Sokwanele was invited to blog for Sky News this week on The Insider Blog. The Sky audience is much wider and far more diverse than ours, so we encourage you to visit The Insider Blog and please participate in the comments and discussion being generated there.

Our Friday entry for ‘The Insider Blog’

There is only one possible thing I could write about today, and it’s the looming stayaway planned for next week – I am writing this with real hope in my heart. I believe that the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions’ stayaway (nation wide strike) called for the 3 and 4 April might be successful.

I am hoping for the shops to be closed, the fuel queues gone, and the streets to be empty of cars and bicycles.

The stayaways called in the past have never been as visibly powerful as the vision I have just described.

Every stayaway is preceded by a lot of talk and soul searching on the part of both employers and employees. Everyone wants to support the stayaway, to stand united, but some people are scared. Some people have certainty about what they will do, but for others it’s more difficult.

Listening to someone talk about what to do on a stayaway is like watching a baby bird tremble on the edge of a twig: if it jumps, will it know that it can fly or will it tumble to the ground? You can almost see people nervously considering their odds.

There are many small signs that this stayaway might be different.

A very good friend of mine (who demanded I refer to him as a REAL war veteran in this blog) said to me yesterday that past stayaways presented employers with a “damned if you don’t” and “damned if you do” set of choices.

“Damned if you don’t” close your business and tell your workers to stay at home, because it means you’ll be passively accepting the terrible conditions of life in Zimbabwe. And “damned if you do”, because it means as an employer that you are publicly defying this regime and risking repercussions.

Make no mistake; those risks are still there. Even now, we are hearing stories that the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) is going around to factories and businesses in our town and threatening owners who close their businesses and warning them that they will be held responsible.

But we are also hearing that the police are abducting our leaders at gunpoint, and no one knows where they are being taken; and that the police are visiting the ZCTU offices and threatening and intimidating them; and we have fresh memories of the way Mugabe unleashed his vicious thugs on our leaders when they tried to attend the Save Zimbabwe Campaign rally.

This cannot go on anymore. We are angry and we have had enough.

My friend the real war vet has always honoured every single stayaway called and he has survived them all: his business has not been closed and his employees still work with him. He very strongly feels that the fear we all struggle with is mostly in our heads, and that Mugabe and his bullies are master manipulators of the state of fear.

The person who owns the business next door to his has never closed his business on a stayaway, but he does experience shame and guilt because he knows that fear has prevented him from supporting a cause he believes in.

My real war vet friend argues that our individual choices are different for this stayaway; they have changed to two options: “damned if you don’t” and “damned if you don’t”.

Zimbabweans are realising – just like that little bird – that the only way they will ever be able to fly free in our country is to take the risk and jump. The twig we stand on offers us no security anymore, because we can feel it breaking under our feet.

I was encouraged to hear today that the person who has the shop next door to my real war vet friend has said that this time he plans to close his business and join the stayaway.

He is still fearful, but he has no choice. His employees are talking about giving up their jobs because they can’t survive on their wages and he can’t afford to pay them more. He says he has to try and do something.

The fear he once felt for the thugs and bullies is now far outweighed by the fear he feels at the thought of losing his business and being unable to feed his family and his children.

I believe that the tide is turning and options are running out. The day when Zimbabweans all realise that they have no choice but to stand shoulder to shoulder and demand a new better government is not that far away any more.

I can feel the change in the air, and it really excites me.

Thank you for reading my blogs this past week. Please watch over us closely next week and in the weeks to come; pray for us, and stand with us in spirit.

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, stayaway, ZCTU, strike, poverty, employment, action

Sokwanele was invited to blog for Sky News this week on The Insider Blog. The Sky audience is much wider and far more diverse than ours, so we encourage you to visit The Insider Blog and please participate in the comments and discussion being generated there.

Our Thursday entry for ‘The Insider Blog’

Zimbabweans are in the dark and powerless, and I mean that literally: we often have no power and the lights are often out.

Last year we’d have a power cut about once a week depending where you lived, and we had a vague idea when they’d be coming.

‘Load shedding’ as it is called, was staggered across different areas on a more or less regular basis. If Tuesday was the night the lights went out for two or three hours, you could plan ahead and cook in advance.

This year the power cuts come with no warning and several times a week.

I rent a two-roomed cottage on a larger property. I have candleholders and matches in all the rooms, including the toilet. When the cut comes I walk around lighting candles.

The quality of the candles we get in Zimbabwe is appalling. Cheap Chinese imports that foam and froth rather than smoothly melt down like our Zimbabwe-made candles used to do.

The matches are just as bad; they break off and spit out a spark rather than strike and burn. It can take ten matches to light one candle.

As well as lighting the candles, I also (and this is very important) go around switching off all the lights at the wall, and I disconnect my TV from the wall. There is nothing worse than being woken up in the middle of the night by a sudden blaze of light when the power comes back on!

The only thing worse is when you find your TV no longer works because a power surge blew out its delicate electrics.

My mother has stopped going to her Bible Studies group because the power cuts are unpredictable. The church cannot afford to pay for candles.

She said that at her last meeting, when they were forced to stop reading their Bibles, her group sat and talked in the dark, mostly about how much we needed our government to be changed so solutions could be found.

When I heard that, I thought to myself that that was a true sign that God was on the side of the people! I have started to pray for more power cuts at meetings so people sit and talk together about the need for change.

When the electricity goes off during the night there is a sense of stillness and total silence that is hard to explain.

I am not a brave person during power cuts, so rather than enjoying the silence my ears strain for the sounds of burglars who I am convinced like to use the blackout to creep about undetected!

Last year my ears would be trying to hear thuds and clinks of burglar tools in between the loud clatter of someone’s petrol generator a few blocks down. But I’ve not been hearing as much of the generator recently – I suspect the price and scarcity of petrol has put an end to that solution.

Power cuts are a supermarkets’ worst nightmare. The shop where I buy my groceries stopped stocking certain kinds of groceries a long time ago. Ice cream – a luxury I couldn’t afford anyway – was the first to go. Essentials like milk are a bit risky. Sometimes the shop leaves them in the fridge and just waits for it to re-chill when the fridge comes on.

I buy it and often don’t know that it’s sour until I get home. Forget about refunds in this economy; besides, how do you prove it was the power cut in the shop fridge that made it go sour rather than a power cut affecting your fridge?

We have had three power cuts so far this week. My aunt’s son works at ZESA (Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority) and he told me yesterday that South Africa have not supplied electricity to Zimbabwe for three weeks now.

He said we used to get about 40% of our electricity from them, but because Zimbabwe can no longer pay its bills and we owe them a lot of money, they have started to switch us off. Is this about money or is it maybe ‘quiet diplomacy’ in action?

My ‘freezer’ is a tiny compartment over my very old fridge that has managed to keep going through it all. If the power cut is longer than a few hours, and it often is, I’m mopping water off the floor. Any longer than that and the meat defrosts and starts to smell funny, especially during the hot months. So I don’t store meat and perishables anymore; I can’t afford to throw things away.

I was moaning about this at the butchery where I occasionally buy meat. The person serving me just laughed and pointed to their large freezers: only one out of the three they had was working. Two had ‘blown out’ due to power surges and they can’t get spare parts to repair them. The third stocked frozen chickens and cuts of meat packed in plastic. “How do you think we feel when all that goes off?” he said. He has a point.

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, ZESA, Zimbabwe Electricty Supply Authority, Mugabe, power cuts, power supply, South Africa, quiet diplomacy

Sokwanele was invited to blog for Sky News this week on The Insider Blog. The Sky audience is much wider and far more diverse than ours, so we encourage you to visit The Insider Blog and please participate in the comments and discussion being generated there.

Our Wednesday entry for ‘The Insider Blog’

More people die in Zimbabwe every day than in Darfur or Iraq, but we are dying silently and the world doesn’t seem to know how bad it really is.

Zimbabwe’s HIV/AIDs statistics are among the highest in the world and this terrible pandemic, combined with a lack of drugs in our country, corruption by government ministers, food shortages and 1,800% inflation, makes it a swift killer in our society.

Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is 34 years for women and 37 years for men.

I would really like you to think about that for a moment. How old are you? How much longer would that leave you to live or have you already exceeded our life expectancy?

Attending funerals is a regular occurrence in Zimbabwe.

I know many people who have died over the last few years.

Last year two of my work colleagues died within the space of a couple of months of each other. I go to funerals, I experience the awfulness of funerals, and then I come home.

But even though this is ‘normal’, I am sometimes woken up and stunned by something, and I am left horrified and shocked and very sensitive to how extreme life is in Zimbabwe.

For example, a couple of days ago I attended a child’s funeral. This is hard enough as it is, but through my tears I noticed how many freshly dug graves there were in the children’s section of the cemetery, clear evidence that lots of children are dying.

Even worse, this is a new cemetery and it’s already almost full.

I saw two women digging a child-sized grave on their own, and I was told that this was because they could not afford to pay a gravedigger to do it for them.

I was told they were alone because their men were probably out of the country working in South Africa.

The painful reality of what I saw in that place was emphasised by our Zimbabwean tradition of leaving some of the possessions belonging to the person who has died on the grave.

For children this means I was looking at a scene of small graves with bottles, toys, baby baths and other plastic pieces of childhood treasures piled on them. It is wrong, very very wrong, to see these sort of things.

I felt overcome with grief and anger at what I saw. It is like being trapped inside a horror film – a truly terrible thing to see.

I want to bring a chair to this section of the graveyard, and make Robert Mugabe sit in it for a day.

I want him to sit there for hours looking at the graves and the toys. I want the message of what this means to wash over him, for him to know he’s destroying our country’s future.

He is stripping the joy from parents’ lives, and he is creating a legacy where he will be remembered for many years as the man who inflicted misery and pain and suffering on a nation.

Most of all, I want him to step out from the security of his Mercedes Benz and his soldier patrolled mansions, and I want him to stand here in the blazing sun in that dusty graveyard surrounded by bright plastic toys that testify to the lives of children and babies.

I want him to talk to the parents, to be forced to explain to them – face to face – why he is doing nothing to help them save their children’s lives.

Sometimes I can go through a day and just live my life like everyone has to – that’s surviving – one step at a time. Then there are days like that one, where I am consumed with rage and grief and pure frustration. I am still furious and torn-up two days later, and it makes me very ready to march for change and to defy this regime.

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, Mugabe, HIV, AIDS, funerals, life expectancy, health, infant mortality

Well now! What have we here? Another admission of failure by the zanupf government? Or another act of paranoia by bob?

‘What is it?” you may ask, and indeed, well you may.

These days, the zanupf government seems to alternate from shooting itself in the left foot, then the right, then the left…… ad nauseum!

Well, I’m talking about the latest news that Angola is supposedly going to be sending 3000 of their “ninja” police militia to Zimbabwe, and that, in fact , these guys are due here any minute now. So – is it true? Have bob’s thugs been busy behind closed doors, making careful strategic plans to rescue mugabe from the stewpot?

I really wonder if this is true, or just another figment of the propaganda monster’s well-fertilised imagination. I recall, over the past few months, huge business deals with the Russians and the Chinese that were reported by government ministers, only to have the so-called partners, denying it within days.

So – should we be shaking in our boots? Should we lock ourselves in our rooms at night? Should we underfeed the dog to make sure that he is extra hungry and ready to attack strangers on sight? I’m not so sure myself.

One problem I foresee is that the average rank and file militia man is neither well spoken in his own language, nor fluent in others. Are these portuguese-speaking demons, coming with their own translators, or have they all been issued with the Angolan militia’s standard Portuguese-to-English/English-to-Portuguese camouflage mini-dictionaries? I posed the question to my brother: “That’s easy to solve”, he replied, grinning, holding up his right hand in a familiar (and rather impolite) gesture. “I’m sure they’ll understand sign language!”

Another thought – I wonder how the National Youth service will feel about these guys – (lets not be too formal – lets call them the “ninnies”) having earned their title of “green bombers” (let’s call them the “greenies”) by unleashing well trained, drug and alcohol heightened assaults with blunt weapons on unarmed, untrained and unsuspecting civilians, whilst backed up by armed police and army (ooh – that takes a lot of bravery that does!).

Are they about to be knocked off their perch? Are they going to be upstaged? Beware the backlash bob!

Then what about you mr gideon gono – financial wizard and saviour of our bankrupted nation? Has bob told you that he is bringing these guys in? Has he told you what it will cost to feed and maintain them? You can bet your collection of silver teaspoons that Angola will not be sending them at their own expense.

Yes sir, the “greenies” get Z$1.2 million a month. What will the “ninnies” be paid, seeing as they will not be on home soil and will need danger pay? I’ll bet my collection of beer cans that they won’t want Angolan rupees (or whatever they use in that part of the world). Nope, I bet they’ll want US dollars. So remember! When you next trade your forex on the street – that buyer may well be gideon in disguise, buying up all your US dollars to pay the “ninnies”. Sorry, “greenies”, but you’re no longer going to be flavour of the day!

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, Mugabe, propaganda, Angola, military

Sokwanele was invited to blog for Sky News this week on The Insider Blog. The Sky audience is much wider and far more diverse than ours, so we encourage you to visit The Insider Blog and please participate in the comments and discussion being generated there.

Our Tuesday entry for ‘The Insider Blog’

People are talking about the recent news that Angola had agreed to send 2,500 police militia to boost the Zimbabwean Police Force.

The Angolan government has denied this, but no one believes they’re telling the truth.

Zimbabweans have lost trust with governments in the SADC region, and we think they might lie for Mugabe and secretly help him keep us oppressed. The memory of the stolen elections, which were declared free and fair by South Africa, still feels very fresh. How can we trust them to help us?

In my area, Matabeleland, around 20,000 civilians were killed in the early 1980s during Mugabe’s military operation code-named ‘Gukuruhundi’. Many more were brutally tortured.

The Fifth Brigade who carried out the vicious murders were trained by the North Koreans. The cruelty and types of things they did to people defy civilised imaginations.

I know people who are still psychologically scarred by witnessing atrocities and living with fear. I have a friend whose mother still suffers from pain caused by torture injuries inflicted on her more than twenty years ago.

So when we hear talk of foreign forces coming in to ‘help’ Mugabe, that’s the first thing that comes to mind for those of us who live in Matabeleland. We are even more alarmed when we hear that the Angolan police militia are referred to as ‘ninjas’ because of their brutal tactics.

I should be objective about this and say ‘it has been denied by the Angolan government so it’s probably just a rumour’. But like most of the people in my area of Zimbabwe I don’t trust the regional leaders to stop an injustice BEFORE it happens, so I regard any comment by regional leaders with suspicion.

Like everyone in Matabeleland, I know it as an absolute fact that Mugabe is capable of murdering civilians on a mass scale. It has happened before.

I hope the world is wiser now than it was decades ago, and I hope it doesn’t react too slowly on this issue. If Angola does send militia police to Zimbabwe, I hope the world knows that that means bloodshed for innocent people.

Sokwanele was invited to blog for Sky News this week on The Insider Blog. The Sky audience is much wider and far more diverse than ours, so we encourage you to visit The Insider Blog and please participate in the comments and discussion being generated there.

Our Monday entry for ‘The Insider Blog’

Hello.

My day begins with a 30 minute walk to a place where I wait for a work colleague to pick me up.

Sometimes I have to walk further because we change the pick up spot every week. If I stay in one place too long, other people in the area soon learn that I have a lift organised and start waiting with me.

My work colleague doesn’t mind an extra one or two squeezing in, but objects to five or six trying to sit on laps to fit in the car.

I am extremely lucky to have a lift. Other work colleagues who rely on the ETs (Emergency Taxis – mini-bus cabs) are in a terrible situation. The country’s annual 1,800% inflation has forced the ET fares from $3,000 to $5,000 overnight (£6-8)- and that is just one way.

ETs divide their routes into sectors so the costs can sometimes be double that if you have to catch two ETs to get home.

An average commercial worker clears around $30,000 a week (£60). So if a person is spending $10,000 a day on ETs their transport bill comes to nearly twice the amount they earn in a week. What about food, school, fees, and rent?

Last week the employees of a major department store refused to go to work because their earnings didn’t cover their transport. The government’s solution at the beginning of this month was to force employers to give their employees an extra $60 000 (£120)on top of their wages as a transport allowance.

But before the month has even ended, inflation has made the figure nonsensical. This is why we see so many people walking these days.

Walking 15km to work is bad enough, but worse when you have to factor in Mugabe’s thugs trying to enforce an illegal curfew by intimidating and beating up civilians out on the streets at night.

One of my friends described how his walk home is taking him twice as long as it should because he is choosing back roads to avoid the patrolling thugs. He says he’s feeling exhausted all the time now because he can’t afford to eat three meals a day anymore, and all the walking is sapping his energy.

People are talking about having to make a choice; most of them are thinking about whether it is even worth working any more.

So I am incredibly lucky to have a colleague who gives lifts to us. In return, we share the cost of his fuel. The price of fuel goes up almost daily: it was $8 000 a week ago (£15)and today it is $18 000 (£35)in most garages.

We also help him by taking it in turns to sit in his car when he needs to queue for fuel (a person can queue for days to get hardly any fuel). But the impact of inflation tells me that it won’t be long before the whole country is walking a very long tiring walk to work every day – the whole country with the exception of the Zanu PF elite.

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, Sky News, The Insider Blog, transport, ETs, Emergency Taxis, inflation, economy

Sokwanele was invited to blog for Sky News this week on The Insider Blog. The Sky audience is much wider and far more diverse than ours, so we encourage you to visit The Insider Blog and please participate in the comments and discussion being generated there. We’ll post up our Monday blog on ‘This is Zimbabwe’ at the end of today.

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, Sky News, Sokwanele, The Insider Blog

This news footage fresh from South Africa (22 March 2007)

UPDATE:Channel Four News has uncovered a secret meeting between the Zimbabwe vice president – Joyce Mujuru, a leading contender to take over from Robert Mugabe, and the South African vice president, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, in Johannesburg. Watch the report here. It includes footage of an interview with Archbishop Pius Ncube

And this from Business Day today:

THERE are signs that regional leaders are growing impatient with the way SA is handling Zimbabwe’s political crisis.

There is a danger to SA that our Southern African Development Community (SADC) partners may begin to move in way that could dent Pretoria’s diplomatic image in the region.

Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa’s assertion this week that quiet diplomacy has failed to solve the political chaos and economic meltdown in Zimbabwe is just an illustration of this. There is frustration and a little malice in the remark. Mwanawasa must have known his words would sting President Thabo Mbeki. But they are also heartfelt, bemoaning as they do the sight of Pretoria missing out on a wonderful opportunity to finally abandon quiet diplomacy in favour of a more direct approach on the issue.

Observers thought that Pretoria would, finally, emerge from its diplomatic torpor in the wake of last week’s savage clampdown on the Zimbabwean opposition. Its silence, however, has been deafening and it is interesting that not only did Mwanawasa say his piece, but that he said it in Namibia, which has increasingly been viewed as a close Zimbabwe ally. This might have prompted former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda — historically a potent supporter of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe — to say that what was needed most was the creation of a committee of eminent persons to mediate Zimbabwe’s worsening political crisis.

Mwanawasa’s and Kaunda’s statements were made at a crucial time in young SA’s diplomatic history — just days after SA completed its tenure at the United Nations Security Council by blocking discussion on Zimbabwe and ahead of next week’s SADC summit.

It is quite possible that regional leaders looking at the Zimbabwe issue next week could outpace SA on the issue and leave Pretoria looking both isolated and ineffectual.

Putting big and powerful Pretoria in its place would be an appealing prospect for our poorer northern neighbours.

Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe, Zambia, Levy Mwanawasa, Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki, Quiet Diplomacy, South Africa