‘We’ll die of hunger first’: Despair as Zimbabwe lockdown begins
HARARE It was still early on Sunday morning when Stewart Dzivira, his wife and their twoyearold son, jumped on a bus in Glen View, a densely populated suburb of Harare, to head into Zimbabwe’s capital. For days now, the 33yearold has been unsuccessfully trying to get maize meal, or mealie meal, a Zimbabwean staple that has been in short supply following a devastating drought two years ago. “We desperately need to get maize now that there is a lockdown,” Dzivira told Al Jazeera, holding his son while sitting on the concrete pavement outside a miller’s building in central
Harare.
He was not alone. Hundreds of others were queueing alongside him on the eve of the start of a threeweek lockdown imposed by the government to contain the spread of COVID19, the highly infectious respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus. “All citizens are required to stay at home, with the exception of those seeking health services, buying food, medicine and vital supplies, and those manning our essential services,” President Emmerson Mnangagwa said on Friday as he announced the lockdown. “I know that these measures may seem drastic, and will upset all of our daily lives, but there is no other way,” added Mnangagwa, two weeks after declaring a “national disaster” and banning gatherings of more than 100 people. As of Sunday, COVID19 had infected seven people in Zimbabwe and caused the death of one person, 30yearold broadcaster Zororo Makamba. The threat of the new disease could not have come at a worse time for millions of Zimbabweans already struggling with a deepening economic crisis bringing soaring food prices, stagnant salaries, water shortages and daily power blackouts. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s annual inflation soared to more than 500 percent in February. The unemployment rate stands at more than 90 percent, medicines are scarce, and depleted state coffers mean that the government is unable to purchase sufficient supplies for the already weakened staterun medical facilities. In December last year, the World Food Programme warned that Zimbabwe was facing its worst hunger crisis in 10 years with half of the population 7.7 million people food insecure.
(Al Jazeera)