African Think Tanks stretch out their hands to the people of Zimbabwe
Temba A Nolutshungu

Nine African think tanks, concerned about conditions in Zimbabwe are co-sponsors of the Zimbabwe Papers: A Positive Agenda for Zimbabwean Renewal – Coalition for Market & Liberal Solutions; Zimbabwe; IMANI: The Centre for Policy and Education, Ghana; Initiative for Public Policy Analysis, Nigeria; Institute for African Economics, Guinea; Law Review Project, South Africa; Le Centre des Affaires Humaines, Burkino Faso; Free Market Foundation, South Africa and Centre for Ethics and Technological Development, Nigeria.

The Zimbabwe Papers contain proposals for reform that, if implemented, would not only rapidly improve conditions for the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe but also make them once again a thriving and productive nation. The country that was once described as the ‘bread-basket of Africa’, can regain its former title if it applies sensible policies such as those outlined and explained in the carefully prepared proposals.

Excerpts from the papers describe the reasons for their preparation:

‘Zimbabwean citizens have had a hard time over the last decade. Life expectancy has declined, the majority of the people are unemployed, nearly half the people do not have enough food to eat, and the children have suffered terribly from malnourishment and illness.’

‘The suffering of the Zimbabwean people is not the consequence of historical or external factors. It is entirely due to policies adopted, decisions made, and actions taken by the government of Zimbabwe. Many people have been the victims of violence perpetrated by the government, the institution that was supposed to protect them and provide them with an institutional environment in which they could lead happy and productive lives.’

‘African friends of Zimbabwe, who have observed the suffering of its people with helpless concern for many years, wish to assist in the best way they can. Schooled in political economy, they have prepared documents that offer proposals for policy changes that can be used to bring about reforms to transform Zimbabwe: reforms that can restore it to its rightful place as one of Africa’s most thriving, peaceful and prosperous countries.’

‘When the opportunity for change arises, the people of Zimbabwe will need to act quickly to put policies in place that will change their lives for the better, and dramatically improve the prospects of future generations. High economic growth is a matter of choice, not destiny. It depends on the nature of the policies, laws, and institutions that are put in place by the people of a country to ensure that they have good governance and economic and social conditions that lead to peace, economic opportunity and prosperity.’

Some of the ideas for reform put forward in the Papers deal with:

Currency stabilisation
Economies are destabilised by currency inflation and crippled by hyperinflation. The death of the Zimbabwe dollar and the formal adoption of a choice-in-currency policy, with the SA rand, US dollar and Botswana pula in most general use, is a positive step towards currency stabilisation and the revival of the economy. Ensuring that there is not a recurrence of currency instability must remain a permanent feature of future economic policy.

Tax reform
Private capital investment, not aid, is the most essential financial requirement for the revival of the Zimbabwe economy. A competitive tax environment will be necessary to attract capital investment and provide citizens with incentives to rebuild the economy. Low taxes and simplified tax laws will encourage foreign investment and the entrepreneurial activity that is needed to rapidly lift the country out of poverty.

Trade
Lowering trade barriers, improving infrastructure and streamlining customs have the potential to bring about enormous improvements in the people’s general welfare. An increased flow of products and people across the country’s borders will attract ideas, entrepreneurial talent and technology. More active trade will improve relations with neighbouring countries and bring about greater political stability.

Property rights
Restoring the inviolability of private property rights is a crucial requirement for the future economic progress of Zimbabwe. A strong constitutional and statutory framework for the protection of property rights against arbitrary seizure is vitally necessary to gain and retain the confidence of potential investors.

Mineral rights
Abundant natural resources do not automatically translate into prosperity for the people. The allocation and subsequent protection of mineral rights have to be carried out within a transparent framework that is free of arbitrary government decision-making, respected by the country’s people, and trusted by investors. Efficient extraction will follow, jobs will be created, and citizens will gain the greatest benefit from the country’s natural resources.

Water
That water is a necessity of life does not mean that the government should provide it. Clearly defined, enforceable and transferable water rights that allow people to buy the water they need, provides the people, including the poor, with greater access to the water than is provided by government monopolisation of water rights.

Health care
Good health is essential for human flourishing and government’s role is to create the circumstances in which people can live healthy and productive lives. This does not mean that government should provide health care, any more than it should provide food, clothing or shelter. Rather, it means that government should create conditions within which the maintenance of good health is possible.

Unemployment
Zimbabwe’s general economic problems are not the only reason for its high unemployment rate. The situation is exacerbated by regulations intended to ‘protect’ employees. If it is difficult to fire employees, firms are less likely to hire people. Employment contracts governed by Zimbabwe’s common law will provide employees with protection without creating barriers to employment: reform measures should therefore restore to employees and employers their contractual rights.

Freeing enterprise
Business regulations in Zimbabwe are confusing, arbitrary and costly; they inhibit business start-ups, repel foreign investment, reduce productivity and depress wages. Regulations that unnecessarily inhibit economic activity should be swept away in order to allow entrepreneurs and businesses to kick start the process of economic growth.

Controlling violence
Few people would choose to live in a society rampant with violence. Preventing violence should therefore be the highest priority of any government. Zimbabwe reform must reduce violence, crime and arbitrary violation of people’s rights.

Free speech and the media
Few rights are more fundamental and more crucial to our well-being than the right to free speech and free expression. Freedom of speech and expression, including freedom of the press and other media, freedom to receive or impart information or ideas, and academic freedom, must be guaranteed in the new Zimbabwe constitution.

The ideas for reform contained in the Zimbabwe Papers are not comprehensive. They are those that from all accounts appear to be most essential and urgent. A copy of the full report is available at http://zimbabwepapers.wordpress.com/

Author: Temba A Nolutshungu is a director of the Free Market Foundation and a Zimbabwe Papers commissioner. This article may be republished without prior consent but with acknowledgement to the author. The views expressed in the article are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the members of the Foundation.

FMF Feature Article / 19 May 2009 3 years ago

^{(with apologies to Charles Dickens)}4 years ago

Courtesy of money.co.uk

By Charlotte Cardingham Jan. 12, 2009

The country’s central bank has today released the new note into circulation in their attempt to battle hyperinflation.

Zimbabwe’s central bank has today launched a $50billion note into circulation, despite the currency being virtually worthless.

According to today’s estimates the $50billion note will trade at $1.25 US dollars on the black market and have enough purchase power to buy just two loaves of bread or three newspapers.

Three weeks previous, when the government introduced a $10billion note, the equivalent £50billion would have been worth $3.30 US dollars, illustrating the currency’s severe decline in value.

A $20billion note has also been released as part of Acting Finance Minister, Patrick Chinamasa’s bid to tackle the cash shortages currently gripping the country.

This actually represents the second issue of such high value notes after the government were forced to revalue the currency and remove 10 zeros (effectively turning Z$10billion to just Z$1) in August last year.

Poverty stricken Zimbabwe is currently struggling with an unprecedented economic crisis. Almost 80% of its population is unemployed, its currency is dropping in value by almost 100% a day and inflation is running at a staggering 231million%. As a point of comparison, the official rate of inflation in the UK, the Consumer Prices Index, currently sits at 4.1%.

Hyperinflation has become such an issue that few are trading in the nation’s official currency. US dollars and South African rand have instead been adopted as a more viable alternative.

Even the government have acknowledged the futility of the Zimbabwean economy and in September licensed over a thousand shops to sell goods in foreign currency. Everything from food to fuel, property and mobile phone credit can now be bought with non-Zimbabwean funds.

While the situation is nothing short of dire it is difficult to see how this move by Zimbabwe’s central bank will better the situation.

“I am not really sure what these notes would be for,” commented Zimbabwean economist John Robertson in an interview with CNN. “No one now accepts the local currency. It is a waste of resources to print Zimbabwe dollar notes now.”

Many have argued that a resolution of the country’s grid-locked government can be the only possible reprieve for the situation. 4 years ago

Courtesy of Time.com

By Alex Perry Monday, Dec. 01, 2008

Cholera is one of the simplest diseases to prevent or cure. To kill the cholera bacterium in water, just boil it. To treat the chronic diarrhea and potentially fatal dehydration that results from cholera, take a liter of water, a teaspoon of salt, eight teaspoons of sugar, mix, and drink; or, for patients too weak to drink, administer intravenously.

You have to be destitute not to be able to afford a fire. You have to be just as poor not to afford salt and sugar. And you have to have ruinous public sanitation not to be able to filter out the feces of an infected person from the water supply (ingesting fecal matter is the most common way for cholera to spread). So it is a stark indication of how far Zimbabwe has fallen that a country that used to export food is now in the grip of a cholera epidemic that the World Health Organization (WHO) says has claimed 412 lives and infected 9,908 people. South Africa’s Sunday Times said 400 new cholera cases were arriving at a treatment center in the township of Budiriro every day. Aid groups on the ground — UNICEF, Medecins Sans Frontieres, German Agro Action and the WHO have between them set up 36 treatment centers — are working on a scenario of 10,000 deaths and 60,000 infected by next March. The outbreak began in the east of the country and now affects the entire eastern portion, said the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It is also hitting cities hard, including the capital Harare, where it can be expected to infect more people more rapidly because of greater population density. The epidemic has also spread to neighboring Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique.

The root cause of Zimbabwe’s woes is the power struggle between President Robert Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, led by Morgan Tsvangirai. This, by itself, has been bad enough — Mugabe and his security services unleashed a campaign of violence that has killed more than 200 people when they lost control of parliament and Mugabe came second to Tsvangirai in a general election in March this year. (See pictures of the political crisis in Zimbabwe.)

But, in the context of Africa’s worst countries, 200 deaths, despotism, brutality and the corruption of the regime elite is all too usual. The cholera epidemic indicates Zimbabwe is entering a new stage: a humanitarian crisis that affects tens of thousands inside the country and, with hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring over Zimbabwe’s borders, all southern Africa too. After initially denying there was a problem, Zimbabwe’s regime changed its tune last week, saying it could not cope with the health crisis. “With the coming of the rainy season, the situation could get worse,” said deputy health minister Edwin Muguti. “Our problems are quite simple. We need to be helped.” 4 years ago

Courtesy of CNN.com

By Eliott C. McLaughlin

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said Wednesday that Zimbabwe is in shambles and warned that deaths from starvation and a cholera outbreak threaten to surge with the rainy season approaching.

Bemoaning Zimbabwe’s decline is a familiar refrain for the embattled head of the Movement for Democratic Change. His most recent remarks, however, were backed by former President Carter, who returned from a five-day trip to neighboring South Africa this week and declared Zimbabwe “a basket case.”

Tsvangirai also expressed frustration with attempts to form a unity government between his group and the ruling Zanu-PF party. He said he has asked that South African ex-President Thabo Mbeki recuse himself as mediator between the two parties.

The Zimbabwean government quickly countered Tsvangirai’s allegations that President Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF were responsible for the problems gripping the country.

“The government is very committed to ensure that the humanitarian crisis is addressed. It would be wrong for the MDC to blame it on the government,” Foreign Affairs Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi said.

Addressing Tsvangirai’s allegations that cholera deaths could soon top 50 a day and that the Mugabe-led government seems intent on covering it up, Mumbengegwi noted that Zimbabwe is not the only country where cholera is a problem. Watch why world leaders call the situation in Zimbabwe shocking »

“No government would want its people to suffer. Cholera is not peculiar to Zimbabwe,” he said. “We hear it is now in South Africa, too, but we cannot relax because of that. We have to fight it as Zimbabweans.”

A report in the state-run Herald newspaper Wednesday said the government has kicked off an information campaign to inform citizens of “the do’s and don’ts to combat the disease.”

The government is also drilling boreholes to find clean, subterranean water that can be pumped to the surface for drinking and bathing, the Herald reported.

The World Health Organization said last week that almost 300 people have died of cholera since August and more than 6,000 cases have been reported.

Tsvangirai said Wednesday that conditions would worsen this month as the rainy season brings steamy downpours to much of Zimbabwe, especially the eastern mountain forests.

Carter, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Graca Machel, wife of former South Africa President Nelson Mandela – all of whom belong to a group of world leaders called the Elders – had hoped to visit Zimbabwe on their recent trip to the region but were denied visas, according to Tsvangirai and a statement from the Carter Center.

“Mr. Mugabe would prefer that the suffering that he and Zanu-PF have caused, and continue to cause, remains in the dark,” Tsvangirai said in a statement, adding that because the Movement for Democratic Change and Zanu-PF cannot form a partnership after months of wrangling, “the MDC must instead work with those Zimbabwean organizations, groups and individuals to address the humanitarian crisis.”

The humanitarian problems illustrate the political quagmire in Zimbabwe, where a power-sharing agreement that Mugabe and Tsvangirai signed in September has yet to take effect.

Carter issued a statement Tuesday condemning what he said was Harare’s decision to renege on an agreement to allow him, Annan and Machel into the country. He also offered a damning assessment of the Mugabe regime.

“After almost three decades of governmental corruption, mismanagement and oppression, Zimbabwe has become a basket case, an embarrassment to the region and a focus of international concern and condemnation,” he said.

Denied passage to Zimbabwe, Carter, Annan and Machel were left to consult with regional leaders – including Tsvangirai, Botswana President Ian Khama and South Africa President Kgalema Motlanthe – as well as United Nations officials, nongovernmental organizations and Zimbabwe’s civil leaders.

“We had a complete and balanced agenda and more frank discussions than would have been possible in the oppressive and restrained environment of Harare,” Carter said in his statement.

Carter said he learned of conditions in which the official inflation rate has soared to about 231 million percent while thousands of Zimbabweans stand in line for their daily allowance of about 2 cents a day—from their own bank accounts. The allowance does not afford them a half loaf of bread, he said.

Teachers, who earn about a dollar a month, report a student-textbook ratio of about 20-to-1, and school attendance has dropped to about 20 percent in the past three months, the former president reported. The few students still attending classes are generally doing so in the hopes of being fed, he said.

“Meanwhile, top government officials and other privileged people can exchange Zim money at a favorable rate that is several thousand times more than the official rate available to other citizens,” Carter said. “They profit greatly from these monetary transactions and shop in special stores.”

The nation’s four major hospitals have shut down, as roughly 3,500 AIDS victims are dying each week. Unchecked sewage and filthy water have compounded the cholera problem, and Zimbabwe’s death rate from the disease is 10 times greater than rates in areas where treatment is available, Carter said.

The former president said 19,000 Zimbabweans are fleeing the country each month, mostly to South Africa and Botswana. He estimated that 4 million people have fled the nation.

“The middle class is departing, leaving behind the extremely poor and the small elite group around Mugabe who are profiting from the economic disaster,” he said.

Comparing Zimbabwe to Somalia, a failed African state that has had no functional government since 1991, Carter cast blame on African leaders who fail “to confront Robert Mugabe and force him to accept the result of the March election and more recently to comply with negotiated political agreements to share governmental authority with Morgan Tsvangirai and the opposition party.”

Tsvangirai snared more votes than Mugabe in March’s election but not a majority. Tsvangirai dropped out of a subsequent runoff, citing widespread violence against MDC supporters.

Carter’s call for African leaders to step up pressure on Mugabe came a day before Tsvangirai asked South Africa’s Mbeki to bow out as mediator between the MDC and Zanu-PF.

“Sadly, the negotiations have also been hampered by the attitude and position of the facilitator, Mr. Thabo Mbeki. He does not appear to understand how desperate the problem in Zimbabwe is, and the solutions he proposes are too small,” Tsvangirai said in his statement.

“He is not serving to bring the parties together because he does not understand what needs to be done. In addition, his partisan support of Zanu-PF, to the detriment of genuine dialogue, has made it impossible for the MDC to continue negotiating under his facilitation.”

Asked for the Zimbabwe government’s reaction to the MDC asking Mbeki to recuse himself, Foreign Minister Mumbengegwi said, “We have no right to tell them who to complain about. It is their decision in the MDC.”

Unless African leaders can find a way to mitigate the political impasse in Zimbabwe, the United Nations or the African Union might need to enter the fray, because, Carter said, “the poisonous effects” of the Mugabe regime, including the cholera outbreak, are spilling into other African nations.

Food, medicine and monetary donations should be sent immediately to humanitarian agencies such as CARE, World Vision and Save the Children, Carter said, advising that it is unwise to send cash directly to people in Zimbabwe.

“It is counterproductive to contribute money that can be confiscated by the Zimbabwe government,” he said. 4 years ago

...by definition, most every man acts in good faith, according to his beliefs of good. As said Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has seen the heart of evil, ``To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.´´ Certainly, there are very few psychopaths, who do what they know to be evil. And unhappily, we often find these psychopaths attracted to positions of political power.

http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/sofia2005.html 4 years ago

Mr A. M. Rosholt (Executive Chairman of Barlow Rand Limited)said:

“

There are now ominous signs appearing in Zimbabwe which are of grat concern to any of us with business interests there. The same pattern is emerging (as in the Zambia). State participation in the private sector and in individual companies – nationalisation of land and agricultural resources – statutory uneconomic minimum wages and a state marketing board for all minerals, which taken together have already made the mining sector uncompetitive in export markets. A stock exchange which is rapidly becoming a non-event, incapable of carrying out its traditional role of providing capital for the economy. We must ask ourselves whether these steps would have been taken if the majority of the population had shared in the past of the fruits of the economy.”

He then goes on to ask if we in South Africa are not on the same road.

The fact that in South Africa the masses have been denied “the fruits” during the Apartheid years should not blind them from seeing what is happening in our northern border.

Let the seed of liberty grow in our part of the world so that all can share in the fruits of our land.

Elsewhere in his talk Rosholt says:

“In general the state can obstruct the working of the private enterprise system in two ways. Firstly by participating in the economy, particularly where it is in direct competition with the private sector. Secondly by enacting excessive and restrictive controls and regulations.”

I am afraid to say that many of the policies that we have seen being followed in South Afica lately has not been in the right direction – they have been interventionist to the detriment of economic growth.

We can only hope that sense will prevail… 5 years ago

Courtesy of www.sokwanele.com

PROMOTING NON-VIOLENT PRINCIPLES TO ACHIEVE DEMOCRACY

It is more than a month since the elections were held on March 29th 2008, and we are still waiting for the Presidential results.

Meanwhile, Zanu PF has embarked on a campaign of terror and intimidation in the rural areas against opposition supporters. There have been at least ten murders so far.

A report released on the 25 April 2008 by the ‘Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR)’ details violence and torture against 62 people they have treated, over a period of the three days between April 22 to April 24. They state that even this number “under-reports the true total as full documentation (e.g. confirmation of suspected fractures by x-ray) of a number of cases has not yet been completed”.

In these three days, ZADHR says:

Sixty two cases were assessed and treated, including 9 women, one of whom is 84 years old and sustained serious facial injuries when she was struck in the face with stones on opening her door to unknown assailants. The youngest patient seen was a one year old baby boy who suffered gastroenteritis with dehydration following sleeping in the ?bush? with his mother after their home had been burnt down. 23 cases were from Karoi; otherwise there was still a concentration in Mudzi, Mutoko and Murewa with 12.
It is against this backdrop of gross human rights violations that riot police invaded Harvest House, the MDC Headquarters, and arrested scores of people on Friday, 25 April 2008.

Many of those arrested are injured civilians who had fled the rural areas to seek safety and refuge in the only place they could turn to; namely, the opposition headquarters. Many of them were injured days ago and were only able to get medical treatment when they arrived in town.

The state-controlled press have deliberately gone on to misreport the arrests.

The government’s motive, through the state-controlled press, is to try and persuade the people in our country – who have little access to independent news – that the victims of these horrendous attacks are actually criminals. By arresting the injured, the state hopes to hide the evidence of their violence and silence the voices that shame them. On Saturday, The Herald wrote:

Police yesterday arrested 215 people after raiding MDC-T?s Harvest House headquarters in central Harare on allegations of committing acts of political violence countrywide and going into hiding. [...] Chief police spokesperson Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena said the information they had indicated that most of those who had participated in post-election violence had sought refuge at the MDC provincial and national headquarters. “Police rounded up 215 people at Harvest House this afternoon and these will be screened against participation in politically motivated criminal activities around the country,” he said.
The Herald would like us to believe that these people are criminals; however, the full extent of their lie is exposed when we learn that among the injured people arrested are twenty-four babies and 40 children under the age of six:

?This is ruthlessness of the worst kind. How can you incarcerate children whose mothers have fled their homes hoping to give their children refuge?? asked an emotional [Nelson] Chamisa yesterday. ?In Mugabe?s Zimbabwe even children are not spared the terror that befalls their parents.? [Nelson Chamisam is the MDC MT spokesperson]
The Herald might print lies, but the pictures the world has seen tell the truth. These are not pictures of criminals: they are the images of people who have been brutalised, tortured, murdered and had their human rights violated. They have been subjected to retributive persecution by a regime that fails to accept the simple truth that it has lost the elections.

It does not matter how many people the regime tries to arrest to cover up the reality that it is brutalising its own people; the world now knows the truth.

In a press release on Sunday the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for Zimbabwe (IDAZIM) announced that they had initiated, with full support from civil society, labour and legal organizations, a Truth and Justice Coalition on Zimbabwe. They have stated that:

Its objectives are to identify perpetrators and seek legal redress for the victims of crimes against humanity and other serious crimes in Zimbabwe [...] the coalition had now assembled over 200 names of ZANU (PF) military, militia, members of parliament and war veterans who in their personal and/or professional capacity have unleashed terror and tyranny against civilians in recent months. More importantly, their complicity with a cabal of high-ranking Zimbabwean politicians and military personnel with links to other countries is now documented for public release.

We need to Take Action!

On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council will be briefed on the situation in Zimbabwe by the MDC Secretary General, Hon Tendai Biti. A statement issued today says:

The MDC will make its plea to the United Nations that the ZANU PF regime has unleashed brutal and fascist violence on the membership of the MDC and the generality of the people of Zimbabwe. The regime has declared war with the people, whose only ‘crime’ is voting for change, and change they can trust. We call on the United Nations to send an envoy, who will work with SADC to find a lasting solution to the crisis. This crisis can only end if Mr Mugabe accepts that he lost the election and allow a smooth transfer of power, leading to the formation of a government of national healing led by President Tsvangirai.

Under the Charter the functions and powers of the Security Council are:

to maintain international peace and security in accordance with the principles and purposes of the United Nations;
to investigate any dispute or situation which might lead to international friction;
to recommend methods of adjusting such disputes or the terms of settlement;
to formulate plans for the establishment of a system to regulate armaments;
to determine the existence of a threat to the peace or act of aggression and to recommend what action should be taken;
to call on Members to apply economic sanctions and other measures not involving the use of force to prevent or stop aggression;
to take military action against an aggressor;
to recommend the admission of new Members;
to exercise the trusteeship functions of the United Nations in “strategic areas”;
to recommend to the General Assembly the appointment of the Secretary-General and, together with the Assembly, to elect the Judges of the International Court of Justice.
What can we do?

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-
It is very important to reinforce the message of non violence at every opportunity. Please do what you can to help our country maintain its committment to non violence through these difficult and distressing days. We have come so far, let us not be seduced into violence in the way that Zanu PF hopes we will be.

You can also:

Send emails to Permanent Representatives to the United Nations of the United Nations Security Council and tell them, in your words, the truth about what is happening in Zimbabwe

They are Jean-Maurice Ripert (France); Sir John Sawers (UK); Vitaly Churkin (Russian Federation); Johan C. Verbeke (Belgium); Marty Natalegawa (Indonesia); Dumisani S. Kumalo (South Africa); Marcello Spatafora (Italy); Le Luong Minh (Vietman); Jorge Urbina (Costa Rica); Giadalla A.Ettalhi; Ricardo Alberto Arias (Panama); Zhenmin Liu (China) and Wang Guangya (China)
These are their email addresses (you can copy and paste them into your email software): france@franceonu.org; UK@UN.int; rusun@un.int; newyorkUN@diplobel.be; ptri@indonesiamission-ny.org; sacg@southafrica-newyork.net; info.italyun@esteri.it; info@vietnam-un.org; costarica@un.int; misioncostaricaun@yahoo.com; emb@panama-un.org; chinamission_un@fmprc.gov.cn;

Because of the violence in our country, ask the UN Security Council to place a UN arms embargo on all trade in arms and ammunition with Zimbabwe until such time that a political resolution has been reached and there is peace and no more violence in our country.
Ask them to call for an immediate end to the violence against the people of Zimbabwe, and to support the opposition’s request for special envoy to work with SADC to find a lasting solution to the crisis
Ask them to call for an immediate release of the Presidential results. Remind them that it is now one month after we voted and the results have still not been officially released
Send copies of your emails to SADC regional leaders. We recommend you focus your letters towards President Levy Mwanawasa who is the Current SADC Chairperson; President Thabo Mbeki, SADC’s appointed mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis; and President Jakaya Kikwete, the President of Tanzania who is also the current Chairperson of the AU. Their full details are provided below.
Forward this email to friends, family and colleagues and ask that they Take Action too!
Boycott the State controlled media! Don’t pay hard earned money to read lies.
Country: Zambia
Name: Mwanawasa, Levy
Job title: President of Zambia; Chairperson of SADC
Email: differmu@nkwazi.gov.zm
Telephone: +260 1 266147
Fax Number: +260 1 266092
Website address: http://www.statehouse.gov.zm/
Physical Address: Independence Avenue Woodlands Lusaka Zambia 10101 P.O Box 30135

Country: Botswana
Name: Mothae, Tanki
Job title: Director of Politics, Defence and Security Affairs, SADC
Email: tmothae@sadc.int
Telephone: +267 361 1001 or +267 397 2848
Organisation: Southern African Development Community (SADC)

Country: South Africa
Name: Mbeki, Thabo
Job title: President of South Africa
Email: president@po.gov.za
Telephone 1: +27 (0)12 300 5200
Telephone 2: +27 (0)21 464 2100
Fax Number: +27 (0)12 323 8246 and +27 (0)12 461 2838
Physical Address: Private Bag X1000, Pretoria, 0001 Union Buildings, Government Avenue Pretoria; Private Bag X1000, Cape Town, 8000 Tuynhuys Building, Parliament Street, Cape Town
Website address: http://www.gov.za/

Country: Tanzania
Name: Kikwete, Jakaya
Job title: President of Tanzania and Chair to the African Union
Email: info@ikulu.go.tz
Telephone: 00 255 22 2 116 898 or 00 255 22 2 116 899
Fax Number: 00 255 22 2 113 425
Physical Address: State House Luthuli Road, Box 9120, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania 5 years ago

What we are seeing is the result of many years of the eroding of individual and human rights. If you can with impunity take a person’s farm (for your comrades) and buldoze a persons home as part of a “cleanup” process surely you can, even if you have lost a democratic election, continue to run a country as if it is your own personal fiefdom.

If South Africa and the world does not take a stand South Africa itself may be in jeopardy, then Africa and I am afraid to say… the world.

Now is the time to act. 5 years ago

Dear 43ters,

I’m repeating this entry because I believe it contains an extremely important message for all.

I have just received the message below and have taken the liberty of posting it here. Yes Zimbabwe is just one more world crisis along with Darfur, Tibet, Iraq, etc. However we do have the power to at least try to do something instead of sitting back and merely watching from the sidelines. It doesn’t cost anything to sign a petition and your action may contribute to a solution. PLEASE TAKE ACTION NOW

The Zimbabwe crisis is spinning even further out of control, but the international response is gaining steam.

In less than a week, more than 120,000 people from 215 countries and territories including thousands from across Africa have signed the Avaaz petition demanding the release of the election results. On Wednesday, as world leaders enter the United Nations for a special summit chaired by South Africa, a plane hired by Avaaz will soar above them pulling a massive aerial banner reading “MBEKI: TIME TO ACT DEMOCRACY FOR ZIMBABWE.”

To make this message count, can you help us reach 150,000 signatures by the end of the day? Forward this email to your friends and family, and urge them to sign the petition at this link:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/democracy_for_zimbabwe/20.php?cl=76880517

Yesterday, the Zimbabwe High Court ruled against requiring the immediate release of the results of the March 29 Presidential election. In response, opposition called for a nationwide strike, and Mugabe deployed police throughout the country.[1]

All of this came just after South African President Thabo Mbeki who, more than anyone else in the world, could influence Mugabe’s actions said on Saturday that “there is no crisis in Zimbabwe.”²

But Mbeki isn’t off the hook just yet. Tomorrow (Wednesday), he will chair a special United Nations Security Council meeting, where diplomats have promised to raise the Zimbabwe crisis.[3] If he looks up as he enters the United Nations headquarters, Mbeki will see a 280 square metre (3000 square foot) banner amplifying the voices of Avaaz members around the world and if he doesn’t see it then, you can be sure he’ll see it in the newspapers the next day. International press have already begun to report on the planned fly-over of the banner.

Throughout the day, Avaaz will update reporters in Southern Africa and at the United Nations on the growth of the petition. If all of us forward this email to friends, co-workers, and relatives, we can add tens of thousands of new signatures in one day, and show Mbeki and Mugabe that the world is watching and supporting the people of Zimbabwe as they demand democracy.

It’s easy to sign at this link:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/democracy_for_zimbabwe/20.php?cl=76880517

This Friday, the 18th of April, marks Zimbabwe’s Day of Independence from colonial rule. Amidst the worsening poverty and danger, civil society organisations across Zimbabwe are gearing up for nonviolent resistance to Mugabe’s regime, calling for local actions and urging supporters to wear white in solidarity. And Zimbabwean media organisations many now operating outside the borders are broadcasting news about the international support that Zimbabwe’s people are receiving.

Mugabe was once the hero of Zimbabwe’s liberation. Now his own people embody the principles he once championed. For those of us around the world, it is our privilege and our responsibility to stand with them.

With hope,

Ben, Ricken, Galit, Paul, Milena, Graziela, Pascal, Iain, and Milena—the Avaaz.org team

Sources:

AFP: Zimbabwe opposition strikers face police crackdown http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hwWRGDpJdG0A1GFJ6SSTbcP_MP8w
Zimbabwe is not in crisis, says Thabo Mbeki http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/12/wzim412.xml
Reuters: US, Britain want UN council to tackle Zimbabwe. (See final paragraph.) http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/4/15/worldupdates/2008-04-15T023403Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-330394-1&sec=Worldupdates
Zimbabwe National Association of Non Governmental Organizations
http://www.nango.org.zw/news/view.asp?id=802 _

ABOUT AVAAZ
Avaaz.org is an independent, not-for-profit global campaigning organization that works to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people inform global decision-making. (Avaaz means “voice” in many languages.) Avaaz receives no money from governments or corporations, and is staffed by a global team based in London, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Paris, Washington DC, and Geneva.

Don’t forget to check out our Facebook and Myspace pages!

To contact Avaaz write to info@avaaz.org. You can also send postal mail to our New York office: 260 Fifth Avenue, 9th floor, New York, NY 10001 U.S.A.

If you have technical problems, please go to http://www.avaaz.org. 5 years ago

Dear 43ters,

I have just received the message below and have taken the liberty of posting it here. Yes Zimbabwe is just one more world crisis along with Darfur, Tibet, Iraq, etc. However we do have the power to at least try to do something instead of sitting back and merely watching from the sidelines. It doesn’t cost anything to sign a petition and your action may contribute to a solution. PLEASE TAKE ACTION NOW

The Zimbabwe crisis is spinning even further out of control, but the international response is gaining steam.

In less than a week, more than 120,000 people from 215 countries and territories including thousands from across Africa have signed the Avaaz petition demanding the release of the election results. On Wednesday, as world leaders enter the United Nations for a special summit chaired by South Africa, a plane hired by Avaaz will soar above them pulling a massive aerial banner reading “MBEKI: TIME TO ACT DEMOCRACY FOR ZIMBABWE.”

To make this message count, can you help us reach 150,000 signatures by the end of the day? Forward this email to your friends and family, and urge them to sign the petition at this link:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/democracy_for_zimbabwe/20.php?cl=76880517

Yesterday, the Zimbabwe High Court ruled against requiring the immediate release of the results of the March 29 Presidential election. In response, opposition called for a nationwide strike, and Mugabe deployed police throughout the country.[1]

All of this came just after South African President Thabo Mbeki who, more than anyone else in the world, could influence Mugabe’s actions said on Saturday that “there is no crisis in Zimbabwe.”[2]

But Mbeki isn’t off the hook just yet. Tomorrow (Wednesday), he will chair a special United Nations Security Council meeting, where diplomats have promised to raise the Zimbabwe crisis.[3] If he looks up as he enters the United Nations headquarters, Mbeki will see a 280 square metre (3000 square foot) banner amplifying the voices of Avaaz members around the world and if he doesn’t see it then, you can be sure he’ll see it in the newspapers the next day. International press have already begun to report on the planned fly-over of the banner.

Throughout the day, Avaaz will update reporters in Southern Africa and at the United Nations on the growth of the petition. If all of us forward this email to friends, co-workers, and relatives, we can add tens of thousands of new signatures in one day, and show Mbeki and Mugabe that the world is watching and supporting the people of Zimbabwe as they demand democracy.

It’s easy to sign at this link:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/democracy_for_zimbabwe/20.php?cl=76880517

This Friday, the 18th of April, marks Zimbabwe’s Day of Independence from colonial rule. Amidst the worsening poverty and danger, civil society organisations across Zimbabwe are gearing up for nonviolent resistance to Mugabe’s regime, calling for local actions and urging supporters to wear white in solidarity. And Zimbabwean media organisations many now operating outside the borders are broadcasting news about the international support that Zimbabwe’s people are receiving.

Mugabe was once the hero of Zimbabwe’s liberation. Now his own people embody the principles he once championed. For those of us around the world, it is our privilege and our responsibility to stand with them.

With hope,

Ben, Ricken, Galit, Paul, Milena, Graziela, Pascal, Iain, and Milena—the Avaaz.org team

Sources:

AFP: Zimbabwe opposition strikers face police crackdown http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hwWRGDpJdG0A1GFJ6SSTbcP_MP8w
Zimbabwe is not in crisis, says Thabo Mbeki http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/12/wzim412.xml
Reuters: US, Britain want UN council to tackle Zimbabwe. (See final paragraph.) http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/4/15/worldupdates/2008-04-15T023403Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-330394-1&sec=Worldupdates
Zimbabwe National Association of Non Governmental Organizations
http://www.nango.org.zw/news/view.asp?id=802 _

ABOUT AVAAZ
Avaaz.org is an independent, not-for-profit global campaigning organization that works to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people inform global decision-making. (Avaaz means “voice” in many languages.) Avaaz receives no money from governments or corporations, and is staffed by a global team based in London, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Paris, Washington DC, and Geneva.

Don’t forget to check out our Facebook and Myspace pages!

To contact Avaaz write to info@avaaz.org. You can also send postal mail to our New York office: 260 Fifth Avenue, 9th floor, New York, NY 10001 U.S.A.

If you have technical problems, please go to http://www.avaaz.org. 5 years ago

Zimbabwe is on a knife’s edge between democracy and chaos. Results still have not been released from the 29 March elections—and each day, more signals emerge that Mugabe will resort to violence and fraud to hold on to power.

I just signed a petition calling for the release of the results of Zimbabwe’s election—and urging South African President Thabo Mbeki to pressure Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to honour the will of the Zimbabwean people.

Please join me in signing

Courtesy of Avaaz.org – The world in action

Mugabe is unlikely to listen to the world’s outcry but he might listen to his old friend and powerful neighbour Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa. Click above to add your name to a petition calling for the results to be released, verified, and peacefully honored, and we will do all we can to deliver it to Mbeki through diplomatic channels, over the radio, and in a public event when Mbeki travels to New York for a United Nations meeting next week.

The more of us sign the petition, the powerful the message that South Africa’s reputation as a world leader is on the line.

The petition was organized by Avaaz.org.

Thanks! 5 years ago

Courtesy of Times Online

Robert Mugabe unleashed his most-feared thugs on the streets of the Zimbabwean capital today in a very public show of force as his party’s leadership united to back a last-ditch bid for him to stay in power.

At its first meeting since the party’s shock defeat at polls held last weekend, the Zanu (PF) politburo endorsed Mr Mugabe’s bid for a second-round run-off against his opposition challenger, Morgan Tsvangirai. The continued absence of official results in the presidential race, which Mr Tsvangirai says he has won outright, raised fears that the figures were being held back and manipulated to ensure that a second round would take place.

After a week of high drama – from reports of his imminent concession to tonight’s sudden nocturnal crackdown on foreign journalists and raids on opposition offices – fears are growing that Mr Mugabe is planning a violent, protracted fight to the end.

More than 400 of his so-called war veterans, the shock troops that led the violent invasions of white-owned farms, marched through the streets of Harare today in a silent display of menace. Afterwards they addressed the media, vowing to “defend the country’s sovereignty” against an opposition takeover.

Echoing the fiery anti-British rhetoric of Mr Mugabe’s election campaign, they said that they would defend Zimbabwe against “a white invasion” under the auspices of Mr Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

“The election has been seen as a way to reopen the invasion of our people by whites,” Jabulani Sibanda, the veterans’ leader, said. The state newspaper and mouthpiece for the Mugabe regime had carried yesterday a thinly sourced report about alleged attempts by white farmers to reclaim their farms after the Opposition’s apparent victory.

A shadow fell over even that parliamentary win when Zanu (PF) claimed that the Opposition had bribed electoral officials and that it would contest results for 16 parliamentary seats. If they are overturned Zanu (PF) would win back its majority.

Mr Sibanda said that the victory declaration by the MDC, whom Mr Mugabe casts as colonial stooges, was “illegal” and “a provocation against us freedom fighters”. The powerful militia supposedly comprises former rebel fighters from the Rhodesian bush war, but many are young men born long after independence was won 28 years ago.

Reports from rural areas talked of the mobilisation of youth militia, who along with the veterans carried out much of the intimidation of voters in past elections that was missing from this time around.

Six days after the historic polls brought millions hungry for change flocking to the ballot box, there was still no sign of the official result of the presidential contest, prompting the Opposition to prepare a case to take to court demanding their immediate release. Under the country’s election law, authorities have one week to release all the results.

“So we want to see results by today. If that doesn’t happen then we will retrieve all our tools including court process to make sure we give Zimbabweans the results as soon as possible,” Nelson Chamisa, the MDC spokesman, said.

Foreign governments have joined in the clamour for the results to be announced, expressing their fears of foul play. But in a serious blow for the Opposition, South Africa yesterday slammed “a media conspiracy”, casting aspersions on the reasons for the delay.

South Africa, the regional superpower, is regarded as the only Government with any hope of pressuring Mr Mugabe into leaving quietly. Gordon Brown has been in close contact with South African leaders over the past week in an effort to persuade them that Mr Mugabe must be made to go.

But yesterday, a day after his first public appearance in nearly a week, Mr Mugabe looked far from a man at the end of his reign, wisecracking in front of the cameras as he convened the politburo meeting, joking with one high-profile election casualty that he had been “struck by lighting” at the polls.

Opposition politicians also met today to hammer out a joint strategy. By law, a run-off should be held within 21 days of the elections, but suspicions are building that Mr Mugabe intends to use controversial and disputed presidential powers to put off a vote for up to three months, thus giving himself time to intimidate the Opposition.

There are also fears he would seek to remove the electoral provisions that made it so hard to steal the vote, such as the publication of results at individual polling stations, which the MDC used to produce its own parallel results showing an outright victory.

The MDC has said that Mr Tsvangirai will submit to a second round “under protest” but still maintains he won the first round outright. Zanu (PF) projections put Mr Tsvangirai as the winner but with just less than the 50 per cent required to win outright.

One British and one American journalist seized from their hotel on Thursday night were charged under tough media laws today for operating without government accreditation. The United States called today for the immediate release of Barry Bearak, a Pulitzer prize winning correspondent for The New York Times, and revealed that a second American, Dileepan Sivapathasundaram, a senior officer with the election monitor group the National Democratic Institute, had been arrested at Harare airport as he tried to leave the country. 5 years ago

Courtesy of Time.com

By Alex Perry

On Tuesday Zimbabwe entered its third day of waiting for the results of a general election amid mounting evidence that the opposition had narrowly defeated President Robert Mugabe — and increasing suspicion that his ruling regime was trying to rig the results. But as the delay continued, speculation grew over the reasons for manipulating the results.

Members of the opposition have two theories. The first is that Mugabe is trying to push himself over the 50% mark and win the election outright — though they say that is increasingly difficult given the amount of unofficial results indicating otherwise. The second theory is that the 84-year-old Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe for 28 years, is trying to negotiate an exit. That is the more likely scenario, says David Coltart, a newly reelected member of parliament from Bulawayo. Speaking to TIME by phone, Coltart said, “It is increasingly clear that Mugabe has lost the support of the rank and file of the army and the police.” The armed forces have become Mugabe’s main support as his popularity plummeted amid the the country’s economy disintegration. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian is reporting negotiations between the opposition and Zimbabwe’s military and security apparatus.

Nevertheless, Zimbabwe citizens say they will not be surprised if Mugabe finds a way to stay on. “Nothing is going to happen,” says one resident of Bulawayo, who asked not to be named. “He is clinging to power because he has so much to lose.” If Mugabe were to leave office, they point out, he could suffer the fate of Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, who is now awaiting trial in the International Criminal Court.

Officially, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has thus far released results for 131 out of the parliament’s 210 seats. According to that preliminary count, Mugabe’s Zanu-PF won 64 seats, while the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won a total of 67. But five of those opposition seats went to a splinter faction that has broken off from the MDC and its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s main rival.

The commission has yet to release any results on the presidential poll, held simultaneously on Saturday. The Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a non-governmental group, said a sample it conducted of 435 polling stations—5% of the total—showed Tsvangirai winning 49% of the presidential vote, Mugabe 41% and Simba Makoni, a former finance minister who split from Mugabe, 8%. If final results show that no candidate received more than 50% of the vote, Zimbabwe’s electoral law would mandate a run-off between Tsvangirai and Mugabe within three weeks.

Mugabe was once a darling of Africa for his overthrow of white supremacist rule in what was then known as Rhodesia, and was praised in the West for Zimbabwe’s excellent education system and relative prosperity. More recently he has become a failure and an embarrassment. Zimbabwe’s economy has collapsed: unemployment is 80%, inflation is 100,000%, and up to 3 million Zimbabweans have fled the country. Mugabe regularly rails against homosexuals and a Western conspiracy to recolonize Zimbabwe. His regime is riven with corruption, with senior figures allotting themselves large tracts of farmland seized under Mugabe’s anti-white land reform process. Wealth depends on political power in Zimbabwe, and in the run-up to the vote, senior regime figures, including the head of the army and the prison service, ordered their officers to vote for Mugabe and vowed that, even if he lost, the security services would continue to support him.

Now the delays in releasing the results have prompted speculation that the regime is attempting to fix the poll. There are ample grounds for suspicion: elections in 2000, 2002 and 2005 were marred by violence and rigging. In Washington on Monday, U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey urged that the results be released. “The opportunities for mischief increase the longer the delay is between the elections and the announcement,” he said. Earlier in the day, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described Mugabe as a “disgrace,” while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned that the “eyes of the world” were on Zimbabwe. Most foreign observers and journalists have been banned from covering the election.

Aside from the slow drip of parliamentary results, there has been no word from the regime since Saturday’s vote. Neither Mugabe nor Tsvangirai have appeared in public, nor released any statement. Senior ministers are also staying hidden and not answering their telephones. Riot police have been deployed on the streets of the capital, Harare. There have been no clashes so far, but the limbo in Zimbabwe leaves residents there, and observers abroad, anxious about how it will end. With reporting by Howard Chua-Eoan/New York 5 years ago

Courtesy of Times Online

Jan Raath in Harare

President Mugabe betrayed yesterday signs of anxiety over tomorrow’s elections as the scale of the clamour for change throughout Zimbabwe became ever more obvious.

About forty armoured vehicles, including four Israeli-made water cannon, anti-riot trucks and six armoured personnel carriers packed with heavily armed troops, travelled through central Harare in the afternoon – a show of force never before seen in any election since independence 28 years ago.

The President had delivered earlier an angry statement via State media, warning Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, and his faction of the divided Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) against staging demonstrations if they lost the election. “If they make a disturbance like in Kenya, you will see,” he said. “We are not joking. We warn the MDC, if they want to put a rope around their necks, that is OK.”

Mr Tsvangirai has been urging his supporters to stay around the polling stations after casting their ballots, “to defend your votes” against attempts to rig the election. Despite Mr Mugabe’s threat, Mr Tsvangirai repeated his call late yesterday to frenzied supporters at a rally in the neighbouring dormitory town of Chitungwiza. He held talks yesterday with the two other opposition leaders, Simba Makoni, Mr Mugabe’s former Finance Minister, who has shaken the ruling Zanu (PF) party by his challenge to his erstwhile mentor, and Arthur Mutambara, leader of the smaller faction of the MDC, to work out a joint strategy against the expected attempts to rig the vote.

The three were due to make an unprecented joint appearance at a press conference, but Mr Tsvangirai had been delayed, Mr Makoni said. He added that the three had been discussing the threat of cheating and that their consultations had been “under way for some time”.

“It is crucial that the three of them confront the rigging jointly,” a Western diplomat said. “They have to do it together or Mugabe will beat them.”

Mr Makoni showed photographs of a large, empty field in a Harare township, where the only signs of development had been pegs in the ground to mark plots for would-be homeowners. Yet, according to the electoral roll, it is a ward where 8,000 people are resident with specific addresses, at a density of up to 75 people on each 30 sq m plot, and who are to be served by ten polling stations. “This is evidence of a deliberated, sophisticated and premeditated plan to steal the election from us,” Mr Makoni said.

Mr Mugabe denied that his Administration had rigged elections and was about to do so again. “They want to tell lies, lies,” he said.

However, his denial is undermined by the determination of Tobaiwa Mudede, the Registrar-General, to keep opposition parties from getting hold of a digitally searchable copy of the electoral roll, which still includes the names of the first two MDC activists murdered at the start of the 2000 election campaign, and that of Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of white-ruled Rhodesia, who died last year.

Two years ago Mr Mudede defied court orders to give independent researchers access to ballot papers from the 2002 presidential election, when Mr Mugabe got 54 per cent of the vote after a savage campaign of intimidation.

It is not clear whether the President is aware of the depth of feeling against him, boosted daily by worsening hardship. Queues for bread and money in Harare yesterday appeared to have lengthened, as the basics of life become more difficult to find. 5 years ago

Courtesy of Times Online

Lina thought that the streets of Harare were paved with gold, so it was there that she begged the bus driver to take her when her parents died leaving her an orphan in Zimbabwe’s destitute rural west.

Princess came to the city after she was thrown out by the new wife her stepfather took after her own mother died from tuberculosis.

Precious came looking for an aunt she had heard was living here, peddling vegetables on the streets for a meagre living.

Lina, then 14, had no money for her fare, so the driver took her virginity as payment. Princess, then 13, sold hers for a loaf of bread after the police stole the peanuts she was selling and chased her off the streets. Precious had already had hers taken from her by a cousin who ambushed her on her way to school and raped her. So she was no longer a virgin when, at 14, she followed the others into prostitution, selling herself to strangers on the streets of Harare merely to survive.

“They are the chaff that has blown in here,” said the church worker who took The Times to meet the girls in the slums of Harare. “Nobody cares about them at all.”

The story of the children peddling their bodies for pennies is the story of Zimbabwe’s rural poor. Ground down into a state of dependent impoverishment, the collapse of the country’s rural economy has left them more desperate than ever. The Aids crisis, and the creaking health system it has overwhelmed, has left hundreds of thousands of children orphans, struggling to fend for themselves. As once-prime farmland fell back into bush, thousands picked up their few belongings and headed for the cities in search of a better life.

Lina came to the slums from far-flung Matabeleland, where President Mugabe sent his troops in the early Eighties to put down opponents, wiping out entire villages. It has been punished for its opposition ever since.

“I came to Harare because I thought people were rich here,” she said. But at the bus station people told her to go to the slums of Mbare, where “people like me” slept on the streets. She saw people hawking drinks, vegetables and nuts and thought she would do that too. But she had no money to start with and there was none to be earned begging. “That’s when one of the other girls taught me to stand on the streets.”

Princess fared better, finding a vendor willing to employ her selling her vegetables in the street. But then came Mr Mugabe’s social project, Operation Murambatsvina, or “Clean Up Trash”, a brutal push to clear the streets of peddlers and squatters and deny his opposition urban support. More than 600,000 people were made homeless in the purge.

The clear-up deprived Princess of her legitimate if meagre livelihood, forcing her to more desperate measures. “The police chased us and beat us if they found us selling,” she said. “And then they would steal what we had to sell.” In debt to her supplier, she had only one option. “The last thing I had to sell was myself.”

That was two years ago and the money she got for her first client could buy her a loaf of bread. Now it can barely do that. Sex with one of Mbare’s street girls costs Z$10 million (25p) — when the customers actually pay. “I’ll have about four or five a day,” Princess said. “Out of that, maybe two will pay.” The police do not chase her any more, but they still steal, demanding sex in return for leaving her alone.

Amine, one of the girls who works the streets with Princess, showed a fresh scar on her hand where a customer had stabbed her, forcing her to drop the notes that he had just paid her.

Precious, a tiny 16-year-old, stunning beneath the grime, sees as many as ten men a day, and mostly they pay. But often when she wakes up in the morning, beneath the plastic sheeting she uses for shelter, she finds her money has vanished, stolen by a client or a jealous friend.

“My money is disappearing,” she said. “I am doing this for nothing at all. Sometimes I wake in the morning and I have nothing, not even a piece of soap to wash, and my belly is sore from no food.” Along with the hunger, fear stalks the girls. Zimbabwe’s HIV rate runs at 15 per cent and few of the men that buy their services wear condoms. “Sometimes they threaten you and say ‘If you try to make me wear a condom I’ll beat you’,” said Treatmon, who came to Harare to work on the streets a year ago when she was orphaned at 13.

“To begin with I was happy to do it because I had money and I could eat. But now I see girls dying of Aids and so I expect to die with Aids too.”

Elections this weekend herald a momentous moment in Zimbabwe’s history, holding out the possibility of an end to the three decades of Mr Mugabe’s rule that have driven these children to the streets — and the country to the brink. It remains to be seen if having stolen the girls’ past Mr Mugabe will also rob them of their future.

His machinery is in place to steal the vote as before, but this time even that may not be enough to mask the groundswell of discontent. The chance of change has gilded the elections with mythic status, a panacea for ills that even a new president cannot hope to change.

It is two years since Precious went back to Lower Gwelo: the cousin who raped her is out of jail and swearing vengeance, and she is too afraid to return. “I miss my granny,” she said. “Maybe after elections things will be more stable and I can go home.” 5 years ago

Courtesy of Times Online

New strategies must be found urgently to end the tyranny of Zimbabwe’s leader

For a man so deluded about his past achievements, Robert Mugabe has a painfully clear understanding of his prospects at the polls. His rivals for the Zimbabwean presidency “may win some seats”, he said recently, “but they cannot win the majority. Impossible.”

Few would gainsay him. Zimbabwe’s opposition movement is more vocal than in past years, but more divided. Its voters can expect systematic intimidation this Saturday from police at polling stations. Constituencies have been redrawn in favour of the ruling Zanu (PF) party. The count has been centralised and will be supervised behind closed doors by presidential appointees. There is not even a pretence of fair election coverage in the state media, and in any case voting, for millions, will take second place to the more urgent business of survival. This is why Mr Mugabe’s election forecast is likely to be accurate. It is a tragedy for Zimbabweans; it is also proof of a colossal failure of international diplomacy.

Surrounded by sycophants, Mr Mugabe may actually believe his claim to be a freedom fighter. He is in fact a wrecker on a par with Kim Jong Il. He has turned Africa’s second-strongest economy into a nation dependent on food aid and shuttle trading. Life expectancy has tumbled from 60 years to 35 in less than a generation. One in four children is an orphan. Unemployment stands at 80 per cent, and inflation, at more than 100,000 per cent, is the highest in the world. A country of huge mineral wealth, whose staggering natural beauty should be the basis of a world-class tourist industry, has been reduced to starvation and, at best, subsistence.

The man responsible has shored up his domestic position with home-grown thuggery and Soviet-style kleptocracy. By razing the slum dwellings of some two million opposition supporters in 2005, he disenfranchised them. The beneficiaries of Mr Mugabe’s expropriation of Zimbabwe’s white farmers have been his own party elite, and the process will continue in the industrial sphere with a new law forcing foreign-owned businesses to yield control to black Zimbabweans.

Mr Mugabe hopes to deepen his inner circle’s vested interest in a grotesque status quo that cossets ministers in fortified mansions while child prostitutes haunt central Harare. But he is also dependent on continued foreign acquiescence. President Mbeki’s failure to denounce the Mugabe dictatorship has been self-defeating, swelling the tide of refugees from Zimbabwe to South Africa, but entirely representative of the rest of Africa’s lamentable response – both at the African Union and the UN. His crimes have been ignored; his anti-colonial bombast has been endorsed, even though half a century out of date.

Britain has tried not to dignify Mr Mugabe’s ranting with a response. Last year’s EU-AU summit was supposed to vindicate this strategy by letting others lead the condemnation of Zimbabwe. In the event, just four leaders of the European Union spoke up, and the silence from the African side was deafening.

There are glimmers of hope that Mr Mugabe may win this election and yet lose power. His own former Finance Minister, Simba Makoni, is running against him. His best-known rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, is drawing large crowds despite police intimidation. The election commission may even find the courage to defy the Zanu (PF) strongmen. Whatever happens on Saturday, the time has come to stop appeasing the monstrous Mr Mugabe. 5 years ago

Courtesy of Times Online

Jonathan Clayton

Maureen Dangarembizi, a 23-year-old Zimbabwean university graduate, stopped dreaming years ago.

“When you are young, you have dreams of how it is going to be if you study hard and get a good job – and then you end up like this, at the bottom,” she said as she trudged up the steps of a dingy building in the crime-ridden heart of central Johannesburg. “Now I just focus on each day. To remember how I dreamt of where we would be at this age and then see where we are is just too painful.”

Mrs Dangarembizi fled to neighbouring South Africa with her new husband, David Jakana, 30, about 18 months ago. They hoped to find a better life. Instead they found themselves at the bottom of the pile in a country where they are not welcome.

Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa, often unable to obtain official asylum status, struggle to find work and face brutal police harassment and resentment from local people fearful that they will take their jobs. On Tuesday, in the latest outbreak of xenophobia, a Zimbabwean man living in a slum outside Pretoria was burnt to death by an angry mob.

A brave handful have decided to return home to vote in Saturday’s elections. Many more, despite wanting to see the end of Mr Mugabe, cannot afford the trip and are fearful that the South African authorities will close off the border once they go back.

Officially there are one million Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa but the real figure is believed to be double, even triple, that. Many are well-qualified professionals who end up doing the most menial of jobs and living in poverty in overflowing hostels and church halls. They send what little money they earn home for relatives.

“I was a primary school teacher, but my salary did not even cover my transport to work. David is a qualified engineer but he had not had a job for years,” Mrs Dangarembizi said.

After leaving Grace, their one-month-old daughter, at a crèche run by a church group, the Dangarembizis work 12-hour days as hawkers. They sell everything from sachets of soap and juice to cheap keyrings and name tags. “It is not a nice life, especially when you know that at home you could be, and should be, having a good job,” she said. “But we have no choice.”

Like other refugees they blame President Mugabe for destroying their dreams and robbing them of hope.

Susan Ngwariu, who came to South Africa three years ago, said: “We used to have dignity but he has even robbed us of that. We have nothing here but it is still better than there. That is how bad it is. We all want to go home and pray to God he loses. Only God can beat that man.”

Sitting in the half-light in the back room of the Central Methodist Mission, one of the main unofficial homes for

Zimbabwean refugees in Johannesburg, Ms Ngwariu strained her eyes to make beaded keyrings that she sells for about 35p. “If I am lucky I sell five a day, and may be earn 25 rand (£1.60) ... I send it all back home for my children. I have six, they are living with different relatives … We are all scattered now because of that man [Mugabe].”

Everyone is agreed that the moment Mr Mugabe leaves office they will return home. “If Mugabe goes, I will go home immediately. Even though the economy will not recover immediately, I will still go home because it will be better there than here,” said Max Muriuti, 25, a mechanic. 5 years ago

Courtesy of africasia.com

Key dates in Zimbabwe’s post-independence history

Zimbabwe goes to the polls on Saturday for a contest in which President Robert Mugabe hopes to extend his 28-year rule. The following are some of the key dates since the ex-British colony’s independence:

—April 18, 1980: Rhodesia gains independence after 90 years as a British colony, taking the new name Zimbabwe. The 1972-1979 war of independence between nationalist blacks and the minority white regime led by Ian Smith leaves 27,000 dead.

Robert Mugabe, head of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), takes power as prime minister. Joshua Nkomo, head of the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU), Mugabe’s partner in the armed struggle, becomes minister of the interior.

—Feb 17, 1982: Nkomo, accused of plotting a coup, is dismissed. Armed resistance in his stronghold of Matabeleland, in the west, is met with bloody government repression. At least 20,000 die in the ensuing violence.

—Dec 30, 1987: Mugabe becomes head of state after reforming the constitution to usher in a presidential regime.

—March 16-17, 1996: Mugabe is re-elected with 92.7 percent of the vote but the results are contested by the opposition.

—Dec 9, 1997: A national strike paralyzes the country. Bowing to growing demonstrations, the government gives up plans for new taxes to finance the pensions of former fighters.

—Sept 11, 1999: The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) is officially formed.

—Feb 12-13, 2000: In a public repudiation of Mugabe’s designs on expanding his presidential powers, Zimbabweans defeat his proposed new constitution by 54.6 percent in a referendum.

—Feb 28, 2000: Hundreds of white-owned farms are seized by squatters and pro-Mugabe war veterans in a violent campaign to reclaim what they said had been stolen from them by colonial settlers.

—June 24-25, 2000: In parliamentary elections Mugabe’s party, now the ZANU-PF, barely keeps its hold on power against the MDC after a campaign closely linked to land disputes left dead some 30 people, mainly members of the MDC.

—March 9-11, 2002: Mugabe is re-elected president in a poll marked by violence and denounced as rigged by most international observers. Sanctions are imposed on Mugabe and his entourage by the European Union and United States.

—Dec 7, 2003: The Commonwealth extends Zimbabwe’s suspension, imposed in 2002. Mugabe announces the country’s withdrawal from the organisation.

—Oct 15, 2004: MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai is cleared by the High Court of charges of plotting to kill Mugabe.

—March 31, 2005: The ruling ZANU-PF party wins parliamentary elections but the main opposition MDC rejects the results.

—May 22, 2006: The Zimbabwe government begins Operation Murambatsvina (Drive out filth) destroying shacks and backyard shanties and market stalls that leaves at least 700,000 homeless.

- March 11, 2007: Opposition leader Tsvangirai is beaten, and two activists killed, during new political violence.

—Feb 5, 2008: Former finance minister Simba Makoni announces his plans to challenge Mugabe for the presidency in joint presidential, legislative elections.

—Feb 19, 2008: Zimbabwe’s Central Statistical Office announces annual inflation has reached 100,580.2 percent 5 years ago

Courtesy of The Mail & Guardian

The numbers ceased to mean much to Sarah Chekani about the time inflation in Zimbabwe surged past 50 000% late last year. It has doubled again since then, to the alarm of Robert Mugabe heading into this month’s presidential election. But that hardly matters to Chekani and others like her who survive in an orbit touched only fleetingly by cash or the spiralling exchange rate.

Nor do the other numbers that the central bank governor has called “an economic HIV” (half the population living on $1 a day, 80% unemployment and 45% of Zimbabweans malnourished) mean much when what you are worried about is your own young children.

To Chekani (31) the figures now only represent desperation and death; one death in particular, but also the fear that more might follow.

“I try not to eat too much so there is enough food for my children, but even if I ate nothing there wouldn’t be enough,” she said. “I didn’t think it was possible that people could starve in Zimbabwe or just die because the hospital has nothing. That’s what we thought happened in Angola and Mozambique.”

Chekani’s home in Highfield, a crowded township on the edge of Harare, is bare. There are no chairs, only cloths on the floor. No bed, just a mattress for her and the two remaining children, boys of seven and eight.

She has a gas hob but no oven, and the only decoration is a print of Jesus Christ—a white man with a golden halo.

It wasn’t always this way. Chekani and her husband were relatively poor, but his labours as a casual construction worker and her trading in secondhand clothes filled their three-roomed home with the things that marked rising living standards in Zimbabwe after independence: a radio and then a television, a couch, armchairs, a bed.

Then, five years ago, shortly after the birth of her only daughter, Chekani’s husband died. She says she doesn’t know why—he just got sicker, and nothing could save him.

By then, his work had dried up as the economy crashed under Mugabe’s maladministration, and they were selling off their belongings to those who still had means. The television fetched enough money to feed the family for a month. The bed went for almost nothing. Chekani even sold off most of her plates and cutlery, keeping only what the family needed for a meal.

With the money she did what large numbers of Zimbabweans are doing to survive: she bought up basic foods, keeping some for her family and making a small profit from the rest. There is almost nothing left in the house to sell, but Chekani gets by.

Her latest acquisition is two litres of cooking oil, which she sells at a pavement stall, five tablespoons at a time, in return for a handful of near-worthless notes. Other women are selling bars of soap by the slice and flour by the cup.

Chekani’s trading kept her children alive until last November. Then her five-year-old daughter fell sick with diarrhoea and fever. Chekani hesitated to take her to Highfield’s government clinic because charges have risen several times over, but as the child’s condition worsened she carried her there.

The nurse said there was nothing she could do. There were no antibiotics to treat the child’s condition. All she could offer was a spoonful of syrup to help bring her temperature down.

“The nurse said she was sure she would be fine. She said lots of children were coming in with diarrhoea because of the sewers,” said Chekani.

Burst sewer lines are increasingly common in Highfield and other Harare townships as the infrastructure collapses from lack of maintenance. On occasion, groups of women with babies strapped to their backs have marched to Highfield clinic to demand treatment for their children, sick from the filthy water.

The situation is not helped by months without clean water in the taps in most of Harare. Even residents of wealthy suburbs are collecting water in buckets and jerry cans from borehole-stand pipes. Swimming pools are now mostly used for water to flush toilets.

Chekani’s child did not get better. “I took her back to the clinic three times,” she said, “but every time they said that she would get better soon if I give her food and lots of water—that it was just the fever and there was nothing they could do because they had no drugs.

“I thought about taking her to the Harare central hospital, but it costs so much money and people said things are no better there. I just hoped.” A week later the child was dead.

The death rate for children under five in Zimbabwe has almost doubled over the past decade. So has the number of women dying in childbirth because, doctors say, so many more are giving birth at home because they can no longer afford hospital charges.

There is a desperate shortage of vaccines to protect children from measles and other diseases. Thanks to foreign donations, some of those with HIV get antiretroviral drugs to keep full-blown Aids at bay, but most who need them do not, and the supply is often irregular, which undermines their effectiveness.

The biggest government hospital in Harare, the Parirenyatwa, has ceased operations because of the shortages. The two hospitals share a single radiologist because so many medical staff have decamped to South Africa or Europe to find work that can feed their families.

That is not an option for Chekani. “I don’t know what to do if my other children get sick. Where can we go? The hospital tells you to buy the drugs yourself, but where do I get the money?” she said. “Some people say this election will change things. I don’t know. I don’t have hope. It will not bring back the dead.” -

Mugabe: We’re facing food crisis
Robert Mugabe has, for the first time, admitted that Zimbabwe faces a grave food crisis amid the collapse of the country’s agriculture. But he blamed it on “racist” Britain trying to oust him at this month’s presidential election.

Responding to pleas at a campaign rally in Plumtree, in the province of Matabeleland South, Mugabe accepted there was a crisis. “There is hunger in the country and a shortage of food,” he said, according to the state-run Sunday Mail newspaper. Mugabe promised to speed up food imports, which have so far met only a fraction of the country’s needs.

The World Food Programme (WFP) says 45% of Zimbabweans are suffering chronic malnourishment because of “poor agricultural policies and a declining economy”. The WFP feeds about 2,5-million people and other agencies are providing food to about one million. But large numbers of people are surviving on far fewer calories than they need, leaving them vulnerable to illnesses, particularly the large proportion of the population with HIV at risk of developing Aids.

The government promised “the mother of all agricultural seasons” this year after repeated crop failures.

But agriculture has again been hit by the weather, compounded by a fall in production since the redistribution of white-owned farms to black farmers. The situation has been worsened by a shortage of fertilisers because of a lack of currency for imports, and frequent power cuts that have hit irrigation.

Overall food production has fallen by about 70% 5 years ago

Courtesy of Yahoo News

AFP – Sunday, February 24 06:45 pm

HARARE (AFP) – Zimbabwe’s biggest state hospital has stopped surgical operations because of a breakdown of equipment and shortages of drugs, a rights group said Sunday.

“There is a critical shortage of items ranging from anaesthetics to surgical equipment at Parirenyatwa hospital,” Douglas Gwatidzo, chairman of Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights told AFP.

“Surgeons can carry out operations but they are saying they cannot risk their profession and increase the risk on the lives of the patient.

“They are not prepared to be blamed for an operation which goes wrong because it was done without the necessary equipment, and operating on a patient when there are no painkillers to relieve their pain amounts to subjecting that patient to torture.”

The state-owned Herald newspaper said Parirenyatwa Hospital was referring patients requiring emergency operations to Harare central hospital which is battling with its own shortages.

Those who can afford it are referred to expensive private hospitals.

Deputy health minister Edwin Muguti blamed the shortages on western-imposed targeted sanctions.

“Government is aware of the serious anaesthetic drugs shortages that have hit our central hospitals,” Muguti was quoted by the Sunday Mail as saying.

“These are results of western-imposed sanctions that we are always talking about. We can’t promise when the situation will return to normal but we want to assure the nation that we are treating this as an urgent matter.”

The deputy minister said the last stocks of the widely-used ketamine and propofol drugs were donated and have since run out.

Zimbabwe is in the throes of economic crisis with annual inflation officially at over 100,000 percent. There is a chronic shortage of basic goods and the majority of the population live below the poverty threshold. 5 years ago

Courtesy of IOL.co.za

February 23 2008 at 11:34AM

While Zimbabwe implodes, Robert Mugabe’s supporters are preparing to spend almost R8-million to celebrate the dictator’s 84th birthday on Saturday. The celebration is being held in the dusty, derelict town of Beit Bridge on the Zimbabwean side of the Limpopo River.

For the past few weeks the town has been undergoing a major spruce-up in preparation for the party, and, for the first time, has had running water and electricity – in a country which marked the dictator’s actual birthday on Thursday with an official inflation rate of 100 000 percent.

Supplies of the staple mealie meal have also been made available for the first time.

Hundreds of head of cattle are being slaughtered for the tens of thousands of attendees expected in the Matabele South town that was once home to the largest ranches and pedigreed beef herds in the country.

Few remain now and even fewer Zimbabweans have tasted red meat in months.

The road 100km north from Beit Bridge is collapsing with enormous potholes along the highway which links the rest of Africa to South Africa.

Mugabe will not see this – he and his family are being flown to the party in Zimbabwean Airforce helicopters directly from his mansion in Harare.

His birthday bash, and where he will also launch his bid for re-election on Saturday, will be held at a shabby soccer stadium on the edge of the old town, given a special facelift for the day.

By Friday, 10 000 people had arrived, many bused in on state commandeered coaches and trucks. Some of the guests are going to be taken across the border to visit SA, according to the organisers.

The ruling party raised Z$3-trillion (almost R8-million) for the event. This week a single cigarette cost Z$500 000.

The Zanu PF MPs organising the party, Andrew Langa from Matabeleland, and wealthy businessman Saviour Kasukuwere from Mashonaland, Central Province, have arranged pro-Zanu PF musicians to play at the celebration.

Zanu PF secretary for youth, Abolom Sikhosana, said a selected group of children from the country’s 10 provinces and who share the same birthday as Mugabe, have been invited to the party.

“The commemorations should also make a powerful statement that Zimbabwe is as vibrant as ever despite the suffering being caused by illegal sanctions imposed on the country by Britain and its allies,” he told the state press this week.

The theme for the celebrations is “Defending our sovereignty through youth empowerment”.

Mugabe’s birthday on Thursday was marked by an outpouring of protestations of loyalty in the state controlled media.

“Paragon of magnanimity, consistency,” read a tribute in the state-owned Herald newspaper – part of its 18 pages devoted to congratulatory messages and pictures of the continent’s oldest serving president, most paid for by bankrupt state enterprises.

State radio repeatedly played the chorus of the 1980s song: God bless President Mugabe he is our beacon.

“We wish you many more years and good health as well as all success in all your endeavours to direct the affairs of the state under very challenging circumstances,” the foreign ministry said in its message.

“Having spent many years of incarceration in Rhodesian prisons and leading the struggle for independence from outside, you have deservedly lived to champion the empowerment of Zimbabweans and consolidation of national sovereignty,” said Zimbabwe’s parliament.

China’s ambassador to Harare gave Mugabe a framed drawing as a birthday gift.

“Your excellency, you are a great revolutionary in the world, the best friend of the Chinese people,” ambassador Yuan Nansheng said after presenting the work to Mugabe.

Mugabe’s chief secretary Misheck Sibanda praised his “unwavering and principled determination to free this country and its people from colonial bondage and the shackles of neo-colonialism, in the face of multifaced machinations by imperialist forces and their lackeys as well aspolitical renegades.”

Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, winning re-election in 2002 in a vote that was widely recognised as rigged.

After announcing he would step down when his term ends this year, he has now said he will stand again in general polls next month to seek a sixth term.

He faces a challenge from former finance minister Simba Makoni,57, and Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

On Friday, Makoni published his first political advert, carried by the weekly Zimbabwe Independent.

In it, Makoni said: “We can’t afford five more years of power cuts, water cuts, cash shortages, endless queues, daily rises in the cost of transport and food, diesel and unavailability of foreign currency.

“Nothing works in this country any more.”

On Thursday, Mugabe used a nationwide television broadcast to attack Makoni.

“I have compared him to a prostitute,” Mugabe said.

“But you see a prostitute could have done better than Makoni because she has clients,” he said. 5 years ago

Courtesy of Washington Post

As Hyperinflation Puts Even Bus Fare Out of Reach, One Man’s Trek Embodies Plight of Foot Commuters

By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 7, 2008; A15

ON THE ROAD FROM EPWORTH TO HARARE, Zimbabwe

A slender moon shadow stretches out on the road before Willard Chitau as he takes his first quick, purposeful steps toward his workplace. It is 4:27 a.m. Nine miles to go.

Buses have begun to stir, spewing their smoky diesel fumes into the darkness. But like many Zimbabweans, Chitau can no longer afford the ever-rising fares in a country where hyperinflation, estimated at more than 26,000 percent, is the world’s worst. A single round trip to his job at a lumber yard costs 10 million Zimbabwean dollars, nearly a week’s salary.

“Five million this way,” Chitau says as he points his slim left arm forward, toward Harare, the crumbling economic heart of Zimbabwe. “Five million this way,” he says as he points backward, toward his one-room home in Epworth, a sandy slum far beyond the city’s tree-lined suburbs.

So Chitau, 33, desperate to support his wife and two young children, has joined Zimbabwe’s growing legions of foot commuters. They make journeys that almost anywhere else would be epic. Here they are routine.

Along the way they trace the decline of a nation, passing clinics short of drugs, schools short of teachers, stores short of food. They walk on crumbling roads whose darkened streetlights are remnants of an era, just a decade ago, when Zimbabwe was one of Africa’s most prosperous nations instead of one of its most troubled.

Chitau did not always live so far from work. During Operation Murambatsvina President Robert Mugabe’s 2005 slum clearance campaign, which left 700,000 people homeless, jobless or both police forced Chitau to tear down his house in a dense Harare neighborhood much closer to the lumber yard, he said.

So he sent most of his belongings to his family’s rural village and settled into the small, dark room in Epworth. There he sleeps with his wife, 4-year-old son and 3-month-old daughter on a concrete floor, a single wool blanket beneath them. A warm morning bath, which would consume precious firewood, is beyond their means. So is breakfast or even a cup of tea to cut the early morning chill.

The economy has been in free fall since Mugabe encouraged the invasion of white-owned commercial farms by landless black peasants in 2000. Although many Zimbabweans say land redistribution was needed to right historic wrongs, the way it happened was chaotic and often violent; it devastated successful businesses while triggering hyperinflation and leaving many poor blacks the supposed beneficiaries of the program without steady paychecks. An estimated 3 million people have since fled the country.

Sometimes Chitau finds odd jobs for extra cash, or his wife helps by selling vegetables. When there’s enough money, he even takes the bus some mornings. But today the monthly rent is due. Because prices go up here unevenly, it’s only 9 million Zimbabwean dollars, about $1.50 in U.S. currency, but that still means a struggle for a man paid in local bills worth less than $9 a month.

“I need to search for money very hard so that I will survive,” Chitau says, his swift, smooth stride unbroken.

Cars pass. Buses pass. Cyclists wearing suits and ties pass. A barefoot man who has broken into a jog passes, too. But mainly it is Chitau who overtakes other pedestrians as the miles slip by.

The only thing that can slow him down is rain, he says. The shoes he wears most days look as though they have sloshed through a hundred storms. The brown leather is softened, largely detached from the rubber soles. The laces are gone.

But this morning is dry and clear, with a fat crescent moon and a spray of stars twinkling overhead.

After nearly half an hour of walking, as the faintest light begins to warm the eastern horizon, Chitau steps past Sophia Manjiva, 45, a single mother clutching a closed umbrella who says she is pleased to have company. She has heard many tales of robberies along this dark road.

Manjiva says her monthly pay as a maid in a private home is 20 million Zimbabwean dollars less than $4 in U.S. currency. With that she feeds, clothes and schools her two youngest children, ages 10 and 13.

As hyperinflation erodes her pay, making even staples like cooking oil and cornmeal difficult to buy, Zimbabwe’s deteriorating infrastructure complicates her work. Chronic power blackouts and water shortages mean that several times a day she must fetch water from a well near the house she cleans, then carry full buckets back upstairs, she says. That’s after walking 2 1/2 hours to work and before walking 2 1/2 hours back home.

“I get tired, but there is nothing to do,” Manjiva says as Chitau begins to open up the distance between them.

At 5, the sky turns a soft blue, streaked by pinkish clouds, as a diffuse pre-dawn glow lights the faces of rows of sunflowers gazing east. White-robed members of Zimbabwe’s popular Apostolic churches kneel in prayer on the dewy grass. Birds begin chirping tunes that, under the circumstances, sound improbably upbeat.

Yet the growing light reveals unmistakable signs of frustration with Zimbabwe’s decay.

Epworth’s most singular natural feature stacks of rounded, beige boulders bear snatches of spray-painted graffiti: “Vote MDC.” The initials refer to the Movement for Democratic Change, the fractured opposition party that in March will seek, for the fourth time, to defeat Mugabe’s ruling party after 28 years of unbroken control.

But Chitau doesn’t want to talk about politics when the feared Central Intelligence Organization remains a well-funded marvel of efficiency amid collapsing government services. Arrests, beatings and humiliating sting operations are common tactics against those who complain too loudly.

“It’s my country, but I’m afraid” to talk about Zimbabwe, he says.

Shortly before 6, Chitau reaches Harare’s outskirts, where the names of the suburbs Chadcombe, Cranborne, Queensdale echo the country’s British colonial past. Sand gives way to dark soil, shacks to large, tile-roofed homes.

Chitau closes in on a group of women carrying empty bags and baskets. They, too, are coming from Epworth, but their destination, the bustling Mbare market near downtown Harare, is even farther than Chitau’s lumber yard.

They earn the equivalent of two or three U.S. dollars a day, the women explain, by buying vegetables at Mbare, then carrying them back to Epworth to sell. The bus would cut their profits by half or more.

A few minutes later, Chitau indulges his one daily luxury, buying a cigarette from a street vendor squatting by the side of the street. The cost is 400,000 Zimbabwean dollars, or about 7 cents.

“By smoking, I can’t feel as hungry,” Chitau explains as he inhales deeply from the cigarette and briefly slackens his pace.

A few steps later, he tosses the burned-out butt. Tea is still four hours away. It will be seven hours until lunch, when a plate of sadza the snow-white cornmeal mush that is southern Africa’s staple food will be his first meal since last night, he says. His pace quickens again.

The sun is up now, casting long shadows as Chitau passes the two-hour mark in his journey. He crosses an intersection where the traffic light, like most in Harare, is not working.

A passing van such vehicles are used almost universally as taxis here slows to let out a passenger. Its radio is tuned to the 7 a.m. newscast, which like all radio and television reports in Zimbabwe carries only government propaganda. The announcer complains that sanctions imposed on Mugabe’s government by the United States and European countries are undermining Zimbabwe.

As the van pulls off, Chitau bears left from Chiremba Road onto Robert Mugabe Road, a commercial strip where businesses are struggling to stay open. Among the estimated 20 percent of Zimbabweans who have jobs, many have simply stopped coming to work now that the value of their salaries has fallen below the cost of commuting.

Chitau arrives at his lumber yard at 7:13 a.m., after 166 minutes of nearly continuous walking. As often happens on rainless mornings such as this, he is early. Chitau can savor the next 47 minutes until his workday begins.

He says, “Now I must rest.” 5 years ago

Global warming is already taken it toll on humanity. Please highplight all spots on Earth that are suffering abuse from the people, by other poeple. END SLAVERY ON THE XX1S century. Itá all I´ve ever had, redemption songs!!!!!!! 5 years ago

Courtesy of Ipsnews.net

Stanley Kwenda

HARARE, Apr 12 (IPS) – Chippy Ncube, aged 6, jubilantly hurried home as soon as she received her school report. She could not hide her excitement at being the top student in her grade one class when schools closed for the holidays recently in Zimbabwe.
Such an achievement can only be attained with great effort in a country where the education system is under severe strain. Chippy deserved it. Her parents can no longer afford to pay bus fare for her. She has not only had to contend with walking to school but also to carry a chair along with her books to school.

The governing body at her school, Blackstone Primary School located in the capital Harare’s Avenues area, sent letters to parents requesting them to buy chairs for their children. The school can no longer afford basic infrastructure due to the extreme costs caused by hyperinflation of over 1000 percent.

Chippy’s experience represents the state of primary education in Zimbabwe. Several of Zimbabwe’s cash-strapped public schools have requested pupils to bring furniture from home. The education system is struggling under the weight of the country’s seven-year-long political crisis.

Zimbabwe’s school system was one of the best on the African continent after the country gained independence in 1980. Previously the government provided furniture and other necessities.

Government provision has faltered and the authorities have imposed a ceiling on fees to prevent schools from raising money to cover the cost of chairs and desks.

Blackstone Primary School, a ‘‘whites-only’’ school before independence, is regarded as one of the top primary schools in the country. At first, it was one of the many schools which benefited from the strides the government made after independence in building new schools, libraries and providing learning materials.

But Blackstone Primary School has lost its glitter after years of under-funding. Like all government schools, it lacks everything from textbooks to toilet paper. Infrastructure at schools is in a state of total dilapidation.

The Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe, one of two teachers’ representative bodies in the country, said the fact that authorities required parents to provide chairs was testimony to the state of decay in most public schools. ‘‘It shows the extent of the chaos in the education sector,’’ stated a representative.

Teachers have also been adversely affected. High levels of stress due to low wages are driving scores of them from the profession. Those that remain are spending their time selling sweets and other goods to supplement their meagre salaries instead of concentrating on their core business of teaching.

Zimbabwean teachers on average earn between 400,000 and 800,000 Zimbabwean dollars. This is between 1,600 and 3,200 US dollars, using the official exchange rate, and between 25 and 50 US dollars on the parallel market. According to the government’s Central Statistics Office, an average family of five people requires about 900,000 Zimbabwean dollars per month for basic goods and services. This is 3,600 US dollars according to the official exhange rate and 56 US dollars on the parallel market.

Farai Mpofu, a parent, believes it will be a ‘‘miracle’’ if Zimbabwe attained universal primary education by 2015, as per the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

‘‘Education in Zimbabwe is in a bad state. The standards have deteriorated alarmingly compared to 10 years ago. Because of the harsh economic environment, teachers are now selling sweets and knitting jerseys,’’ said Mpofu.

‘‘The education sector is losing highly qualified teachers to neighbouring countries. Kids at public schools are left with teachers who have no interest at all in the job because of low salaries,’’ according to Mpofu/

Alice Muchine, a primary school teacher, described the state of primary education as ‘‘near zero’’. ‘‘It is all zero here. We have no resources. We want textbooks to help the children during reading time. We have no charts of instruction, or chalk, or syllabuses. We have nothing.

‘‘Most of the parents can no longer pay fees for the kids. The BEAM scheme only pays for the fees and not for books for the kids,’’ said Muchine. BEAM or Basic Education Assistance Module is need-based financial aid awarded by the government to orphans. It is limited to school fees and caters for 10 pupils per school.

Tariro Shindi, a student, shares the same view. ‘‘There are a few textbooks which are shared by four students at any given time. Students are sitting on the floor. Teachers sometimes abscond and if students do the same, no questions are asked. Everything is disorganised.’‘

Last year, the UN launched a national education plan for girls to help Zimbabwe with achieving the education MDG. The plan also aims to address emerging HIV/AIDS related and cultural challenges, such as forced early marriage, abuse and economic exploitation which harm particularly girls.

The UN has also actively supported the ministry of education and other partners in the launch of a back to school campaign in September 2006. The campaign sought to re-enrol children who had dropped out of school during the government’s widely condemned Operation Murambatsvina (‘‘Drive Out Filth’‘).

Before Operation Murambatsvina, United Nations Children’s Fund statistics indicated that national primary school enrolment rates improved from 92 to 96 percent between 2000 and 2004. Nearly four out of five orphans and vulnerable children were attending primary school.

Even the most recent data from a UNICEF-led assessment of the impact of Operation Murambatsvina on children’s schooling status across Zimbabwe showed that 90 percent of children affected by the operation are going to school despite being forced to relocate.

‘‘Zimbabweans are making many sacrifices so that their children can continue going to school,’’ said UNICEF’s representative in Zimbabwe, Dr Festo Kavishe.

According to the US state department, the country continues to boast the highest literacy rate in sub-Saharan Africa. 5 years ago

Courtesy of All Africa.com

Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)

By Tonderai Kwidini
Harare

Alois Mufundisi, a media professional, earns 200 million Zimbabwean dollars, about 50 U.S. dollars on the thriving parallel market.

On paper this amount appears huge, but in real terms it is just enough to buy essential foodstuffs for half a month. He is barely able to keep his three children in school. Seven years ago he could manage without any problem. Now he has to do private jobs to supplement his income.

“Sometimes I can’t sleep thinking about where I can get my next dollar. It really pains me to think that I may not be able to pay for basic things such as my children’s education,” said Mufundisi.

With hyperinflation at 8000 percent according to the Central Statistical Office (CSO), keeping children in school has become difficult in Zimbabwe. Educational standards have been on a free fall since the beginning of an unprecedented economic collapse that started in 2000, with often-violent seizures of thousands of white-owned commercial farms in the former regional breadbasket.

“During our time education was free,” said Mufundisi. “My parents could send me and my siblings to boarding schools on my father’s civil servant salary, but now I am in danger of not being able to do the same for my children.”

Schools opened in Zimbabwe on Jan. 15 and teachers in Harare have reported growing absenteeism. To make matters worse the country is facing acute shortages of food, hard currency and fuel in the economic meltdown that began in 2000.

Once Africa’s best, Zimbabwe’s educational system is now in crisis. Tens of thousands of teachers in state schools are constantly on a ‘go-slow’ action demanding a wage hike. There is an exodus of teachers to better paying jobs outside the country. The Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) one of two teachers’ representative bodies estimates that more than 15,000 teachers left the teaching profession in 2006.

Those who stay behind spend most of the time moonlighting. Even head- teachers at private schools where quality of education is better are demanding bribes of up to 200 South African rands or 50 U.S. dollars in hard currency to enroll children.

“I had to pay money in foreign currency to secure a place for my daughter at a private school in Harare,” Mufundisi told IPS.

A teacher at a rural Zimbabwe school who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity said, “I am quitting and going to South Africa. I have sold so many text books from my department library to supplement my meagre salary, I have to make a move before I am caught.”

President Robert Mugabe’s investment in education after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 has generally been seen as the highlight of his increasingly autocratic 27-year rule, although he inherited most of the infrastructure from the former white colonial government.

PTUZ estimates that between four and five children share a textbook. There are often four children to one desk in the poorly equipped classrooms.

Students are fainting in class from hunger. Girls are missing school during the menstrual cycle because they cannot afford to buy sanitary pads. School dropout rates have shot up. Children are quitting school to supplement family incomes as vendors, commuter omnibus conductors, even sex workers.

A price-freeze ordered by the government in June last year left store shelves bare of most basic commodities, but the freeze was eased in phases to restore the viability of producers and businesses. However, supplies of goods have remained erratic.

Some Zimbabwean residential schools hit by severe food shortages were reported to be insisting that students bring their own supplies, according to Zimbabwean private media. The PTUZ said several boarding schools had cut short the last term of 2007 after running out of food.

The union secretary general Raymond Majongwe told IPS, “Our reports indicate that many schools will not open. These are clearly signs of the virtual collapse of the education system.”

Higher education is also in crisis. The Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU) a representative body released a report this week stating that the country has the world’s highest college dropout rate outside a war zone.

The report further states that more than 31.5 percent of students were forced out of school due to the exorbitant fees being charged in these institutions.

“The government only funds about 3 percent of the students in tertiary institutions. 80 percent are funded by their relatives,” stated the report.

“Zimbabwe is facing a sharp decline in public expenditure on higher education, deteriorating teaching conditions, decaying educational facilities and infrastructure, perpetual student unrest, erosion of university autonomy, a shortage of experienced and well trained teaching staff, lack of academic freedoms, and an increasing rate of unemployment among the college graduates,” the report damningly concludes. 5 years ago

Very alien to me being in Mexico. Made me realize that my own country is as racist as the Appartied regime was. I will post this in hope more people see and perhaps, raise public opinion. South Africa5 years ago

Courtesy of Mail & Guardian Online

Stella Mapenzauswa | Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

As I drove from the border with South Africa to my home town I recalled the refrain Zimbabweans use when pondering the economic meltdown in their country: “surely things cannot get any worse than they are”.

That mantra has helped them soldier on during the last eight years as they grappled with an ever-growing list of shortages, which now include water and electricity.

But on my journey home to Bulawayo, which should have taken three hours but lasted double that as I dodged gaping potholes in the pitchblack night, I realised things had gotten worse.

After 14 months living in Johannesburg, with its tarred highways and bustling, well-stocked shopping malls, getting reacquainted with the hardships back home took the joy out of reuniting with family and friends for Christmas.

When I went tor the bathroom in my parents’ house, my mother handed me a bucket of rain water to flush the toilet and wash my hands, because there was nothing in the cistern or the tap.

Although drought-prone Bulawayo was enjoying its wettest summer in recent history, running water from the city council had been erratic for months; there was no money to import treatment chemicals.

I got used to seeing women and children balancing containers on their heads along dusty township roads, begging water from residents lucky enough to have some.

Bulawayo long enjoyed a reputation as Zimbabwe’s cleanest city, with charming, colonial-style buildings, but the walls were now peeling and gone too were the street cleaners who used to keep the central business district pristine.

Stinking litter lay rotting in makeshift dumps close to houses. The rubbish disposal company stopped its weekly collections three months ago because of a fuel shortage.

“We try and burn some of the trash, and dig the rest into the ground,” my mother said, pointing at mounds of soil in what used to be her tiny but lush vegetable garden.

Despair prevails
A sense of despair hung over the city, with none of the spontaneous parties, complete with loud music, that had heralded Christmas Day on my previous visits home.

This is partly because electricity is now a rare commodity. The pile of firewood in my parents’ backyard and the candles in every room said it all.

The power disruptions, already in evidence before I left the country, had worsened as state utility Zesa struggled to import energy in the face of a foreign currency crunch.

The goodwill that had kept Zimbabwe lit despite mounting debts to her neighbours was drying up.

Watching the billowing smoke in our neighbourhood as people cooked evening meals, I mused that I could be in a rural village, and not the second-largest city in what used to be one of Africa’s most thriving economies.

A trip to the supermarket a few days later left me gaping at empty freezers and shelves which only a year ago were stuffed with meat, milk, bread, cooking oil, maize meal and toiletries.

Retailers had stopped stocking basic goods to protest government price controls imposed to stem inflation, the highest in the world at over 8 000%.

Although a few commodities were finding their way back to the shelves, after the government backtracked on the controls, shoppers were not exactly snapping them up.

They were busy waiting in long queues at commercial banks, trying to withdraw money—now also in short supply.

“It’s exhausting just getting from one day to the next,” a childhood friend still living in Bulawayo told me. “If it’s not water cuts, then it’s the electricity, or banknote shortages, or the empty shelves.”

The only money in abundance were Z$1 000 notes which had long lost their value and littered street corners.

“You offer one of those to a three-year-old and they will laugh in your face,” my brother said. He was right. A piece of candy, the cheapest item in stores, cost Z$100 000.

I tried to squelch the familiar sense of guilt at having “bailed out” like thousands of other Zimbabweans who have left the country as the economy sunk deeper into a meltdown critics blame on government mismanagement.

Of about 13-million Zimbabweans, around 3,5-million are estimated to have fled the country’s political and economic crisis. About 2,5-million are in South Africa.

Critics say veteran President Robert Mugabe, in power since the end of white rule in 1980, has pursued skewed policies, including the seizure of white-owned commercial farms for blacks ill-prepared to fully utilise the land.

Mugabe points a finger at Western economic sanctions he says were imposed in retaliation for land reforms meant to correct colonial ownership imbalances.

Watching the despair etched on many faces, I saw that the optimism for which my compatriots have long prided themselves has started to wane, in the face of the likelihood things will probably get much worse before getting better. – Reuters 5 years ago

Courtesy of Zimbabwejournalists.com

By Chenjerai Chitsaru

THERE must be Zimbabweans who remember the big New York blackout of 1977. They must have been reminded of that Big Apple incident by last Saturday’s nationwide blackout, which set some conspiracy theorists’ tongues wagging.

Was this the prelude of a coup of some sort? Would the lights soon return and the State television and radio, after blasting away with a military tune, then boom with the baritone of an extremely calm and collected military officer, intoning solemnly:

“This is the voice of the leader of the National Redemption Council, announcing that the government of…..”
And so on and so forth.

“No such luck,” one cynic retorted to that theory. “All the likely coup leaders are deceased…either in an accident at a railway crossing or an accidental jab with a lethal injection…”

The New York blackout was reported thus:
“On a hot July night in 1977, the lights went out in New York City. The purr of air conditioners, cooling millions of New Yorkers, was replaced by stultifying silence – and then the sound of breaking glass. Faced with the second blackout in twelve years, New Yorkers responded with resilience as well as violence. Many stories emerged from the night of July 13th that revealed New Yorkers’ divergent feelings about the city in which they lived. In some places, neighbors helped neighbors, and strangers helped strangers. Yet, at the same time, neighborhoods throughout New York exploded into violence. Stores were ransacked, looted and destroyed. Buildings were set ablaze. And the police, for the most part, stood helpless. In these stark contradictions, an unusual yet definitive moment left its mark on New York history – the night the lights went out.”

Fortunately for many Zimbabweans, the blackout was no more than another dirty chapter in the reckless bungling of their government, under President Robert Mugabe.

There have been blackouts in selected cities and towns for years, even after the state electricity company, the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (Zesa), was no longer under the aegis of one Sidney Gata, a relative by marriage of President Mugabe.

Previously, critics had zoomed in on this seeming nepotism as a reason for Mugabe’s lack of action at Zesa, in spite of its atrocious record.

But the crisis has worsened without Gata and recently a top official of the rotting parastatal was relieved of his job amid much publicity in the State media.

Among rabidly anti-Mugabe and anti-Zanu PF critics, the scourge of power cuts is aimed at the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) whose turf is the urban population sector.

Other critics, more politically sober but still not impressed with Zanu PF, apportion the blame to a government so preoccupied with retaining power it has taken political and economic decisions which have alienated most of the countries which could have offered aid on very generous repayment conditions.

Zimbabwe receives power from its neighbours, but because of the foreign currency crunch, it has often run out of funds to pay for the power. A few of the countries have cut off power as a result or threatened to do so.

To many critics of Mugabe’s government, this is another tragic example of how the former guerilla leader has failed, literally, to bring the light of development into the darkness of the people’s lives since independence in 1980.

Which might explain why there was feverish speculation when it was reported by the independent media that Simba Makoni might at last have taken the plunge and decided to challenge Mugabe in the presidential election this year.

Some critics scoffed at the very idea of such a challenge, calling it a Zanu PF plot to muddy the election waters. Makoni has been previously linked to a faction of Zanu PF led by the Vice President, Joice Mujuru and her husband, the former army commander, Solomon Mujuru, the so-called kingmaker in the party.

Theoretically, such an alliance would be quite a challenge for Mugabe: the Mujuru’s combined support would encompass two large provinces in Mashonaland – Central and East – and Manicaland, from where Makoni has his roots and where he could also depend on the support of another anti-Mugae stalwart, Edgar Tekere.

If, as expected, most of Matabeleland fell to the MDC, Mugabe and Zanu PF could be on a very sticky wicket indeed. Unfortunately, Makoni is not Tekere, although he too was “bitten by mosquitoes” in Mozambique during the struggle – as the late Eddison Zvobgo used to label the “true freedom fighters”.

For many Zimbabweans, any new government containing elements of Zanu PF would be fatally contaminated. This party has performed so dismally that most people would not be excited if a new government was tainted, even remotely, by a Zanu PF element – old or new.

Why some have speculated on the so-called new party being a “Trojan horse” is the mention of Ibbo Mandazas, as being among the luminaries of the new party.

The former newspaper publisher and ardent admirer of Mugabe is not in Tekere’s or Makoni’s political league. Although it is his publishing house which brought out Tekere’s autobiography, in which Mugabe is heavily rubbished, he is not seen as a “heavyweight critic” of Zanu PF.

So, the political landscape, it would seem, will be dominated for a long time to come by a cocky Zanu PF, relying on its apparatus of terror and subterfuge, to take on all-comers, and the MDC, weakened by division at the top, and easily liable to be hoodwinked by Zanu PF into signing pacts with the enemy which might turn out to be their final undoing.

Most hard-nosed critics of the government tend to dismiss any radical reform programmes under Mugabe. They say the president is trapped in a time-warp. Hardly is he likely to abandon completely the idea of the government having a hand in the economy.

For instance, although on paper the government has accepted the participation of the private sector in its parastatals, including the national airline, the national railways and the national electricity company, not many would-be partners would risk it after studying a new law on the ownership of mines.

Under that law, indigenous people would legally own 51 percent of any new mining company. That ownership could translate into government ownership, as there are few Zimbabweans rich enough to invest so heavily on their own in a mining venture.

Moreover, the suspicion is that most of the indigenous stakes would be snapped up by Zanu PF heavyweights, as happened with the formerly white-owned commercial farms.

Mugabe has not abandoned his flirtation with Marxism-Leninism, it would seem. Although some of his colleagues in the party hierarchy, notably the Vice President Joseph Msika and the Speaker of the House of Assembly and Zanu PF chairman John Nkomo, are not too keen on socialism, Mugabe may lure them into his circle with “goodies”.

All this, as an election platform, would be meaningless to most voters. An improvement in their lives would hinge on the creation of more well-paying jobs which would mean foreign direct investment, affordable schools with well-paid qualified teachers, hospitals and clinics with well-paid doctors and nurses – and reliable electricity, preferably run by a private company and not by Zanu PF zealots or relatives of the president.

All this would be topped by a government with zero tolerance on corruption. 5 years ago

Courtesy of Mail & Guardian Online

Harare, Zimbabwe

Police were called to churches around the Zimbabwean capital Harare last weekend to halt skirmishes between supporters of a bishop who is a close ally of President Robert Mugabe and followers of a rival cleric, reports said on Wednesday.

Tensions rose after followers of Anglican Bishop Nolbert Kunonga, a supporter of the 83-year-old Zimbabwean leader, insisted on holding services in Harare churches on Sunday even though Anglican authorities have decreed Kunonga is no longer a member of the church.

In September Kunonga announced he was withdrawing the Harare diocese from the Anglican Province of Central Africa, ostensibly because he opposed the church’s stance on homosexuality.

The province has since appointed a new bishop to fill Kunonga’s place.

Kunonga, a beneficiary of Mugabe’s controversial land reform programme, and his supporters have, however, refused to recognise the new cleric, Sebastian Bakare, formerly of Africa University in the eastern city of Mutare.

There were disturbances in at least seven churches on Sunday, including at the main Anglican Cathedral in the city centre, and police had to be brought in, said the government mouthpiece Herald newspaper.

Kunonga’s supporters held their service in the cathedral itself while Bakare’s followers met in the church hall, the report said.

Bakare said his parishioners had been assaulted.

This is not the first time the two camps have clashed.

Writing in an epiphany message on Saturday, Bakare said he and his followers were denied entry to a church in the plush suburb of Borrowdale on Christmas Day.

Instead of extending a hand of peace people who call themselves priests were going round leaving their own congregations unattended in order to promote violence which makes the basic purpose of Christ’s mission a scandal, said Bakare.

“We have become a laughing stock for fellow Christians from other churches and the public in general.” – Sapa-DPA 5 years ago