Gold panning

The international press is currently swamped with reports of the arrests of over 25 000 gold panners in Zimbabwe. Operation Chikorokoza Chapera ("No Illegal Panning") was launched in November last year, ostensibly to bring gold panning activities under control. With the implosion of the economy, this sector had been burgeoning, albeit illegally in most cases, as poverty-stricken Zimbabweans endlessly struggle to provide for themselves and their families. Make no mistake, this loss of livelihood is not an incidental side-effect of the operation, but it is its very raison d'etre. Just as they did with Operation Murambatsvina (Clean Out Filth) in 2005, the regime has purposely set out to destroy this activity, and with it, the lives of those involved.

This brutal operation is tantamount to genocide with constructive intent - the authors knew in advance that their actions would lead to death by starvation, depriving the poorest of the poor of their only - and last - means of feeding themselves and their families.

Not only have livelihoods been eliminated, but lives too. Since the beginning of January, the press - muzzled as it is - has still been able to report deaths as disused mines collapse on miners who are tear-gassed as they hide, seeking to evade arrest and others who have been shot by a police force bent on serving its despotic leader.

Killarney after Murambatsvina

On 25 May, Africa Day, the Government of Zimbabwe began an operation labelled "Operation Murambatsvina". While Government has translated this to mean "Operation Clean-up", the more literal translation of "murambatsvina" is "getting rid of the filth". The operation has continued throughout the month of June, and has affected virtually every town and rural business centre in the country. From Mount Darwin in the north, to Beitbridge in the south, Mutare in the East and Bulawayo in the west, no part of the nation has been spared the impact of what could be termed a slow-moving earthquake; every day the nation awakes to find more buildings have fallen around them, more families have been displaced. Families are often having their homes and possessions ruthlessly burnt to the ground, or are given a few hours to remove what they can save before bulldozers come in to demolish entire structures.

Destruction of the informal sector

Zimbabwe is a nation in dramatic economic decline. It is estimated that no more than 20% of the adult population is currently employed in the formal sector. Approximately 80% of adults in Zimbabwe therefore eke out an existence in the informal sector, either through subsistence farming or through informal employment in towns. By this means, they pay their rent, buy food for their children and send them to school. As many as 3-4 million Zimbabweans survive by informal employment, and their income is supporting another 4 million Zimbabweans at least. It is the unofficial backbone of the economy, and in a nation with no free health, housing or education, to remove the informal sector is to reduce Zimbabwe's poorest to a state of abject poverty.

In three weeks since the beginning of this "clean up', estimates of the displaced vary from 300,000 to over a million, and hundreds of thousands more have lost their sources of income in the informal sector. The Government, under the auspices of the Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises Development, began by arresting 20,000 vendors countrywide, destroying their vending sites, and confiscating their wares. Thousands more escaped arrest, but have lost their livelihoods. This process took one week in the first instance. Harare was among the worst affected cities: police action was brutal and unannounced. Sculpture parks along the main roads, which have been there for decades and feature as a tourist attraction in guide books, were smashed.

Gideon Gono

No other party in Zimbabwe's history surely ever had the sheer audacity that ZANU PF displays in, on the one hand, carrying out the most dastardly acts, and on the other, dressing up those acts to look respectable. Time and again they claim the most noble motives to justify the most ignoble deeds. So in the year 2000, when the party's popularity was plunging and in order to divert attention from the chronic failures in governance that were then showing up in significant social and economic problems, they undertook a programme of violent and unlawful farm invasions. They called it the Third Chimurenga and used their state-controlled propaganda machine to portray the exercise as correcting long-standing grievances arising from historic inequalities in land holding. A mask of respectability to conceal an unpalatable truth.