It is time to Panic a little
I think it was 1992, the season started badly and as it progressed the heat increased until we were experiencing temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius in the lowveld. We had a business there and my son was down there living and working. It got so hot that we closed the office at 10 and came back to work when it cooled off a bit. Birds were dying in the trees and falling to the ground. The Ministry of Education closed the schools.
As the season progressed the rains simply did not come in the south. We were shareholders in an 80 000-acre ranch and by the end of summer we were down to 15 cows and a bull - all on feed. The sugarcane on the Triangle and Hippo Estates died, the great rivers of the Lowveld dried up and the Hippo died with them. Farmers to the north where they had some grass and crop residues sent them down the lowveld to keep some animals alive. A small number of Hippos were captured and put into small dams for the winter. The only green thing for hundreds of kilometers was the Triangle golf greens - what water the Estate had kept them green - good priorities!
I do not think we had a blade of grass within a 200 kilometer radius of our Ranch.
The hero of that situation was an elderly friend of mine who was the Chairman of the Grain Marketing Board. He sensed that this season was going to be different and he acted earlier than anyone else by ordering maize grain from overseas markets in hundreds of thousands of tonnes on an emergency basis. Trainloads of grain arrived and was taken into storage because he recognized that we would have to feed the country and running out of maize was simply out of the question.
The GMB is not what it was in those days - a well-run organisation with a clean audit record and a reputation for managing stocks that was unparalleled in Africa. The Railways are no longer what they were, capable of running a 100 trains a day and hauling 20 million tonnes of cargo at a cost that was half the cost of road haulage.