“Eat vegetables and potatoes instead of meat” ED remark causes furore.

ED seems to have become the modern day Marie Antoinette who during the French revolution, advised citizens to “go eat cake” when they were starving and barely able to feed themselves. The president seems to have stirred hornet’s nest with his remarks that starving citizens must resort to eating vegetables and potatoes instead of meat recently.

ED was responding to residents of Kuwadzana on Friday as he conducted a clean up campaign of the area. Most people aired out their grievances to ED and said due to the economic hardships facing the country most of them could no longer afford to buy meat to which the president responded,”Aah nyama, ko muriwo ka. Muriwo ndiwo unodikanwa namadoctor”. He then went on to say he personally preferred to eat vegetables that are loaded with vitamins much to the dismay of the residents.

ED has often been accused of being out of touch with reality and not heeding to the calls for help of his citizens. Indeed most people are no longer able to buy basic necessities such as food and meat. The United Nations has said the country is among those with starving citizens. The poor rains this year have also made the situation worse because of the Zim agro based economy. The comment that people should eat vegetables has come off as some sort of arrogance and if it was meant to be a joke then most people have found it to be not funny at all.

Most people have been making small video clips and jokes about the remark but the truth of the matter is that ED simply enraged people by his seemingly insensitive remark. According to Japhet Moyo, the ZCTU secretary general,”What Mnangagwa said sounded like a father who says to his children you must not eat chicken because it is not healthy, yet when he comes back home from work he asks for a chicken dinner for himself”.