Children driven from school food queues: reports

Allegations of food aid being politicised have resurfaced in Zimbabwe with a report that opposition supporters' children are being driven away from school supplementary feeding schemes in rural areas.

Shari Eppel of rights group Amani Trust said that in the course of helping torture victims, she had been told that children of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) supporters were being denied access to school food queues in Mberengwa East, in the far south of the country.

In her office on Friday was Sam Mlilo, district chairman of Mburengwa East, who told IRIN he had seen children driven out of the queue for the supplementary meal at the Chamakudo Primary School, near Mataga, because of their parents' political beliefs.

"Children with parents sympathetic to the MDC are denied access to food. In each village there are some MDC supporters and the villagers know MDC supporters by name and drive their children away," Mlilo claimed. He said people had tried in vain to complain.

He added that ZANU-PF structures were being used to distribute food and that traditional leaders were also distributing food along party lines.

Aid groups contacted by IRIN, however, said they were not aware of children being denied access to the school feeding schemes. Dennis O’Brien, country director of Care International, said field staff at school feeding points regularly checked the schemes registers, which was an opportunity for people to raise concerns. We would immediately raise it with authorities and work to resolve it," he said.

Bhekimpilo Khanye, World Vision operations manager for the southern region, said his organisation hadn’t started supplementary feeding yet, but was preparing to do so. "People on the ground will have to get an understanding of the political nature of food distribution," he said, adding that so far there had been "nothing to scare us off".

Edward Watkiss of Christian Aid said many complaints stemmed from agencies not being able to "blanket feed" all schools in an area. "If a school three kilometres away is not fed, there are grumbles of political favours either towards government or the opposition. We find that when we get down to district level, people are down to earth, they are not political like at provincial level," he said.

Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights) Director Munyaradzi Bidi said he had not heard of children being victimised in this way, but said that during the March elections many schools closed down, denying children access to the nutritional supplements they would have received there.

Further afield in Gokwe, Bidi said, ZANU-PF youths were trying to control oil and maize prices in shops and the prices the items were sold at could vary according to political affiliation.

Eppel said a report on the victimisation of the children would be compiled with information from various regions, and would be presented to the donor agencies.

The latest allegations come after last week’s release by the International Crisis Group (ICG) of a report saying maize imports were directed to areas of greatest support for the ruling party, ZANU-PF. At the time Edward Mamutse, a government spokesman in Zimbabwe’s Department of Information and Publicity said: "There’s nothing of the sort."

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s ailing economy received a boost on Monday with the announcement of an agreement to export beef to Libya, with whom the country has close links and a fuel supply agreement.

Also on Monday, post-election talks facilitated by South Africa and Nigeria between the MDC and ZANU-PF finally started.
The MDC, which narrowly lost the presidential elections, is demanding a fresh poll, calling Mugabe’s government a junta.