No less than 10 foreign and local observers were located at Bulawayo City Hall’s polling station on voting day. Those in the cadre represented official and quasi official observers from South Africa, the DRC, Lesotho and the Zimbabwe Legal Society. What an absolute waste. Bulawayo is a safe haven, why did they not leave the comfort of an urban centre and get out into the rural areas where the vote was being rigged? The money spent on getting the observers here, accommodating them (in luxury hotels), wining and dining them would have been better spent feeding some of the starving masses. They certainly did not earn my respect especially when one of the South Africans stated that her government sent her here to ensure there was no violence and the vote is legitimate because there are no dead bodies strewn about the streets. Cry beloved Africa for the crimes against humanity perpetrated on her people.

This Zim government will do anything to hold together their patchwork of lies and deceit! I was just speaking to someone who works for a large Bulawayo transport company. He said that on Thursday last week (24th March) the fuel companies were issued with a Ministerial directive to stop fuel supplies to all transport companies and other large consumers. Instead they were to supply to filling stations in and around Bulawayo until the elections were over! Well, its’s election day, and there still isn’t fuel readily available from the fi
lling stations. Doesn’t that tell you all? What desperate manipulation! What a direct admission of failure of the zanupf regime!

Our domestic worker (whom we fondly call Gogo – “granny” in Ndebele) came in this morning – laughing her head off. She has just come back from an Easter break with her family in Nkayi. Her first anecdote was from a zanupf rally held near her rural home.

The speaker had thundered away at the crowd for some time, then shouted “What has MDC done for you over the past five years?”. One very brave soul got up and retorted “What has zanupf done for us over the past TWENTY-FIVE years?”, at which the crowd collapsed into laughter, and started to drift away.

She also told us that she had got into commuter bus together with a staunch woman zanupf supporter. She lives quite close to us, and every now and then they hold wild noisy parties. That day, however, she was fuming and very unhappy indeed. She had a whole pile of zanupf T-shirts which she was finding impossible to give away – the people only wanted MDC T-shirts!

My small, half-dozen, circle of (white) friends, is probably more apathetic about this election than the previous two. There is no inclination to get involved or make monetary contributions. They are keeping a very low profile. To a lesser extent this is true of me too. I still strongly question the wisdom of the MDC to have gone back on its intial boycott of the election, with the political playing field so uneven.

The same apathy can be said to prevail with the half-dozen workers I employ. The frank, open exchanges of the last two elections debating policies no longer takes place. We are all too scared lest there should be a Zanu PF sympathiser amongst us. They do however concede that the township violence and harassment of 2000 and 2002 is absent this time round.