“People are being accommodated and screened at Caledonia Farm. However, this is not a permanent place and we are holding them for a maximum of three days. It’s just a transit camp before they are routed to appropriate places. That is where other stakeholders should come in and come up with a permanent solution. 30 He said the police would arrest anyone who returns to the places that have been destroyed as they seek to maintain the city’s cleanliness. Various Government officials have made statements encouraging now homeless people to return to their rural homes, or intimating that people would be moved to rural areas. For instance, the Minister of Education, Aeneas Chigwedere, said, “People would be moved on to an appropriate place.” He went on to say that there is “nobody in Zimbabwe who does not have a rural home.” (The Minister is, in fact, incorrect in this regard as many of those living in shanty accommodation are originally from other countries, such as Malawi and Mozambique, who have no right of residence in any rural area in Zimbabwe.) In an editorial, The Herald, the daily newspaper that is a Government mouthpiece, urged “urbanites” to go “back to the rural home, to reconnect with one’s roots and earn an honest living from the soil our government repossessed under the land reform programme”. There is a degree of confusion in the statements of Government spokesmen: on one hand, there are spokesmen urging people to return home or stressing the need for the “industrialisation of the rural areas”, whilst on the other hand, there are spokesmen, like Didymus Mutasa, stating that people who are illegally settled in the rural areas will be removed. It is obvious that, for the ordinary family that has been displaced, it is not clear where they should go, and it is not obvious, apart from Caledonia Farm, that the Government has established any temporary accommodation to house displaced persons whilst the Government makes up its mind about its policy. It must be noted that in many rural areas there are already acute food shortages. Forcing more people into these areas will obviously increase this problem. Barring of humanitarian assistance Soon after the campaign started, there were a number of allegations that non-governmental organisations, wishing to assist people thrown out of their homes, had been prevented from doing so . In one report, it was alleged that senior 31 officials at the Social Welfare Ministry, which approves humanitarian assistance, said Governors of Provinces had been ordered to block donor groups from distributing food and clothes. This report suggested that, by accepting such aid, Government would in effect be admitting that there were grave shortcomings in this campaign. Another 32 possible reason for the reluctance to allow these organisations to provide food and shelter to urban people who had been rendered homeless was that such assistance might discourage people from returning to their rural homes as Government would have liked. In one report about the meeting between Government officials and nongovernmental organisations it is said, “civic sources had maintained that Government wants to force people to the rural areas. Churches and NGOs who have housed or helped the displaced people have been labelled enemies of the operation and told to stop.”