Silent streams and rising dust

Summer is just around the corner in Zimbabwe. In a week, we’ve gone from double duvets, gloves and woolly hats to T-shirts, shorts and sandals. The leaves are pouring off the trees, covering every surface with deep mulch – nature’s preparation for the big heat that’s coming.

The Ghost Birds (Grey-headed Bush Shrikes) are back for summer, their haunting whistles high overhead in the leafless Msasa trees. On the ground, African Hoopoes are busy in the baked and crackly golden grass hunting for insects, while Babblers and Scimitar-billed Woodhoopoes bath and splash and chatter noisily in birdbaths. A slender mongoose has moved back into my garden, and has dug two tennis ball-sized holes which connect to tunnels underground, and every day it searches through the shrubbery and leaf litter for beetles and insects.

Read:
Critical minerals or a loaf of bread
This is Zim in the winter of 2025, where time goes backwards

As temperatures rise, the sky is suddenly full of dust and smoke, as people chop trees, burn, dig and plough their self-apportioned roadside plots for the coming growing season. It’s absurdly strange how we’ve found terms to sanitise illegality borne out of desperation in Zimbabwe – such as ‘self- apportioned plots,’ which are actually pieces of state land along roads and railways, and in valleys and wetlands, where people now plough and plant crops.

These are the life-saving survival crops for urban families who are not making it from one month to the next; everyone knows and understands that, but the long-term ecological damage, loss of habitat and eradication of species is painfully noticeable.

For a moment last year, we had hope that this environmental devastation might be brought under control when the government announced a programme to help struggling urban people.

A much-publicised ‘Urban Cash Programme’ was launched in October 2024 by the government as a means to provide urban food-insecure households with cash to purchase cereals. [Around] 1.7 million people were screened and registered for the support, and were supposed to each receive US$8 a month. US$8 is just enough to buy a 10kg bag of maize meal, but the cash came only once since the plan was started, and didn’t even get to everyone who was registered.

The Social Welfare Minister now admits that the October 2024 disbursement was the only one: “No further payments have been made because Treasury has not released additional resources,” he said. In Bulawayo, where almost 220 000 people were registered for support, only 40 000 received that single payment. The MP for Luveve in Bulawayo said: “This was meant to be a social safety net. People registered in good faith. Now they are left without help, and without answers.”

Hope faded for urban food-insecure people. Ten months later, the Agriculture Ministry announced that we’d had a bumper harvest and all maize imports were banned as there was enough maize to supply to the grain millers.

This bumper harvest is as good as a mirage for food-insecure urban people though; they are still out there burning and digging, waiting for the little buzz on their phones which should tell them that the next instalment of help is coming from the Urban Cash Programme. It remains elusive though, so they bend over and the dust rises.

Read:
The beauty and shame of Zimbabwe
Reaping what Zimbabwe’s government sowed

Trying to make sense of it all, I went walking in the bush, and it is here that you fully appreciate the immense diversity making up the habitat that is so vital if we are to preserve our flora and fauna.

Sit with me a moment and look out at the rocky outcrops with caves and cavities, trees and vines, creepers and climbers, fallen leaves carpeting the ground and little pools of water concealed in the thick reeds and sedges where a silent stream slips past deep underground.

The picture that accompanies this letter tells the story better than my words. It is this we must save, and it is the urban food-insecure people that the government must help, as they promised to do ten months ago, to help slow the devastating effects of self-apportioned plots.

© Cathy Buckle

Follow Moneyweb’s in-depth finance and business news on WhatsApp here.