Zimbabwe's Rain Gamble: A Nation Parched

Philemon Jambaya

Zim Now Editor

Zimbabwe, like its southern African neighbours, depends on rain for its food, energy and economy. But it hasn’t gotten enough this year, and likely won’t in the future, a victim of a climate crisis it didn’t cause.

Gerald Mushonga sits in a leather armchair and reaches for the remote to switch off the news. Pieces of fabric hang over the windows, darkening the room against the heat. A gas-powered hand-plough is parked in the corner. On the floors behind his chair, dozens of ears of corn are spread out, a display of the paltry crop the 56-year-old farmer managed to salvage from his rain-starved soil.

“The fields are a sorry sight,” he says. “We’re saving what we can.”

Everyone here, in this country of nearly 16 million people, is nervously doing the same thing. It’s too late for the rain.

Maize/Chibage, as most people here call it, is the lifeblood of the country’s diet, eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the form of “Sadza,” a high calorie made from maize known as mealie meal. Unless they’ve had Sadza, most Zimbabweans feel like they haven’t eaten.

The maize processed into mealie meal depends on a rainy season that begins around planting time in November or December and ends in March or April, with the harvest. But last year very little rain fell and unusual heat-stressed the crop even more.

In recent decades a boom in mining and agriculture led the World Bank to reclassify Zimbabwe from a “least developed country” to a “middle income country.” Its capital, Harare, has sprouted new office towers, shopping malls, hospitals and a growing professional class—all the signs of an upward economy, of the kind the global North has experienced for a century, abetted by fossil fuels. Now Zimbabwe is trying to get back on track, but could again be derailed by something it can’t control: Rain.

Rain grows its food and powers its energy grid; rain keeps the lights on and the fans blowing in supermarkets, barber shops and roadside restaurants. Rain cranks operations at Zimbabwe’s mines, essential not just for Zimbabwe’s economy, but the global energy transition.

A country’s food insecurity is usually the result of complex, intertwined factors—bad weather, economic problems, war or conflict—that complicate the process of attributing food shortages or malnutrition to climate change. But in Zimbabwe, right now, the link between hunger and climate change is unusually stark.

Warming waters off the African continent’s coast, heated by the burning of fossil fuels, are accelerating atmospheric changes here and supercharging the weather phenomenon known as El Niño. It’s hot and dry here—and will get hotter and drier in some areas, and wetter and more flood-prone in others. For a country that depends almost entirely on rain, the lack or over-abundance of it means big trouble. This atmospheric see-saw will test the country’s infrastructure, notably the beleaguered Kariba Dam and the reservoir it holds back, the largest in the world.

None of this is the fault of the people who live here, but they’re the ones left to cope with the vagaries of their once-reliable rainfall. Historical per-capita greenhouse gas emissions here, as in most African countries, are relatively tiny. The Zimbabweans, like those in many other developing countries, is calling for help.

“We are suffering because the climate has changed,” said Mehluli Ndlovu, the head of Green Zimbabwe Network. “We have never suffered a drought like this.”

Ndlovu, who was part of African Group of Negotiators at the recent United Nations climate negotiations in Dubai, believes it’s past time for rich, higher-emitting countries to compensate his. They should, he said, go beyond funding efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions or adapt to climate change. They should pay for what’s known in global climate-negotiation-speak as “loss and damage”—the impacts of climate change that can’t be adapted to or mitigated.

“The Americans must get out their checkbooks and pay,” Ndlovu said.

Across the country, people plant maize everywhere—in small patches at the side of the road, in family gardens and in acres of farm fields. Most of it is stunted, its blonde, crispate leaves crinkling in the hot breeze.