What El Niño Actually Is — In Plain Shona Sense

Here is the crucial part Zimbabweans must absorb: this is predictable. The United States weather agency, NOAA, now puts the chance of El Niño emerging by July 2026 at 82 percent, with a 96 percent chance it persists into early 2027 — straight through our planting and growing season. Our own Minister of Agriculture, Dr Anxious Masuka, warned at the SADC meeting in Victoria Falls that early models predict a super El Niño in the 2026/27 season. This is not a vague fear. It is a forecast, issued a year ahead, giving us something our grandparents never had: time.

What a Super El Niño Does to Zimbabwe

We do not have to imagine the damage. We lived it in 2023/24, the most recent El Niño, which brought the worst mid-season dry spell in over 100 years and the lowest mid-season rainfall in more than 40 years across Southern Africa. Here is what it did, and what a super El Niño in 2026/27 threatens to do again — worse.

In April 2024, President Mnangagwa declared a national state of disaster, stating that more than 80 percent of the country had received below-normal rainfall, and appealing for US$2 billion in humanitarian assistance. The World Food Programme was already feeding 2.7 million Zimbabweans — nearly 20 percent of the population. Across Southern Africa, the drought pushed nearly 29 million people into alarming hunger. This is the scale of what we are being warned about again.

How We Responded Last Time: Too Late, and From the Top

Tete Getty must be honest, because honesty is the beginning of preparation. Zimbabwe’s pattern with drought has been to react, not anticipate. We wait until the crops have failed, the granaries are empty, and the children are hungry — and only then do we declare a disaster and appeal to the world for billions. The 2024 declaration came in April, when the season was already lost. The appeal for $2 billion came after the damage, not before it.

And if we are truly honest, our last comprehensive, nationally-coordinated drought-preparedness culture — the kind embedded in how communities stored grain, read the seasons, and planned for lean years — belongs to a knowledge system that colonial disruption and modern dependency steadily eroded over the past half-century. In terms of a modern, anticipatory, scientifically-driven national drought plan that actually reaches the village before the drought hits — we have, in practical terms, never properly done it. We have done emergency relief. We have not done anticipatory action at scale. There is a world of difference between the two, and that difference is measured in lives and dignity.

What Worked Elsewhere — and We Can Copy

We do not need to invent the solution. Other African nations and the humanitarian system have already proven what works — anticipatory action, where you act on the forecast before the disaster lands. Tap each to see the proof.

A Disaster-Management Plan, Village to Nation

Here is TGRI’s proposed seven-step anticipatory plan for Zimbabwe’s 2026/27 season. It is built on one principle: act on the forecast we already have, and carry the message all the way to the last homestead.

This Is Where Chiefs, Sadunhu & Sabhuku Step Up

Here is the truth that the international agencies, for all their billions, keep rediscovering: a forecast saves no one until it reaches the person holding the hoe. Ethiopia’s success came from village committees carrying the warning the last mile, in the local language. Zimbabwe already has the most powerful last-mile communication network in the region — and it is not the radio or the mobile phone. It is our traditional leadership.

The chief (ishe/mambo), the headman (sadunhu), and the village head (sabhuku) sit at the exact point where national forecasts must become household action. They know every family. They convene the dare. They are trusted in a way no government circular or NGO poster can match. When the sabhuku calls a meeting under the muhacha tree and explains that the rains will fail and that this season the family should plant rapoko instead of maize, dig a deeper well, and sell two beasts early — that message lands with an authority that no SMS will ever carry.

The zunde raMambo deserves special mention. For generations, Zimbabwean communities maintained a communal field worked collectively, whose harvest was stored in the chief’s granary as insurance against drought and to feed the vulnerable. This is indigenous anticipatory action — our own ancestors’ disaster-management system, designed for precisely the dry cycles El Niño brings. Reviving and modernising the zunde raMambo ahead of 2026/27 would be both a practical food buffer and a reclamation of African knowledge that colonial agriculture taught us to abandon.

From the Satellite to the Muhacha Tree

For this to work, the message must travel a clear chain — and every link must speak the language of the next. This is the communication flow TGRI proposes for the 2026/27 season.

Preparing Is Far Cheaper Than Rescuing

For every dollar spent on anticipatory action — seed, water, cash before the drought — studies consistently show several dollars saved in emergency relief later, not to mention the human suffering avoided. Zimbabwe appealed for $2 billion after the 2024 drought. A fraction of that, spent before the 2026/27 season, would protect far more people far more cheaply.

Yes, It Is Winter — Prepare Anyway

Someone will say: “But it is chibage harvest time, it is cold, the dry season is normal now — why act?” That is exactly the trap. An extreme-weather warning means we prepare even when the sky looks ordinary. Godzilla is forecast for the season after this one. The work to survive it must begin now, in this winter, across Zimbabwe and South Africa alike — because the things that save you in a drought take months to put in place. Here is what every household and farmer can begin today.

Born With a Conservation Role: Our Totemic Duty

This is the first entry in our Environmental and Conservation Journal, and it must say plainly what this category believes. The earth is boss. Work with it, and it gives abundance. Work against it, take the shortcut, and it bites back — patiently, certainly, the way a river always finds its way back to its original course no matter how we try to straighten it. Everything in these journals will flow from that single truth: we are earth-humans, and our task is to work with the land, never against it.

And here is the part the rest of the world is only now catching up to. In universities they now teach “permaculture” and “regenerative agriculture” and “biodiversity stewardship” as cutting-edge science. For us, this was never a curriculum — it was a birthright written into our totems. The mutupo system did not merely organise marriage and lineage; it assigned every Zimbabwean a relationship of kinship and care with a part of the living world. To carry a totem is to be born already holding a conservation role — a duty to a particular animal, a particular part of creation, that you do not eat, that you protect, that you live alongside.

So as Godzilla approaches, remember your totemic role in conservation — especially now. The drought will press the wild as hard as it presses us: animals will come for water and food, and conflict will rise. The totem teaches the older path of coexistence. And the small acts matter enormously. Support the groups creating waterholes and pumping water for wildlife across Hwange, who will keep animals alive when the pans dry. Plant trees — and as our tradition has always known, we plant trees always, not once a year on a designated day. Protect the wildlife corridors, the wells, the water sources near you. Grow a medicine tree, a moringa, that outlives you and serves the whole community. There has never been anything like what is coming in our lifetimes. This is the season for every small act of conservation — so buckle up, and let us get back to the earth.

The Sky We Were Warned About

We have made “El Niño” into a joke because laughter is how we survive hard things — and there is no shame in that. But this year, the joke must become a plan. For the first time in our history, science has handed Zimbabwe something our ancestors would have given anything for: a clear warning, a full season in advance, that the rains may fail.

What we do with that warning is the whole test. We can do what we have always done — wait, watch the crops die, declare a disaster, and hold out the begging bowl for two billion dollars. Or we can do what works: act now, plant the small grains, fix the boreholes, revive the zunde raMambo, and send the warning down through our chiefs and sabhuku to every last homestead in the language of the people. One path ends in hunger and dependency. The other ends in dignity and self-reliance.

This is the first journal in our new Environmental and Conservation category, and it is fitting that it begins here — because the deepest form of conservation is the conservation of our own people through the dry years, using our own knowledge, our own leaders, and the science the whole world now shares. The rains may fail. We must not.