Aflatoxins, HH, UPND and the value of human life in Zambia today

Aflatoxins, HH, UPND and the value of human life in Zambia today -Azwell Banda



By Azwell Banda



Last year, on Saturday the 27th of January 2023, Vice-President Mutale Nalumango advised Zambians who could not afford to buy breakfast maize meal to go for roller meal instead.

Speaking when she officiated the launch of the Lusaka cleaning and drainage clearing campaign, Vice-President Nalumango said unlike breakfast, roller meal could be fetched at as low as K156 for a 25 kilogram bag, then. I wonder whether she could say the same thing now, about roller meal, seeing as both the price has since risen higher and we now have aflatoxin poisoning of mealie meal, and roller meal is quite suspect!

Breaming with confidence in her workingman outfit, News Diggers, on 30th January 2023 recorded her comments. “The issue of mealie meal is being resolved seriously, we have never run out of maize, so one wonders what is happening. Maybe we need a more serious conversation with millers. You are a miller drawing maize from FRA, why is your mealie meal expensive? Is it your outlet? Colleagues who are doing business in our country, particularly in mealie meal, do not make your profits too high, do not make your prices, profit beyond people. You are doing business because of the people. Be patriotic for once, be nationalists for once. You cannot buy mealie meal cheaply and then you want a profit of 50, there is no need for anybody for example in Lusaka to sell your maize even at K200, that is not acceptable because the maize price is still the same and we have maize, we are giving maize to millers,” said Mutale Nalumango.

One year and nine months later, even as climate scientists knew and had announced the possibility of drought in our region, the UPND government went on to dismantle our maize reserves and today, a combination of UPND government recklessness with our staple food and drought have combined to cause a severe shortage of maize to the point where we need to import massive quantities of maize, if millions of Zambians must not die from hunger. The prices of both breakfast meal and roller meal have of course risen beyond what they were in January 2023. And clearly we have rotten maize on the market, some with aflatoxins.

The majority of Zambians cannot afford the price of even roller meal, today. Such is the mass poverty and hunger, and contempt with which Hakainde Hichilema and his UPND government hold the mass of the Zambian people that more than 400 dogs had to die from aflatoxin food poisoning for government to concede and announce that we have a serious and deadly problem on our hands: we have maize contaminated with aflatoxins. The Veterinary Association of Zambia (VAZ) says it asked government to quickly act on aflatoxins in maize and update the nation on it more than a month ago: too many dogs were dying from eating maize contaminated with aflatoxin poison.

Government instead claims it did a few tests on mealie meal, almost half of the samples were found to contain higher than recommended levels of aflatoxins, 10 millers were named as having offloaded onto the market mealie meal and or maize products with aflatoxins, a recall of some maize products and some mealie meal from the market and a public show of destroying mealie meal containing aflatoxins has been done. The initial announcement of aflatoxin poison made by a very nervous Minister of Health Elijah Muchima glaringly did not name the culprit millers! Rising public anger at this glaring omission and open insult by the UPND government forced a reluctant announcement of the millers concerned.

The damage to public confidence in the UPND government about its willingness and  capacity to prioritise Zambian lives above profits had already been done: diplomatically the VAZ tried to deflect blame from the government by saying that government might have delayed announcing the aflatoxin poisoning in order to communicate “scientifically backed data”. I am not aware that VAZ members are not scientists concerned with the health of animals, including human beings, and that their findings of aflatoxin deaths in pets were therefore not “scientific”.

Any delay in alerting the public about deadly food poisoning in a staple food increases the numbers of people exposed to the poison, and in danger of suffering the health consequences of the poison including death. Deliberately withholding information from the public about poison contaminated mealie meal, an everyday staple food in Zambia, is conscious exposure to food poisoning of all the Zambians who would consume such mealie meal. Conscious exposure of any human being to food poisoning, even if it is by merely concealing the fact that the food to be consumed is poisoned, makes the person withholding such information complicit in the poisoning of the person who consumes the poisoned food; it is a criminal offence to knowingly let a person consume poisoned food. Should a person die after consuming poisoned food, all those with knowledge about the poisoned food who failed to alert the consumer of the poisoned food are criminal suspects in the poisoning of the consumer. This is basic and very simple logic. Now, any government which withholds information about staple food poisoning for any length of time is guilty of not only abrogating its constitutional duty to serve and protect human life, but is also directly responsible for the suffering and deaths which might occur as a result of the staple food poisoning.

Should it be proved that the bulk of the mealie meal poisoned by aflatoxins is roller meal, and roller meal is the staple of the majority of a particular economically disadvantaged Zambian, the delay in announcing the presence of aflatoxins in roller meal arguably amounts to the crime of genocide by the Zambian government. This would have been the conscious targeting by government of a particular section of our population, the majority poor who rely on roller meal, for poisoning by consciously delaying announcing publicly, what mealie meal was largely poisoned, which millers produced such mealie meal, when it was produced, which outlets it was sold from, and where in Zambia was this poisoned roller meal sold, besides Lusaka. These are self-evident facts, and truths.

The UN comprehensively defines “genocide” as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND are pursuing severe social austerity genocidal measures contained in their agreements with IMF, against the majority of Zambia’s people, who are unemployed and poor. We now have almost 10 million Zambians facing acute hunger as a result of the UPND’s severe austerity measures. Poverty has shot up to more than 60 per cent of Zambia’s population and it stands at more than 80 per cent in our rural areas. The majority of Zambians have been priced out of essential foodstuffs, water, electricity, fuels, transport, rent, medicines and other basic human necessities. These are a clearly defined nation population sector which is found throughout our 10 provinces. These conditions, consciously inflicted upon these Zambians by Hakainde and his friends in the UPND and the IMF, plausibly amount to genocide. Now this is joined by staple food poisoning and government’s lackadaisical approach to disseminating crucial information to prevent mass exposure to the poisoned food.

Why are Hakainde Hichilema and his friends in government not calling for testing Zambians suspected to have been exposed to aflatoxin poisoning? They now know some of the millers who had aflatoxin maize, maize products including mealie meal and where these were sold. This way, we would all learn how caring and concerned our government is about the effects of the aflatoxin poisons in human beings, and how those so affected may deal with the poisoning. The government would then also be in a position to begin preparing for mass cancer and other aflatoxin poison diseases screening, and clinical and hospital management, in our poisoned population.

Why has Hakainde Hichilema kept a deathly silence on this matter of national poisoning of our staple food, and yet he was quick to hold a press conference to conceal state involvement in the KKI gold saga and over parliamentarian Emanuel Jay Jay+++ Banda? Instead, Hichilema is all over Zambia like a headless chicken insulting us about irrigation and our apparent national laziness. On whose behalf exactly does the UPND government and Hichilema preside over the national affairs of this country?

Nothing best illustrates the utter contempt and total disregard for the lives of the majority of Zambians who are working class and rural poor than the manner the UPND is handling the aflatoxin poisoning of our staple food. As usual, they have put profits before human lives. One, day, and perhaps very soon, they shall have to be forced to account for all this.

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