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I’ve recently heard yet another story showing the true nature of zanupf. This refers back to the recent Mayoral elections in Bulawayo.

Having just lost the Bulawayo Mayoral election to the MDC in a memorable and resounding defeat (even - as some say - with vote-rigging), they saw fit to take out their anger on the residents of the high-density suburbs.

The background here is that the City’s water supply infrastructure has been deteriorating, most of it having been installed well before Independence in 1980. Under the harsh economic climate that prevails, the Council has been unable to keep up with repairs to the system, let alone to replace it. Because of this, several of the high density suburbs - Emakandeni, Njube, Entumbane, Lobengula and Magwegwe - have had erratic water supplies. To try and alleviate the hardship of residents, the Council has been sending bowsers of water to the affected suburbs, supplemented by bowsers from the Army, where they fill residents’ containers at central points.

Now what would you expect the losers of an election to do? Maybe accept with good grace, maybe go and drown their sorrows, or go home and kick the dog? No - not zanupf! Those ideas would be far too reasonable - they don’t cause any human misery or suffering! No, zanupf - lead by party stalwart, Sithembiso Nyoni - forced the deliveries of water to these suburbs to be halted! The residentswere forced to walk many kilometres to adjoining suburbs to beg for water, then carry it several kilometres home!

The sheer venom, the sheer and deliberate denial of human rights by zanupf never ceases to amaze me!

Zimbabwe
Politics
Human Rights

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People have disappeared and in the comfort of my electrified home, with the e
ase of running water and the reassurance of a fridge full of food, I can sit here and pretend that all is well in this country of ours… This is me, here in Zim, trying to divorce myself from the African reality rather than judge it with the eyes of someone from an outside world where nobody queues for bread, sugar, water and whatever other precious commodity has become unavailable.

How do you make real an environment where the norm is people denied food, shelter and any basic human need?

Untold suffering in Zimbabwe is currently being swept under the carpet of the lunatic dictator. The intensity of victimization is devious with a government that brazenly lies and gets away with it time and time and time again.

Yet a strange calm has settled upon the land. I don’t know if it’s the calm before the storm or just simple resignation. I see people so downtrodden that any hope for the future or belief in simple human dignity is dead and gone. This is a mindset that is so deeply entrenched that it is seemingly impossible to change, how do you breathe hope back into Zimbabwe’s heart?

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The government promised to build 5 000 houses by the end of this month (initial deadline was July but that was moved back to end of August) to help alleviate the humanitarian crises that it created by carrying out ‘Operation Maratsvimba’. It seems the only thing in sight now is d-day!

Reports from most areas around the country say that the construction of housing has either not yet started or is happening very slowly. The few ‘houses’ that have actually materialised are incomplete. Sewerage pipes, electricity lines and water access have not been installed which leaves these premises uninhabitable. On visiting one of the building sites last week, a reporter was told that construction had been halted because of lack of fuel and cement, although both prison inmates and members of the youth brigade (green bombers) were seen clearing land.

With the impossible target of 5000 houses on an inadequate budget, it seems that the government has become quite resourceful with cutting costs. A few weeks ago we heard how street vendors were ‘detained’, taken to these building sites and forced to do manual labour. No formal charges were made against the vendors - the police station and court house were simply bypassed. Consuming alcohol in Zim also has its unique hazards. Apparently an accusation of consuming alcohol in a public place will now also lead straight to the construction sites for a bit of manual labour - all saving the government a buck here and there in wages.

With the severe shortage of fuel, cement and other building materials it looks like mugabe and his cronies are going to have egg on their faces again. More empty promises that simply cannot be kept!

I for one am going to be counting down the days. 9 days to d-day and, by the sounds of it, about 5000 houses behind schedule! That makes the new target approximately 555 houses a day, oh… and let’s not forget that we still have no fuel. This is Zimbabwe and one thing that we have all learned over the past five years is that we never say never, so, you go boys, go!

Zimbabwe, Human Rights, Refugees

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A friend of mine was given
this bumper sticker a few days ago, although he says he’s too scared to actually use it on his car. The words translate to “The people say no. Do not buy izhing-zhong” (from Ndebele). The stickers are obviously part of a campaign against the influx of cheap Chinese goods flooding our market - the developing Zimbabwe-Chinese relationship has been mentioned previously in this blog here, and here. The image of ‘China’ giving two fingers to Zimbabweans while nonchalantly crushing the Zimbabwean bird says it all: this is a Zimbabwean protest against Chinese ‘colonisation’.

It amuses me to think that Mugabe ranted on and on and on (and boy, he can drone on and on in his speeches!) about saying ‘no to colonisation’ by the British. “Never again”, he thundered at bemused audiences held captive (and I mean that literally, because they are often forced to attend his boring speeches) by the concept that the British were trying to take over Zimbabwe again. With typical Zimbabwean humour, our country’s bemusement soon turned to amusement, responding to the ‘anti-Blair’ campaign by asking ‘Who is Auntie Blair?’.

The hard-hitting emphasis on British colonisation at election time suggested to me that mugabe needed to force the thought of colonisation into unwilling minds. What he failed to appreciate was exactly how savvy the Zimbabwean people are. We don’t buy the British colonisation story because it’s rubbish, and we’re smart enough to know the truth of that fact no matter how long mugabe drums on about it.

We’re also savvy enough to spot genuine colonisation when we do see it. And what’s more, we don’t need a politician to lead us by the nose through the ins and outs of what happens when a country is in the process of being colonised and asset stripped. Nor do we need to be persuaded to make efforts to resist that happening in our own backyard. This bumper sticker is evidence of all that.

I hope with all my heart that this sort of resistance action doesn’t spin into heartache and misery for our local Chinese community. The bumper sticker message, to me, says, ‘Say no, to Chinese colonisation’ and ‘Say no to Chinese products’. It doesn’t vilify local Chinese people who have been selling Zimbabwean products to Zimbabwean people for a very long time. I hope Zimbabweans continue to be savvy and recognise the distinction.

* Sokwanele Note: Read more about Chinese colonisation on the main Sokwanele site - On Becoming a Chinese colony : 21 June 2005

Zimbabwe, China, Mugabe, Protest, Activism

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When I got up yesterday morning, I felt different. Yes, something had definitely changed since yesterday! I eased a bleary eye through a crack in the curtains to get a foretaste of the weather. Slight haze and some light, low cloud, temperature moderate - not even slightly chilly. Prognosis - a mild
day, a sort of hazy day. Might get muggy by midday. Well hello, African summer! Is winter finally over, or is this just a sneak preview?

Then I thought - is this a sign? Last night I read that Bob, having been basically shunned by most of his former international cronies, was possibly under serious pressure from South Africa to make sweeping political and economic changes in Zimbabwe if he wanted loans from them. The mind boggles! Will this dream actually come true?

But hey! Who cares? It doesn’t matter what anyone says now. It doesn’t matter how much posturing and rhetoric goes on between bob and South Africa, or even what skullduggery is going on behind the scenes there. Look at it - whether he tells South Africa to sod off (doesn’t our ageing bully love to do that), or accepts the deal at first then reneges on it (true to his total lack of principles), or even if he accepts the deal (he has done some unbelieveable things during his reign, but never deliberately tried suicide), it all comes back to the same thing - the evil Grinch is about to get his come-uppance! He has reduced himself to a pathetic bankrupt (financially and morally) beggar who has nowhere to go (besides the corner he has so meticulously painted himself into)! The thaw has started! Summer is on its way! His ice castle - it’s walls built of so many cold hearts - is melting in the summer sun. The only question in this fairy tale is ….. how soon do we all get to live happily ever after?

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While waiting for someone at Kensington shopping centre in Harare on 2 August at around midday, I noticed a police truck reversing into an overgrown piece of ground running parallel to Cork Road. As I moved closer to observe, the policemen told curious onlookers not to come near. They then proceeded to tug and pull a body out of a ditch, put it into a body box and drove away.

When they had left the scene, I asked some of the people nearby what was going on. “Some people live in that ditch, they are homeless and one must have died last night,” they said.

The next morning I returned to the ditch and spoke to a man I’ll call “J”, who explained that the dead man was his friend and he was about 45 years old. “J” said that they used to live at Mufakose, but after their shacks had been destroyed during Operation Murambatsvina, they had been unable to afford to rent and had resorted to living in the ditch.

He told me they had survived by scavenging leftover food from dustbins and by collecting plastic bottles which brought in small amounts of money. “J” explained that Richard had died at around 4 o’clock the previous morning, having spoken of severe stomach pains.

“J” said he was sad about his friend and would change his life if he could, “but I can’t do it by myself.”

Tragically the man who passed away becomes just another unreported, unknown statistic of the increasingly horrific situation in Zimbabwe under the Mugabe regime.

Zimbabwe, Human Rights, Poverty

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Monday and Tuesday are public holidays. In past years everyone would rush home for a few days break. This year not many people are travelling.

My friend Mavis told me that in May this year she paid $130 000 for the bus trip to get to her rural home which is 2 hours away. The same journey now costs $300 000.

In addition
to this she is expected to take home food for the family. Her elderly parents do not have enough food to give her meals for a three day period.

Mavis said she cannot afford to pay the bus fare home and purchase additional food. She is battling as it is, and is now trying to save up to pay for next term’s school fees. She puts her own child’s welfare before that of her parents, and hopes that other family members will be going home.

She is very distressed.

She comments that she does not know if she will ever see her parents again and yet, the journey is only a 2 hour drive away. What a sad, sick situation we are all in!

Zimbabwe, Economics, Inflation

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An exhausted and emotionally drained friend described how thousands of people have been dropped around the province where he lives and those trying to help them are losing track of where they are. He said many of those that did call in were saying that they hadn’t eaten or had shelter since they were forced to leave the holding camps where they’d initially been held.

He also told me that World Vision would not distribute food until they had a full register of those displaced.

His comment to that was a bitter and completely unamused, ‘ha, ha’.

Then he said: “People are effectively being disappeared and there is no way we will be able to document their demise”.

It’s extremely worrying.

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Time to bring you up to speed on Sokwanele’s recent mailings:

Reward or Retribution: the politicisation of Zimbabwe’s food supply

This article, posted on our website here, looks at how food is currently controlled by Zanu-PF on the basis of voting patterns following the March parliamentary elections.

Those communities who voted ZANU PF in the March 31 election are now being amply rewarded with food hand-outs; those known to have voted for the opposition are simply denied access to the scarce and tightly-controlled supplies. Reward time or retribution time, pure and simple.

This article describes examples from three different places.

Dissenting voices: students protest in Zimbabwe

Protest still occasionally takes place in Zimbabwe, despite the government’s best efforts to prevent people from exercising their democratic right to voice their views. Read about it here.

Transfrontier Park and World Heritage Site under threat

This article looks at how Zimbabwe’s rich natural heritage is being disrupted by government negligence, poaching and uncontrolled land invasions.

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