AFRICA        First Lady   Subvu. electricity bill

 Zimbabwe  november 2008                                     No Welcome mat

November 22, 2008  Carpetblogger
 Zimbabwe Traumatizes Carpetblogger

On arrival, my South African Airways flight descended from rainy clouds, only to abort the landing twice within a couple hundred feet of the ground. After sharply ovaling for 20 minutes, the pilot announced that he was waiting for the runway lights to come back on. The hotel – the 13-floor Crown Plaza in the center of the city – not only did not have internet or air conditioning, it also had no phones – as in “unable to call down for room service” no phone. Not that it mattered; there really wasn’t much on offer in the restaurant, just gristly meat and starchy vegetables.

Lots of African cities look like they don’t work but they do. Harare looks like it works but it doesn’t. It’s attractive and organized with long straight, carefully signposted thoroughfares, edged by (albeit poorly maintained) cycle paths. Its wide avenues are lined with hundreds of mature jacarandas and flame trees, planted with British colonial precision 50 or 60 years ago. “Tree Cutting Available” signs posted on their trunks looked ominous. As they dripped their purple and red blooms on the pavements, it was easy to imagine them hacked apart for firewood when cooking fuel becomes impossible to buy.

One of the benefits of a deprived middle class with no access to consumer goods and no money to buy them is very little trash. This is good because there’s no collection. The parking lot of the country’s largest public hospital was empty. All hospitals and clinics have shut their doors, which hasn’t done much to improve the cholera situation. I was told it’s a crisis if one percent of cholera cases die. Rumors are that in Zimbabwe, 10 percent of Cholera cases die. Now that it’s rainy season and the sewers overflow into water supplies, the coming outbreak should be particularly vivid.


Unlike Afghanistan or Somalia, Zimbabwe isn’t lawless. People queue politely at the ATMs, for buses and for fuel. Traffic laws are carefully obeyed, even when there’s no electricity to run the robots (south African for traffic lights, a term I absolutely adore and will use from now on. When a South African says it, it sounds like “rabbit”). People still throw their trash in bins, even though it won’t be collected. Harare has a substantial middle class population, which makes what’s happening here even harder to understand.


I didn’t really believe it when colleagues said there is no food in the shops. It’s not 100% accurate. The situation has improved somewhat from six months ago when there really was nothing to buy. Since then, US dollars have been legalized as tender in certain shops. Now, there is some food in supermarkets but it's priced in US dollars. There’s absolutely nothing if you have Zimbabwe dollars, which is what most people have. With its dairy shelves filled with leaky bottled water, one market serving a middle class neighborhood reminded me of Moscow in 1991. The staples aisle stocked nothing but Mezoe Orange Crush, a Fanta-like soft drink that is definitely a Zimbabwean staple, but isn’t terribly nutritious. In the checkout line, I stood next to a man who had a rusty shopping cart filled with lunch box-sized bags of potato chips.


In an ordinary national chain, a loaf of Wonder-type white bread was $1.20. Two pounds of flour cost more than $3, payable only in USD. The typical wage in Zimbabwe? About 5 million Zim dollars, or about 10 USD, depending on the inflation rate. Should bread be available in Zim dollars, it cost 1.2 million.

Prices are bad enough, but accessing one’s money is next to impossible. There’s a daily withdrawal limit 500,000 Zim dollars from ATMs. That’s about 50 cents, or enough for bus fare home from work. All day long, lines of thousands of civil servants, office workers, teachers, police and military curve around buildings and down city blocks, waiting to use ATMs that will probably be out of money before most people reach them. Yet people continue to wait.

The whole visit was a lesson in macro-economics. If you want to understand why it’s like this, the short answer is nationalization of the farms and price controls.  Zimbabwe isn’t like it is because of war or natural disaster or the tragedy of history. It’s a predictable result of intentional economic policies made by people who should know better. Carpetblogger

                                                                             
22nd November 2008  Cathy Buckle

Within half a kilometre of a main army barracks and in view of a steady stream of traffic and hundreds of people, a man lay next to a main road leading to the Harare airport this week. Barefoot, painfully thin and with thick, unkempt hair the man lay unmoving on the verge, his feet protruding into the busy road. Standing on the opposite side of the road four men in army camouflage stood hitch- hiking, choosing not to see the man lying a few steps away from them.

Outside banks, building societies and post offices the crowds of people trying to withdraw their own money have grown to multiple thousands. Many people have resorted to sleeping outside the banks in order to be near the front of the queues where they can only withdraw five hundred thousand dollars a day - enough to buy one mouthful of a single cornish pasty being sold at a local bakery this week. Two and a half million dollars was the price tag for this simple take away snack - five days of queuing at the bank to buy one meal for one person.
On a seventy kilometre stretch of road through what used to be prime agricultural land on the way to the capital city, there is silence and desolation as roadside farms lie unploughed and unplanted while the country remains barren of seed and fertilizer. Even as the rains fall on the land and the ground turns springy underfoot, the weeds are sprouting but not the food. The lushest crop I saw in 70 kilometres was grass being carefully manicured on a golf course.

In supermarkets, the majority of which are not allowed to trade in US dollars, the shelves are empty. There are no staple goods, no dairy products, no confectionary, no fast foods, no tinned or bottled products, nothing to eat at all. From all over the country there are first hand reports of people barely surviving by eating roots, wild berries, beetles and insects.
Hospitals without disposable gloves, medicines, drips, bandages or disinfectant. Nurses who cannot afford to come to work. Toilets and taps without water. A growing cholera outbreak in all areas of the country with 300 people already dead. Raw sewage flowing in the streets of high density areas. Dustbins which have not been collected in urban residential suburbs since July in my home town. Men, women and children collecting water in bowls and buckets from swampy streams and murky pools. No soap to buy in the shops so no chance of preventing the spread of cholera by washing your hands with soap and water. Cathy Buckle

 

      Zimbabwe  2007

Is Mugabe’s government stock-piling food to use to buy votes next year?

• Musukuru                             Cathy Buckle
• Chinese products       Cathy Buckle
• Morondera                    Cathy Buckle
• Struggle for life        Cathy Buckle
• Subvu                              Cathy Buckle
• Harare diary                firepussy
• mixed messages           Cathy Buckle
• Inflation                        Cathy Buckle                                                                      
• Whose Zimbabwe                 Chippla                     
• economic collapse                Eddie Cross
• Pay in bits                                 Cathy Buckle
• Hope                                    Cathy Buckle 
• Jam                                             Sokwanele 
• Borders                          Sokwanele 
• Violence                         Sokwanele 

                        Is Mugabe’s government stock-piling food to use to buy votes next year?

June 15th, 2007:

Sent to us by email:

I am involved in the Dry Food business in Zimbabwe and we source and supply various commodities from protein based products to cereals.

At this time of year, we get this in to stock as the demand increases as domestic maize supplies diminish particularly in the rural areas.

In attempting to buy large quantities of Kapenta (Dried Fish) and also nuts, I found that stocks were all but non existent.

I was told that the Government is paying cash (notes) to the suppliers with the word that they wish to buy everything.

We have elections coming up early next year and they will occur at a time when the food deficit will be at its worst. In the past, they have used maize and maize meal to lure voters by placing stock in the vicinity of polling stations added to which is word that they will get food if they vote the right way.

Each polling station (mostly in schools) counts the vote right there and therefore the authorities can determine just how the local population chose their candidate.

I have no doubt that as Maize is in desperately short supply this year, this type of food will be used to cheat the system once more.

                                                                             Hullo? Hullo….? Anyone home…..?

It all reminds me of my favourite homework story. The village boy who says he was crossing the flooded river on his way to school when a crocodile leapt from the raging waters and devoured his homework. Result: the whole class and the teacher collapse in side-splitting mirth. But, and here's the rub, the boy still gets punished - and he still has to do his homework. So these brain dead Zanies can invent as many nonsensical excuses as they like, no one believes them. And in the end they will have to pay for their criminal stupidity... What goes around comes around!

 

March, 2007

Yesterday Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube, clutching a brown bible, spoke passionately about what has to happen next in Zimbabwe. "We must be ready to stand, even in front of blazing guns," he said, ''I am ready to stand in front." The Archbishop described himself and the people of Zimbabwe as cowards and said: 'if we gather a crowd of 20,000, the government will not use its guns.'' No one in their right minds would describe Archbishop Ncube as a coward - for seven years he has not been silenced and has stood as a bright light in the darkness - for believers and non believers, for mothers and children, for the beaten and brutalized and for the poor, desperate and hungry people who are dying out of sight of the cameras and world headlines.

April 21st, 2007
                                                   How awful this must be for the Anglican faithful…!         Hope

 In contrast to the Catholic Church, African Anglican Bishops have issued a pastoral letter which appears to broadly toe the government line. It is totally shameful, but perhaps not surprising given the track record of Nolbert Kunonga, the Anglican Bishop of Harare.
This is a man who has not only accepted a farm from Mugabe (40 pieces of silver aren’t the going currency among the Zanu Pf elite), but he has also used government militia to drive the farmworkers and their families off the farm. And in 2005 he appeared before an ecclesiastical court to face 38 charges arising from scores of complaints [including] … incitement to murder, intimidating critics, ignoring church law, mishandling church funds and bringing militant ZANU PF politics to the pulpit .
A man of God….? A moral authority…? I don’t think so!