Posted on 04/30/2002 5:51:07 AM PDT by Vigilant1
African crisis: Aid donors and government engage in a war of words while famine and brutality stalk a once-bountiful nation
By Declan Walsh in Lilongwe , Malawi
28 April 2002
James Black paid a high price for three cobs of maize. After accusing him of stealing from their field, four men launched a vicious attack. Ignoring the farm labourer's protestations of innocence, they bound him, beat him bloody and dragged him down a dirt track. Then, using a razor, they sliced off his ears.
When a friend found James, one ear was stuffed in his pocket. "It is the hunger," he says now in simple explanation. Desperation has collided with hunger in Malawi, the once-bountiful nation now at the heart of southern Africa's looming famine. The consequences have been terrible.
Since Christmas, several thousand people have died – some from cholera, others from accelerated Aids, others again from pure starvation. Famished villagers started eating wild leaves, tree stems and even sawdust to fend off the gnawing hunger.
The social fabric of a nation known as the "warm heart of Africa" has been torn asunder. Farmers waiting for harvest are sleeping by their crops to fend off thieves. Those caught have been treated mercilessly.
Hands and ears have been chopped off, legs have been hobbled. Children as young as seven have been doused with paraffin and set alight. Others have simply been hacked to death in the fields. One woman in the eastern town of Kapiri was presented with a basket full of maize some weeks ago. When she pulled back the cobs, she found her husband's head.
The brutality has shocked long-term residents. "This is a whole new phenomenon. It is inhumanity borne of desperation," said Sister Catherine Dwyer. A chronic shortage of maize, the nation's staple food, is behind the madness. Last year's harvest was a disaster; alarmed aid workers are predicting that this year it will be twice as bad.
The UN estimates that between 3 and 4 million people – up to 40 per cent of the population – will go hungry. "If we don't get resources immediately, we won't be able to do anything come August. You're looking at tens of thousands of deaths," said Paul Harvey of Concern Worldwide. The response from Western donors has been limp and unenthusiastic. They say that although the crisis was sparked by erratic rainfall last year, the government bears a heavy responsibility. Controversy centres on the sale of the Strategic Grain Reserve – Malawi's emergency food supply – in shady circumstances. Some 167,000 tons of maize were sold. Donors suspect politically connected figures of buying stocks cheaply, then re-selling them as prices shot up by 350 per cent in October.
President Bakili Muluzi has ordered an investigation but says he was ordered to sell the stocks by the International Monetary Fund. And he denies any responsibility for the impending famine. "You cannot blame us. This was simply a natural calamity," said Anthony Lufuzi, a government spokesman.
Behind the rhetoric, people are dying. In the emergency feeding centre at Nambuma, two hours from the capital, Lilongwe, Malawian nuns feed an emergency mix to withered infants with protruding ribcages. "Three quarters of the people have nothing to eat," said Sister Modesta, who scrambled the centre into operation after dying people started arriving on her doorstep.
Some villagers were eating "green" or unripe maize – the equivalent of robbing your own bank account. Others had sold everything they own to buy a little maize flour. Staiford Mpingu, 32, and his wife, Linus, sat on the doorstep of their roofless house. First they sold the radio, he explained, then the chickens. Finally they ripped the thatch roof off one of their two buildings. They received 60 kwacha – about 55p – enough for two days maize. "Nothing is left," he said despondently. "Now we don't know what to do because our bodies are weak."
Infants and the infirm are most at risk today, but within months, say aid workers, the entire population will be at risk. Yet Western donors remain reluctant, partly because of the grain reserve scandal, partly due to concerns about general corruption. The Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, has made no secret of her unhappiness and Britain, the largest donor, has frozen £12.5m in bilateral aid. Denmark is closing its Lilongwe embassy over similar concerns.
Aid is arriving, slowly. But Malawi suffers from supply bottlenecks, and must compete with Zimbabwe and Zambia for regional food surpluses, mostly from South Africa. Even worse, meteorologists are warning of a possible recurrence of massive floods that devastated parts of Africa in the 1990s.
Even with funding, a disaster will not easily be averted.
MARK A SITY
http://www.logic101.net/
They're close. Maybe already there.
The person that wrote that sentence must not have written the article that preceeded it.
Funding is not the problem. The problem is a government so corrupt that the funds can't be distributed to those that need them.
FYI--
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Your're close. Maybe already there.
As usual, when corruption reigns (and notoriously when socialist corruption prevails), the people are the ones who suffer.
Africa is reverting to it's "roots". They aren't pretty.
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