While they are playing...

From a reporter for the Sunday Times in Zimbabwe 'who cannot be identified because of the regime's draconian reporting restrictions:

When Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, announced that his country had enjoyed a "bumper harvest", Alice Gela was sending her children to school without breakfast yet again. Some days, the family does not eat at all.

While Gela stared into her bare cupboards, 40,000 tons of food from the Catholic Relief Services was lying unused not far away, according to Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo.

Mugabe has banned all foreign food aid, even the UN World Food Programme. Although his own countrymen have begun starving to death, he accuses the West of trying to "choke" his country with food and tells them to send it elsewhere in Africa.

"The government is shouting that there is plenty of food, but where is it then?" asked Angilacala Ndlovu, deputy mayor of the southern city of Bulawayo, where government records show that 160 people have recently died of malnutrition.

Last week a parliamentary committee flatly contradicted Mugabe's claim of a bumper crop and warned that the country was facing serious food shortages.

Mugabe responded by directing Zimbabwean television to show endless film of silos full of grain which critics claim is library footage. Even weather forecasts now have to be approved by his office so there can be no talk of drought.

Under Gela's corrugated iron roof on Friday there was no food. No cooking oil, no flour, none of the staple maize. The idea of milk or meat raised laughter. Infected by HIV, Gela's wasted body lies on a dirty blanket, tended by her eldest daughter Sandra, who has two children of her own.

Gela watches dull-eyed and powerless as her five-year-old son complains that his belly is empty. Twelve family members live in the three-roomed house, one of which is let to a lodger.

On the wall is a framed 20-year service award in Zimbabwe Post and Telecom for her husband, Wilford. After he lost his job and joined the 70% of Zimbabweans unemployed, he left for Botswana to try to earn some money. The family have heard nothing from him for months.

All of this is just a few miles south of the lush Queens Club where the England cricket team will play two matches in their controversial tour of Zimbabwe, which starts this Friday.
.....
"Food is a powerful weapon," said David Coltart, legal affairs spokesman of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. "The banning of foreign feeding programmes mean the government controls all food and the clear message is: either you vote the right way or you and your children will starve."

Widespread malnutrition, combined with the high level of HIV infection, means that Zimbabwe now has one of the world's lowest life expectancies - 38. "Politicisation of food is the most evil thing a government can do," said Ncube, one of Mugabe's most outspoken critics. Ncube has faced endless threats, even to his 88-year-old mother, and cannot hold prayer meetings without police permission. But he insists: "As long as babies are dying of malnutrition and elderly of starvation, I will not be silenced."
.....
He, like many Zimbabweans, is horrified by the decision of the England cricket team to travel to the country. "While they are playing, thousands of children are going to school with empty bellies all because of one man's obsession with power," he said.

(Hat tip: Jeff Weintraub.) See also this report from Christopher Munnion:

Up to 70 per cent of Zimbabwe's workforce, some 3.4 million people, has fled the country to escape the political oppression and collapsing economy under President Robert Mugabe's rule, according to research by an independent church study group.

The South African-based Solidarity Peace Trust said that most of them had crossed the borders into neighbouring countries, with an estimated 1.5 million skilled and able-bodied workers arriving in South Africa to seek work to support families left behind in Zimbabwe.

Cricket, lovely cricket, hey? Shame on the England and Wales Cricket Board.