Cheryl Robertson
Journalist and Author
| gulf news (dubai) | ||
Food for thought
In 2002 South Africa based Hannes Botha received a call for help from an old person in Zimbabwe who had no money and no food. He went to investigate, driving his old Ford Meteor 1,000 kilometres to the country’s second largest town of Bulawayo laden with supplies. From then on he did the same as often as he could, for he discovered that there were a whole lot more needy people out there in the same boat. By April 2008 he had taken early retirement from his job in a sugar mill, officially formed the Zimbabwe Pensioners Supporter Fund (ZPSF) as a non-profit organisation and was delivering basic food parcels every month to nearly 1,000 pensioners.
“When I’m asked why this situation came about in the first place, I say it was mainly inflation gone wild – inflation completely out of control,” Hannes told me when I went out to rural Zimbabwe to join him on a three-day leg of a typical delivery trip. I had a deep desire to establish the situation among the elderly there for myself - my grandparents farmed this land in the early 1900s; my parents worked for it; I was born there in 1959 and I abandoned it in 1987. Hannes was referring to the state of the Zimbabwe dollar, which reached a staggering annual inflation rate of 231 million per cent in 2008 according to independent economists and official statistics quoted in Zimbabwe's state owned national daily newspaper The Herald in October 2008. This occurred as a result of the country’s political instability, corruption of its government and its handling of a futile, economically crippling land reform programme. “Ordinary people had life savings and/or pension policies here, and these were simply wiped out,” said Hannes. “Many ended up with absolute zero. One day a person may have had comfortable savings of the equivalent of say $30,000 – the very next day he or she would have had savings of just $3. It is unbelievable but sadly true.” Others holding pensions in the country believed that some fund managers undervalued the pension funds and offered pensioners trivial amounts which they were too desperate to refuse. Another reason for the rise in penniless pensioners was that many of those that owned their own commercial farms (mostly white farmers) were forcibly removed from their land by the Mugabe government’s controversial 2000-introduced land redistribution policy. These farms were given to war veterans and supporters of the ruling Zanu-PF party, as reported by the BBC News Online in 2000. Many of these farmers were in their 60s and 70s at the time and consequently also lost their livelihoods. This action has cost the country €8.4 billion (Dhs44 billion) in lost agricultural output in the 10 years up to 2009, according to an annual report issued early this August by the country’s Commercial Farmers’ Union, and as reported in The Irish Times on August 4 2011.
The elderly – ex-farmers or otherwise - that today receive a pension of between $20 and $40 per month are among the lucky ones, for others don’t have anything coming in at all. Some are being helped by family, but those that do not have any family have no state support either, although perhaps there is a glimmer of hope for in July 2011 the government announced that a new Bill compelling the state to provide for its elderly population would soon be presented in the Zimbabwean parliament, according to a report in The Herald. So Hannes and the ZPSF’s small team of volunteers gather, pack and then deliver more than 20 tons of food sourced from all over South Africa to 28 old age homes, private homes and feeding kitchens in the country. Every six to eight weeks two trucks filled with supplies donated by mostly South African residents departs from a warehouse in Malelane, a town south of Kruger National Park in South Africa, for a round Zimbabwe journey which normally takes eight to 10 days and costs in the region of US$30,000.
Hannes’ reason for helping is simple. “The majority of these people are in this situation through no fault of their own,” he said. “Most of them paid into a pension fund for say 20, 30 years and when the economy was destroyed, that was their income, gone. It’s unfair.” He added that the forced removal of elderly farmers from their land was: “…a complete miscarriage of justice”. Hannes hopes the ZPSF will be able to supply a parcel to every pensioner in need, but currently only 40 percent of this is met. “Many totally rely on what they receive from donors,” he said. “The parcels serve two basic purposes. The pensioner gets a regular basic food supply and secondly, the pensioner is aware that someone out there cares about them. That alone is worth its weight in gold.”
Volunteer drivers Attie Botha (Hannes’s brother), a Methodist pastor with a sense of humour and Boet Holmes (68, retired) took me in their 16-ton Nissan diesel UD 90 to the towns of Chinhoyi, Kadoma and Kwekwe, while Hannes in a smaller UD80 truck showed me the delivery operation in Redcliff, Gweru (Hannes’s home town) and Shurugwi.
“Four years ago there was nothing left on the shelves of our TM supermarket in Chinhoyi,” said Pat, manager of the Sunningdale Trust in Chinhoyi. “Since we have gone to the US$ of course everything is available, as long as you have got the wherewithal to buy it. What with them losing all they had invested – even that invested in equities – makes living here now very difficult.” The Zimbabwe dollar was scrapped in April 2009 and replaced by the US dollar. Initially new residents to Sunningale had to be retired before moving in. “We have had to waive that rule as some of them at 80 are still holding down some sort of job to help make ends meet,” she said. “One chap here in his eighties used to drive 10 kilometres to a work in butchery.” I met Koos, one of the residents at Sunningdale, who had dark rings under his eyes. He was an ex-farmer in his seventies who was now working the nightshift in a Chinhoyi bakery. Although grateful to be receiving an income, he was tired much of the time. Other elderly people are destitute for other reasons, from family squabbles to just sheer bad luck. Strangely enough, few complain, and do not appear to be bitter. Shelia, an 89 year old frail but feisty resident of Boggies Trust in Gweru, told me in her refined British accent: “We have to knuckle down and do the best we can. There’s absolutely no point in moping is there Hannes?” She smiled toothlessly as he shrugged his shoulders in resignation. She was among the many residents at the Boggies Trust Home in Gweru who greeted Hannes enthusiastically; all were very concerned about the triple heart by-pass operation he had recently. He chatted for a while, but as time was tight we moved on to meet two pensioners in their own houses. One was experiencing an electricity power cut so it was gloomy inside. There is no telling when, where and how long these cuts will last – it’s just something that happens on a daily basis throughout Zimbabwe. A retired nurse known to all as “Pickles Evans’s widow” was a little downcast when we reached her at the Lynbrook old age home in Kwekwe. She would have liked to have use of a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope to monitor the other residents’ blood pressure, so saving them the $40 they would have to pay for the services of a doctor. “Look, I don’t even get that amount for my monthly pension!” she said. The ZPSF trucks cover two routes parting company after the notoriously tricky (when it comes to paperwork) Beitbridge border post between South Africa and Zimbabwe, one going via Bulawayo to Gweru and the other travelling via Masvingo to Harare. Total distance is about 7,500 kilometres which swallows up more than 2,600 litres of fuel. Each cardboard food box weighs about 20 kilogrammes and includes a two kilogramme bag each of maize meal, flour, rice and sugar; a bag each of oats and spaghetti; plus basics such as cooking oil, jam, coffee, salt, peanut butter, soup packets, instant yeast, six candles, four boxes of matches, a tin each of pilchards, baked beans, Vienna sausages, mixed vegetables and corned meat; plus one bar of soap and chocolate. Every parcel recipient has their name and address stuck firmly onto the sides of their box, and empties are duly returned for next time. There are also spare boxes should more needy pensioners be unearthed. At the same time, people of course “get away”. When he heard about the death of one of his recipients Attie said: “Two years ago these folk were just oldies but these are now friends and their passing is a major thing to me.” Boet was equally affected by a different scenario. On a previous trip when he delivered boxes to the Malvern Trust Home in Mvurwi, he discovered that it recommended that all new elderly residents be measured for their own coffin as they moved in. He said he found it a bit disturbing that a named box was made up and kept aside, and when the resident did indeed die all was ready on site, including a service at the home and a quick burial in a neighbouring field which served as a cemetery. “It sounds awful but the reality is that there are no mortuaries or crematoriums that work,” said Boet. (Zimbabwe’s crematoriums have been overcrowded in recent years, and crematoriums have on occasions run out of gas, according to reports in The Telegraph and The Zimbabwean.) There are a number of organisations helping the elderly in Zimbabwe including SOAP (Supporting Old Age Pensioners), HIZ (Homes in Zimbabwe), ZANE (Zimbabwe – a National Emergency), with the ZPSF mainly supporting the homes and pensioners in the rural areas, although there is some overlap. It’s seldom a straightforward trip for Hannes. Last week he had to go alone to Zimbabwe for just over a week to sort out border permits and establish what the new regulations were regarding the import of flour. “This constant moving of the goals for permits required is exhausting. Just when you think you have it sorted, they come up with something else!!” he said via the ZPSF’s Facebook page He added: “Going to make me grey before my time!” Inside info For donations to their South Africa account: For their PayPal account: Websites: • Who: Hannes Botha (aged 58), born in Zimbabwe, now living in South Africa See also Weekly Telegraph article Starving pensioners get a lifeline in Zimbabwe
|
