NDEBELE AUTHORISES EMERGENCY FOOD DELIVERY 

A large consignment of vehicles to deliver emergency food aid to famine stricken SADC member states is to start moving towards Beit Bridge over this weekend. 

This follows the granting of the exemption for the operation of the 10 food relief vehicles donated to the United Nations by the Norwegian Red Cross Society to distribute emergency food by the KZN MEC for Transport, S’bu Ndebele.   ‘It is important that we give our disaster stricken neighbours all the assistance we can give. As the KZN province, we see the granting of this permission for the trucks to move through our province, as a good start to our efforts, as a country, to assist our neighbours,’ said Mr Ndebele.  The vehicles are mainly six-wheel drive army surplus with some long-haul tractor-trailer combinations. The left-hand-drive trucks will be towing trailers loaded with vehicles parts and a mobile hospital. 

South Africa was requested to assist with the travel arrangements for these vehicles from Durban, where they were off-loaded, to the various border posts. 

‘The objective of this food pipeline is to provide emergency feeding assistance to almost 13 million persons at risk of imminent starvation in six countries of SADC; Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique,’ the MEC said.  The Norwegian Red Cross Society donated this large number of all-terrain trucks to enable it to deliver food to inaccessible locations and to the most desperately needy communities in the countries where food is needed. The trucks will also be used to build the local capacity to deliver food where such ability is deficient. 

It is planned that the trucks will take a day and half to get to the South Africa/ Zimbabwe border. The trucks, which have only been given permission to travel during the day, will be driven by Norwegian drivers to avoid any delays in getting them to their destinations. 

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