed children?

In this communicologist’s humble opinion, the leadership structures in point here ought to demonstrate without any equivocation their pro-active disposition for rallying to the support of people who put them in positions of power and this includes voter’s children whom the concerned leaders must protect.

Government leaders have been proclaiming to the rest of the world that no Zimbabweans would die of hunger as a result of droughts that this country has been experiencing.

But in the prevailing situation, can it be said with certainty that food scarcity caused by drought has not caused any deaths from hunger or malnutrition-related causes?

Rural children’s malnutrition plight apart, cattle in various provinces have died in their thousands due to lack of pastures and water as a result of the prevailing drought. But surprisingly no one has come to the rescue of the surviving livestock with, say, stock-feed provisions programmes when, as everyone knows for sure that cattle do not only provide draught power for the production of food for both villagers and urban dwellers, not to mention beef a shortage of which makes life difficult particularly for urbanites where no one rears goats or sheep as alternative sources of meat.

As things stand right now, no one can say for sure WHEN exactly or IF global warming and climate change will become history, so that everything necessary and possible should be done to protect human lives and animals from the negative weather effects caused by climate change.

It therefore behoves on Zimbabweans, as on other people elsewhere in the world, to be up to scratch in order to effectively counter deadly weather conditions of a globe gone awry.