Zimbabwe’s denials of grain shortages and history of deception: How prepared are we for ‘Super El Niño’?

Source: Zimbabwe’s denials of grain shortages and history of deception: How prepared are we for ‘Super El Niño’?

Once bitten, twice shy!

Warnings of an impending “Super El Niño” weather pattern are growing deafening.

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Climate models point to an overwhelming probability of severe drought and scorching heat stress descending upon Southern Africa.
For Zimbabwe, a nation where millions still rely on rain-fed agriculture, this is not a abstract meteorological update—it is an impending crisis.
Yet, as the dark clouds of climate reality gather, the response from Harare follows a pattern that is as predictable as it is perilous.
Just days ago, the Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe (GMAZ) Southern Region sounded a sharp alarm: Blue Ribbon Industries, one of the nation’s primary food processors, along with 23 small- and medium-scale millers in Bulawayo, suspended milling operations.
The reason?
Local maize supplies across Matabeleland have dried up, remaining harvests are plagued by pest infestation, and prohibitive import levies under Statutory Instrument 87 of 2025 have choked private sector attempts to bring in grain.
The response from the Ministry of Agriculture was instant and familiar.
Authorities flatly dismissed reports of mill closures, insisted that national reserves exceed consumption targets, and essentially told the public that there is nothing to see here.
We have seen this script played out too many times before, and the ending is always disastrously the same.
The history of government communication regarding food security in Zimbabwe is a record of tragic miscalculation and systemic denial.
Cast your mind back to the devastating 1991/1992 drought.
Prior to the disaster, public assurances of adequate grain cover masked the fact that strategic reserves had been cleared out, forcing desperate emergency imports when the drought bit.
​By the late 1990s, Agriculture Minister Kumbirayi Kangai repeatedly assured the nation that state silos held sufficient reserves to ride out bad harvests—even while major corruption scandals and illegal grain exports plagued the Grain Marketing Board.
Then came 2001.
Facing warnings from agronomists of an impending crop failure, Agriculture Minister Joseph Made famously announced to the nation that he had personally taken to the skies in a helicopter, visually inspected the maize fields from the air, and concluded that the harvest was thriving.
That infamous aerial assessment proved catastrophically wrong.
Within months, mealie-meal vanished from supermarket shelves, silos were empty, and the government was forced to rely heavily on emergency international food aid to stave off hunger.
​Consider the post-2000 fast-track land reform period.
Season after season, official state crop assessments painted rosy pictures of impending self-sufficiency, attributing structural agricultural declines merely to localized moisture stress.
Public claims of grain abundance routinely dissolved within months into frantic appeals to the World Food Programme (WFP) and international donors.
Even in recent history, during the height of state-funded initiatives like Command Agriculture and Pfumvudza, the nation was repeatedly promised “bumper harvests” exceeding two million metric tonnes.
Yet, urban consumers consistently found mealie-meal scarce on supermarket shelves, while millers queued for non-existent allocations at GMB depots.
Time and again, gross field projections were brandished as actual, usable grain in state silos—deliberately confusing potential yields on paper with real mealie-meal in the pot.
This track record makes the official denials regarding the Bulawayo milling crisis deeply unsettling.
When private millers, who operate on raw market realities and cash flows, shut their doors because they cannot find maize, who are we to believe?
The commercial processors who cannot run their machines, or politicians whose primary motive is projecting an illusion of flawless governance?
If the government is already hiding behind propaganda while local millers halt production in normal months, how can anyone trust their readiness for a Super El Niño?
The sequence is painfully predictable.
First comes the aggressive denial of any deficit.
Then comes the quiet imposition of import waivers once the crisis becomes impossible to hide.
Finally, we witness the head of state standing before the international community to declare a national disaster, holding out the begging bowl for hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian food aid—just months after reassuring the nation of comfortable surpluses.
Zimbabweans are tired of being treated like passive spectators in a recurring tragedy.
Food security is not a matter of political rhetoric; it is a matter of life and death.
If the government genuinely believes its own numbers, it should have nothing to fear from transparency.
We do not need defensive press statements or dismissive ministerial briefs.
What the nation urgently requires is a comprehensive, independent, and transparent audit of the Strategic Grain Reserve.
Let independent assessors inspect the GMB silos, quantify the physical tonnage, verify its quality, and publish the true data.
Until that happens, official declarations of grain abundance will provide no comfort to a nation standing on the precipice of a severe climate shock.
Truth, not propaganda, is the only defense against hunger.
***Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or ***mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com

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