4,000 white pensioners face starvation in Zimbabwe

May 29 2008 — Malalane truck-driver Hannes Botha (55) since 2002 makes a monthly 2,100-km round trip to Zimbabwe - hand-delivering life-saving food parcels to 350 destitute Afrikaner and other white pensioners.

There’s some 4,000 Afrikaner pensioners living a hand-to-mouth existence in Zimbabwe today, and he hopes to get enough donations to start feeding all of them eventually, he said.

These pensioners used to get ’survival-food donations’ from local farmers, but these farms have now all been confiscated by the Mugabe regime, leaving these pensioners on the constant edge of starvation.

Botha has now been able to quit his job at the TSB sugar factory at Malalane so that he can dedicate all his time to keeping all these pensioners alive as long as he can.

  • “I was born in Zimbabwe myself. Those are my people and I have to help them,’ said Botha.

He first heard of their plight in January 2002 when the Zimbabwe Pensioners’ Support Fund manager in Harare had told him that these pensioners were trying to survive only on some backyard-potatoes.

He first started buying groceries from his own pocket and taking food-parcels - and now this has grown to an organised aid-programme to keep alive 650 pensioners in 36 old-age homes in Zimbabwe.

Each donated parcel costs R300 and contains all the necessary groceries to provide balanced meals for a month. He hands these parcels to each pensioner personally during his 2,500km round trip, for which he needs 750 litres of diesel between Bulawayo, Gweru, Redcliff, Kwe Kwe, Harare and Masvingo.

The pensioners totally rely on his monthly visit and call him “God’s trucker’. He said without these monthly food parcels they would become so malnutritioned that they would starve to death.

“The government took away the farms which were providing them with milk, vegetables and meat,’ he said.

Two volunteers have now offered to pay a basic monthly wage to Botha so that he can start also actively start marketing the project.

http://www.news24.com/Beeld/Suid-Afrika/0,,3-975_2331573,00.html