Robert Mugabe is to blame for the suffering of the Zimbabwean people, his former ally and main rival for the presidency has said.
Simba Makoni, 57, served in President Mugabe's government from the moment the country won independence from Britain in 1980. But his decision last month to challenge Mr Mugabe in the March 29 polls reflects a growing dissatisfaction among leading figures in the ruling Zanu-PF party, who have grown tired of the 84-year-old president and baulk at his determination to remain in his post as the country rapidly disintegrates.
"Zimbabwe is in the condition it is in because of a failure of leadership," said Mr Makoni, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
Mr Makoni, who will run as an independent candidate after he was expelled from Zanu-PF for daring to challenge the president, said that this realisation had come to him over several years.
"There was not a 'St Paul on the road to Damascus' awakening," he said. "It wasn't an event, it didn't just happen, it was going on as the situation evolved - that this is not the correct way for our people."
With an estimated four million Zimbabweans needing food aid, and with inflation officially running at more than 100,000 per cent, Mr Makoni predicted he would win by a landslide.
"We will win resoundingly, by 70 per cent plus," he said. "The people who are supporting me in Zanu-PF and in other quarters, agree with me that the country is ripe for change at the highest level, that the country needs to take a different direction, a positive direction."
The destruction of Zimbabwe's economy dates from 2000, when Mr Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms. Mr Makoni is calling for an end to race-based policies.
"What we had in Zimbabwe in 1980 was a national government, we had people from different parties and different ethnic groups. We offered the African continent, if not the world, national reconciliation, so I am merely reactivating those values."
But whatever a candidate's vision, winning an election in Zimbabwe is not just a matter of crosses on ballot papers. Mr Mugabe is widely regarded as having stolen the last poll in 2002 - and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) believes that a fair ballot is impossible.
With the ruling Zanu-PF having control over the media and police, the MDC is participating in the elections only under protest. A new constitution that would have changed the political climate was recently agreed but Mr Mugabe announced the election before it could be implemented.
Mr Makoni's campaign alleges it has been victim to "dirty tricks". He was unable to leave Harare to campaign in rural areas yesterday because registration plates for his vehicles were not available. Meanwhile, his printers had supposedly run out of paper to produce fliers.
"I wish and hope and expect this election will be free and fair," Mr Makoni said. He added, however, that he had no access to the state television broadcaster or to the national daily newspapers.
"I respect our president. Up to Feb 5 [when Mr Makoni formally announced his candidacy] we had a good, cordial relationship. I don't know what he feels now."
So what of the comments Mr Mugabe has made since then, comparing him to a prostitute and a frog? "I am puzzled," replied Mr Makoni. "You had best ask him about that."
Source:The Telegraph
Friday, February 29, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Govt employees fight over ZANU PF crumbs
ZIMBABWE'S civil servants are up in arms against the government for selectively awarding hefty pay rises to the military while excluding the rest of its workers who are earning salaries that are far below the poverty datum line.
Union leaders threatened industrial action if their members are not awarded salary increases similar to those received by soldiers. President Robert Mugabe' bankrupt government this month awarded hefty pay increases to disgruntled soldiers in an apparent move to buy their loyalty ahead of crucial joint elections on March 29.
A survey by New Zimbabwe.com showed that soldiers got windfalls of between $1 billion and $3 billion in salaries depending on the rank this month, while teachers got $500 million on average, with other government workers getting much less.
The government which employees all civil servants is also responsible for paying the salaries of soldiers, police officers and Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) operatives through its various employment commissions.
Government sources say CIO agents who did not receive the windfalls that were received by soldiers this February are bitter and have sent a delegation to approach CIO director general Happiton Bonyongwe with their grievances.
Bonyongwe has been linked with Zanu PF factional fighting, with strong suggestions he is associated with former finance minister Simba Makoni who has launched a bid for the country's presidency.
It is believed that Mugabe now prefers working with Bonyongwe's deputies and trusted army brigadiers on all matters of state security. Bonyongwe, Finance Minister Samuel Mumbengegwi and Rtd Major Kudzai Mbudzi, one of Makoni's top advisers, are all married to sisters.
The leader of the pro-government Zimbabwe Teachers Association (ZIMTA) Tendai Chikowore warned that teachers will embark on a full-scale industrial action if the government does not urgently undertake to review their salaries in line with what was awarded to soldiers.
Chikowore said: "Our members are now very impatient. We are consulting all provinces this week and I must say we are under pressure to call for industrial action.
"Our members now suspect that the employer is deliberately choosing to underpay teachers while other government employees are smiling all the way to the bank every month."
ZIMTA which is now threatening to go on strike has in the past distanced itself from strike action spearheaded by its rival, the PTUZ, claiming it prefers negotiating.
The militant Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) accuses the Zanu PF government of being "insensitive and discriminatory" by giving soldiers hefty salaries while "impoverished teachers and other civil servants get peanuts every month."
PTUZ secretary general Raymond Majongwe said President Robert Mugabe's government was using salaries as an electioneering tool to buy the loyalty of other employees and punishing others.
Majongwe said: "What is happening in the public service is very sad. We have a situation were Mugabe is giving soldiers a lot of money ahead of everyone else as a way of buying their allegiance in the event that the forthcoming elections are disputed."
He added: "We are aware that Mugabe is planning to rig the elections in March because he must win at all costs. On the other hand he believes that teachers do not deserve salaries because they are agents of regime change. That is ridiculous."
Majongwe who was hospitalised last Tuesday after he was brutally assaulted by Zanu PF youth militias in Harare said it was "tragic" that teachers were being viewed and treated like enemies of the state by the government. He said he hoped leaders of other public service workers unions would soon see the light and join the PTUZ call for confrontation with the government.
Public Service Association (PSA) boss Cecilia Alexander-Khowa said members of her association were bitter after being sidelined in the pay review.
Khowa said: "Our members are very bitter because they are saying the employer is showing favouritism when dealing with the employees. We under extreme pressure to reach an agreement with government and the issue requires urgent attention."
She added: "We are members of the same family and for the past 28 or so years we have always been treated the same with the uniformed forces. We can not rule out anything because government employees are very angry to say the least."
The PSA represents the rest of the government employees outside the uniformed forces and teachers. Teachers are now pushing for a gross salary of $1.7 billion from $520 million given earlier this month. PTUZ officials have justified the new salary demands by teachers saying they believe these demands are reasonable in the context of the current hyperinflationary environment and the escalating cost of living.
Nurses, doctors and other professionals are leaving Zimbabwe in large numbers in search of better paying jobs in Botswana, South Africa, Britain, Australia and the United States among other countries.
Source: www.newzimbabwe.com
Union leaders threatened industrial action if their members are not awarded salary increases similar to those received by soldiers. President Robert Mugabe' bankrupt government this month awarded hefty pay increases to disgruntled soldiers in an apparent move to buy their loyalty ahead of crucial joint elections on March 29.
A survey by New Zimbabwe.com showed that soldiers got windfalls of between $1 billion and $3 billion in salaries depending on the rank this month, while teachers got $500 million on average, with other government workers getting much less.
The government which employees all civil servants is also responsible for paying the salaries of soldiers, police officers and Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) operatives through its various employment commissions.
Government sources say CIO agents who did not receive the windfalls that were received by soldiers this February are bitter and have sent a delegation to approach CIO director general Happiton Bonyongwe with their grievances.
Bonyongwe has been linked with Zanu PF factional fighting, with strong suggestions he is associated with former finance minister Simba Makoni who has launched a bid for the country's presidency.
It is believed that Mugabe now prefers working with Bonyongwe's deputies and trusted army brigadiers on all matters of state security. Bonyongwe, Finance Minister Samuel Mumbengegwi and Rtd Major Kudzai Mbudzi, one of Makoni's top advisers, are all married to sisters.
The leader of the pro-government Zimbabwe Teachers Association (ZIMTA) Tendai Chikowore warned that teachers will embark on a full-scale industrial action if the government does not urgently undertake to review their salaries in line with what was awarded to soldiers.
Chikowore said: "Our members are now very impatient. We are consulting all provinces this week and I must say we are under pressure to call for industrial action.
"Our members now suspect that the employer is deliberately choosing to underpay teachers while other government employees are smiling all the way to the bank every month."
ZIMTA which is now threatening to go on strike has in the past distanced itself from strike action spearheaded by its rival, the PTUZ, claiming it prefers negotiating.
The militant Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) accuses the Zanu PF government of being "insensitive and discriminatory" by giving soldiers hefty salaries while "impoverished teachers and other civil servants get peanuts every month."
PTUZ secretary general Raymond Majongwe said President Robert Mugabe's government was using salaries as an electioneering tool to buy the loyalty of other employees and punishing others.
Majongwe said: "What is happening in the public service is very sad. We have a situation were Mugabe is giving soldiers a lot of money ahead of everyone else as a way of buying their allegiance in the event that the forthcoming elections are disputed."
He added: "We are aware that Mugabe is planning to rig the elections in March because he must win at all costs. On the other hand he believes that teachers do not deserve salaries because they are agents of regime change. That is ridiculous."
Majongwe who was hospitalised last Tuesday after he was brutally assaulted by Zanu PF youth militias in Harare said it was "tragic" that teachers were being viewed and treated like enemies of the state by the government. He said he hoped leaders of other public service workers unions would soon see the light and join the PTUZ call for confrontation with the government.
Public Service Association (PSA) boss Cecilia Alexander-Khowa said members of her association were bitter after being sidelined in the pay review.
Khowa said: "Our members are very bitter because they are saying the employer is showing favouritism when dealing with the employees. We under extreme pressure to reach an agreement with government and the issue requires urgent attention."
She added: "We are members of the same family and for the past 28 or so years we have always been treated the same with the uniformed forces. We can not rule out anything because government employees are very angry to say the least."
The PSA represents the rest of the government employees outside the uniformed forces and teachers. Teachers are now pushing for a gross salary of $1.7 billion from $520 million given earlier this month. PTUZ officials have justified the new salary demands by teachers saying they believe these demands are reasonable in the context of the current hyperinflationary environment and the escalating cost of living.
Nurses, doctors and other professionals are leaving Zimbabwe in large numbers in search of better paying jobs in Botswana, South Africa, Britain, Australia and the United States among other countries.
Source: www.newzimbabwe.com
Monday, February 25, 2008
So President Mugabe is turned 84 ! And is still in control!
Inflation is officially more than 100 000 percent, prices are incredibly high, blackouts are frequent, food shortages are widely pronounced, and you are proudly in charge of the regime that has caused all these evils. Does this not bother you? We doubt if it does. If it did, we presume you would have long done the most honorable thing.
Mr. President, do you honestly think its fair for you and your family to spend a fortune on your bash at the expense of millions of Zimbabweans who are on the ropes, literally starving and needing aid? We think it’s absolutely not fair and we detest it.
Iin your interview earlier today with a State daily, you seem to be in pursuit of the fantasy that you are immortal. You reveal that the grumblings within your party are a culmination of greed by some elements after your job.
And boastfully you ask: “Akanga avaudza kuti ndichachembera ndiani.” How incredible! At 84 you still believe you are young? Y’ know; you have a fundamental problem Mr. President. So this explains why you don’t want to abdicate power. You think you are still young enough? No you are not. You are now a burdensome geriatric.
The Herald newspaper gladly describes you as a “paragon of magnanimity, consistency.” Consistency, yes, but we believe your consistency is misplaced since it has all to do with wrong; destruction, belligerence. Magnanimity; hell no! We believe you are such a disgraced individual.
You are now just too old and devoid of constructive ideas. Zimbabweans are tired of you, you are such a pathetic failure. We do cherish your part in liberating the country, but we stand up and say God forbid when you want to personalize
Now; that you are facing an election, we wish you defeat. But in the likely event that you win, we advise that you hand over power to a much more reasonable person, although we don’t believe in a reformed Zanu PF or in anybody to do with the party for that matter, including the Makoni that you think is self-opinionated and has become dangerous not only to himself but to the society.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Makoni woos the generals off Mugabe bandwagon
Basildon PetaFebruary 19 2008 at 11:55AM
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's reliance on the army to keep him in power now rests on shaky ground.Two former heads of the Zimbabwean armed forces are solidly behind former finance minister Simba Makoni's rebellion against Mugabe.
Interviews with highly placed Zanu-PF officials have confirmed that General Vitalis Zvinavashe and General Solomon Mujuru have been part of Makoni's plans. The elaborate plot was hatched after the Zimbabwean president blocked Makoni's nomination as the ruling party's candidate at a special congress in December.
The sources said it had always been easy for Mugabe to rig elections, since the army ran the elections, but that this would be much more difficult against Makoni.
Other senior army officers have helped to inspire Makoni's rebellion. In party circles he is supported by Zanu-PF stalwarts, including politburo member Dumiso Dabengwa, party chairperson John Nkomo and vice-president Joseph Msika.
Officials said the fact that no senior person within Zanu-PF had openly condemned Makoni since he announced his move more than a week ago,was evidence of his wide support within the ruling party.
"The task of condemning him (Makoni) so far has been seized upon by lunatics like (war veterans leader) Joseph Chinotimba," said a senior Zanu-PF official.
The only senior member of Mugabe's inner circle to have publicly commented on the Makoni move, cabinet minister and Zanu-PF secretary for legal affairs Emmerson Mnangagwa, was very mild in his remarks.
Mnangagwa, who has been doing the bidding for Mugabe in the succession race, announced that Makoni had automatically expelled himself from the party. Mugabe has yet to make a pronouncement on Makoni's move, all of which is in sharp contrast to the normally immediate and virulent attacks launched by Mugabe and his cronies against opponents.
Sources said Mugabe's abrupt postponement of the sitting of the nomination courts two weeks ago was because he had been severely shaken by Makoni'smove and wanted to ensure that Makoni was not joined by disgruntled members who had lost out in the primaries.
Zvinavashe said in 2002 that the army would never salute Tsvangirai as president, because he had not fought in the liberation struggle. But, recently, Zvinavashe has been openly critical of Mugabe, saying that Mugabe was betraying the struggle for democracy with his decision to cling to power at all costs.
(This article was originally published on page 9 of The Mercury on
February 19, 2008)
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
These elections again - heyi madoda
Peta ThornycroftHarare
18 February 2008
There is growing uncertainty in Zimbabwe as politicians and analysts realize
that President Robert Mugabe is likely to face a run off after the March 29
elections. For VOA, Peta Thornycroft in Harare reports on the concerns.
Harare political scientist Eldred Masungurure says he believes the ruling
party - Zanu PF - will try to bring off what he describes as "an electoral
coup" when the results of the presidential balloting emerge after the
elections next month.
He and other independent political analysts do not believe it will be
possible for Mr. Mugabe to win an absolute majority, as for the first time
in his political career he faces not one, but two strong candidates.
Mr. Mugabe would, Masungurure says, have to do massive amounts of rigging to win a majority.
Many independent analysts say that Morgan Tsvangirai, founding president of
the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, was cheated out of a narrow victory in the last presidential poll in 2002. Mr. Tsvangirai has
considerable support in many urban areas, particularly in the capital, Harare.
One of the challengers President Mugabe is facing, Simba Makoni, had been a life long member of the ruling Zanu PF until he was expelled earlier this
month, and has held senior positions in both the government and the party.
Mr. Makoni says he has considerable support from many of his former
colleagues in Zanu PF. Analysts say that means it will be more difficult for
Mr. Mugabe's supporters to rig this election undetected.
Analysts point out that President Mugabe does not know which of the
legislative candidates on the Zanu PF ticket will support Simba Makoni in
the presidential poll.
Masungurure says it is hard to image that an already divided Zanu PF, having contested parliamentary, local government and senate elections on March 29, would be prepared or even able to stage a second round of presidential
voting just 21 days later.
He said Zimbabweans should not be surprised if President Mugabe decides to break electoral laws if, as seems most likely, he does not win a clear
majority.
He said Zimbabweans should look carefully at what happened in Kenya last
month when President Mwai Kibaki quickly had himself sworn into power before any legal objections to the result could be launched by the opposition.
Patrick Chinamasa, a spokesman for Zanu PF who is also minister of justice,
says a second round in the presidential poll will not be necessary as
president Mugabe will win "resoundlingly." He described the opposition as
"make shift" and he said Mr. Mugabe's opponents do not have a "platform or
any cohesion."
Source: VOA
Elections, idiots and handpicked selections?
As an astute observer of Zimbabwean politics, I have watched the election drama unfold with all the interests and plenty of disappointment. I call it a drama because it cannot be called by any other name. Democracy is supposed to be a very big and fair game, but can it be so fair that we can have eleven candidates competing for the votes of an increasingly skeletal population of Mpopoma, or Gwanda Central where many who would have been voters have long walked over crocodiles to get to the greener side of the Limpopo?
The sheer number of idiots, nobodies, thieves and politically bankrupt fools, chancers and turn coats competing to represent the people leaves plenty to worry about. Government calls it the harmonized, historic elections. Historic indeed if you consider the number of split parties contesting with twins in every other small constituencies.
The number of disgruntled people who filed is also a cause of questioning as to whether the motive is really to stand for the people or line the pockets of some of these poor sods masquareding as candidates. The only historic thing I see is that ZANU PF is for the first time since its dictatorship facing a real challenge from the alliance of Simba Makoni and least understood and perhaps more rational Arthur Mutambara led MDC.
Tsvangirai being the noisemaker that he is, has already heaped scorn on Makoni calling him an unreformed ZANU PF, which I think emanates from his short memory, so short that he has forgotten that he personally sang all the praises of Robert Mugabe while he was a youth leader and a Gukurahundi in that party in the early 80s.
I have a feeling that If Makoni is ZANU PF, so is Tsvangirai, and so is the ten-fold liar-cum-day dreamer called John Makumbe, an unrepentant Tsvangirai apologist who masquaredes as a political analyst.
The election fever is bringing out all the idiots and some appear to be bigger and more mindless than that we thought. I will tell you why Makumbe and other Tsvangirai apologists are accomplished idiots in the next instalment.
Moroka Media.2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Zisco Steel Grinds To A Halt
By: Oscar NkalaPublished: 8 Feb 08 - 0:00
Zimbabwe’s major iron and steel producer, the Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company (Zisco), will shortly shut down its Number 4 blast furnace, the only operational unit, to pave way for its refurbishment.
Acting Zisco CEO Alois Gowo tells Engineering News that the refurbishment contract has been awarded to a Chinese company. “The blast furnace has already outlived its lifespan. A Chinese company will carry out the job of relining the furnace between now and July. All we are waiting for now is the release of the US$9,5-million payment by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. We expect the actual refurbishment to begin in August,” Gowo said.
He adds that, in line with the agreement, Zisco has started building up stockpiles of iron waste pieces (ingots) that will be processed into finished goods when the relining process begins, while the Chinese company will supply the equipment.
Zisco projects that production will increase to 25 000 t a month when the furnace comes back into production. Steel production at the company has been on a continuous slide for the past five years as the country’s economic crisis worsens. The latest slide saw production levels tumble from 20% of its full capacity in 2006 to 10% currently.
Gowo blames the decline in production on several factors that revolve around power cuts and inadequate coal deliveries from Hwange Colliery Company.
Coal deliveries to us declined from an average of 8 000 t a month between September and December last year to a mere 5 000 t a month currently. Power cuts also continue to deal us huge blows.” Gowo.
The company resumed production a fortnight ago, after being forced to close down by the nationwide power outages last week.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Dabengwa, Gono show fools no one
By Oscar NkalaLast updated: 11/03/2006 08:00:00
THE past two weeks in Zimbabwe will probably go down in history as the most nightmarish for the increasingly skeletal population of a sinking country.
But as people elsewhere struggled to rise above the confusion brought about by the new Gono-dollars, the city of Bulawayo marked a milestone in its struggle for water security.
Apart from the generally acknowledged fact that the water donors conference was a flop, it marked a new chapter in the general pursuit of the century old Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project (MZWP).
The water donors conference was also significant in highlighting that it has finally dawned on the city fathers and everyone that years of Zanu PF lies, deceit and cheap politicking over the regional thirst can never transform the haunted pipedream into a gush of fresh water.
It was a refusal to accept that the people of the region have to go begging to Harare everytime for water that is in fact supposed to be a freely accessible community resource in Binga, Hwange, Victoria Falls and all the villages along the river basin.
While all the other delegates were deliberating on the harsh reality of the water crisis and its economic impact on Bulawayo's shrunken reputation as an industrial hub, a day-dreamer sat among them, replaying the many hallucinations and nightmares he has experienced in many years of being Zanu PF's speaker box of deception on the crucial regional water security agenda.
Dumiso Dabengwa evidently spent too much time messing up the various ministerial portfolios doled out to him on the government's usual trial and error allocation of duties, in which it is not strange to find a former Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) director of operations appointed minister of Housing, Health and Community Services.
I cannot dispute assertions that lying is contagious or that it has become a rather strange syndrome of self-sustenace in the ruling party. Many followers of the MZWP would not have been surprised, therefore, to hear Dabengwa and Zanu PF's compliant media suggest that an ideologically and financially bankrupt government that has so glaringly failed to deliver staple food to ordinary Zimbabweans would complete the Gwayi-Shangani Dam in 2008.
The worst surprise is that the bare Gwayi-Shangani confluence is already called a dam when it has not even become the water body the dreamers want us to believe it will be. It does not exist, and possibly may not, except in the minds of such terrible day-dreamers. Calling an unimplemented dam a dam could be a ploy to create a feeling that something is really being done when the plan has long gathered dust in the offices of civil servants paid for squatting on the project like the legendary Russian bear.
But as people elsewhere struggled to rise above the confusion brought about by the new Gono-dollars, the city of Bulawayo marked a milestone in its struggle for water security.
Apart from the generally acknowledged fact that the water donors conference was a flop, it marked a new chapter in the general pursuit of the century old Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project (MZWP).
The water donors conference was also significant in highlighting that it has finally dawned on the city fathers and everyone that years of Zanu PF lies, deceit and cheap politicking over the regional thirst can never transform the haunted pipedream into a gush of fresh water.
It was a refusal to accept that the people of the region have to go begging to Harare everytime for water that is in fact supposed to be a freely accessible community resource in Binga, Hwange, Victoria Falls and all the villages along the river basin.
While all the other delegates were deliberating on the harsh reality of the water crisis and its economic impact on Bulawayo's shrunken reputation as an industrial hub, a day-dreamer sat among them, replaying the many hallucinations and nightmares he has experienced in many years of being Zanu PF's speaker box of deception on the crucial regional water security agenda.
Dumiso Dabengwa evidently spent too much time messing up the various ministerial portfolios doled out to him on the government's usual trial and error allocation of duties, in which it is not strange to find a former Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) director of operations appointed minister of Housing, Health and Community Services.
I cannot dispute assertions that lying is contagious or that it has become a rather strange syndrome of self-sustenace in the ruling party. Many followers of the MZWP would not have been surprised, therefore, to hear Dabengwa and Zanu PF's compliant media suggest that an ideologically and financially bankrupt government that has so glaringly failed to deliver staple food to ordinary Zimbabweans would complete the Gwayi-Shangani Dam in 2008.
The worst surprise is that the bare Gwayi-Shangani confluence is already called a dam when it has not even become the water body the dreamers want us to believe it will be. It does not exist, and possibly may not, except in the minds of such terrible day-dreamers. Calling an unimplemented dam a dam could be a ploy to create a feeling that something is really being done when the plan has long gathered dust in the offices of civil servants paid for squatting on the project like the legendary Russian bear.
Self respecting leaders would not dare strip themselves as naked as DD did in choosing to be the communal purveyor of lies for the convenience of Zanu PF.
Before replaying the old and tired piece of propaganda about work on MZWP resuming soon, DD should have asked himself why the conference, which was not a government or MZWP initiative, had been held in the first place. This way, it would have taken just one straight thinker to bring DD back from wandering in shady hallucinations to a realisation that the hosting of the conference could only be explained in terms the failure of the government, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and MZWP to live up to their age-old promises.
We were told, until we stopped believing tales involving the Chinese and Malaysian mafias, that Zambezi water will transform the sorry state of aridity in Matabeleland into a self-sufficient a green belt in which chronic malnutrition would be displaced with healthy children tired of carrying full tummies all the time. I will not dwell on public funds that were spent by some MZWP office-bearers on trips to illict love nests in Germany and Canada, which sadly never had anything to with the water stress in Bulawayo.
Dabengwa speaks as if Bulawayo's water problems began yesterday and are about to end now that he and a few nameless, faceless undertakers have just explained to Gideon Gono why water security is crucial to the region. Again, I cannot see why the discredited MZWT chairman, who is possibly the "chairman and the members", would approach Gono, a mere Reserve Bank governor and not the Minister of Water or Rural Development to plead for Zambezi water. Maybe the dynamics of power in Zanu PF have changed while Zimbabweans were busy struggling to reconnect their senses after
government sponsored confusion bred by the Gonodollars, but the last time I checked, protocol had not yet designated the RBZ as the right place to take pleas for the funding for national programmes. Pleading with individuals was never a way of implementing projects even in the most rotten of regimes.
If issues are important, they need to be budgeted for on the national fiscus but since the MZWP was not budgeted for in the running financial year, we are left with very limited choices to speculate on. The best of these is to believe that Dabengwa's conviction that Gono is a newly found disciple of the programme because he knows something all of us don't. As a long-serving former 'trial and error' cabinet minister, where he probably failed dismally since he has been rated unfit for any of the post-2000 'war cabinets', DD knows better than just that the MZWP has never been part of any national budget and therefore of no consequence in national priorities.
Urgent programmes like the Pungwe-Mutare pipeline, of which no one had ever dreamt before independence, have come and gone. The Tokwe-Mukosi dam in the south-east was started, swept away by floods and rebudgeted for again although progress remains fast enough to keep pace with a terminally ill tortoise. The non-allocation of money for the MZWP is a historical injustice, repeated and still being perpetrated by the political order in the country. All sorts of schemers and political dreamers emerge every election year, and talk passionately about water security to buy votes, which demonstrates that this has beome a handy object of political manipualtion of the region's population.
However, it becomes so much of a natonal taboo in between the councils and the parliaments that anyone who mentions it is seen as a purveyor of tribalism, a divisionist, a secessionist opposed to the supposed harmony which even kids at Gaborone's Mogoditshane Village 7 kindergarten know has never existed in Zimbabwe.
"The non-allocation of money for the MZWP is a historical injustice, repeated and still being perpetrated by the political order in the country"
OSCAR NKALA
Gono may harbour many ambitions, including that of being president, but he is not even the minister of finance as yet. Fresh double talk and a multiplicity of strange, hawkish bed-fellows pairing up as stakeholders around MZWP also leaves us wondering if Gono has not joined the struggle for both ownership of, or taking the credit for implementing this project. Sugestions that he may be positiong himself for a shot at the presidency are probably weird, but power corupts, and this highly contagious disease is believed to affect high levels of the Zimbabwean government. We are also left wondering if he is not one of the Marco Polos, perennial seekers of personal silk routes, with farms straddling the planned pipeline.
The MZWP is much older than Gono's tenure as RBZ governor, so DD's suggestion that he has been rolled into the ugly bungle smacks of a conspiracy of sorts. It is as if Gono has assured DD not to worry about the inclusion of the MZWP on national budgets and trust that all is well because he will send a personal cheque. DD should stop telling such old and ageing lies. He should start telling the MZWT shareholders why the pipeline project has not taken off since 1992 when things were at a ready-go stage. Water activists are still waiting for him to submit the MZWT ledger files as demanded by the High Court in Bulawayo three years ago. Contempt of court is still an offence in Zimbabwe and it defeated the intended scrutiny of the project finances even before it began. This also suggests that the records could be the graveyard where financial impropriety secrets more scary than Gukurahundi are buried under the chairman's signature.
Like other water activists, I would also prefer a prosecution if it turns out that a secretary and her married boss did spend time holed up in love nests in Canada and Germany on MZWT expenses. From Dabengwa's incoherent eulogy, the Gwayi-Shangani dream will be a reality in 2008 simply because Gono says so. Instead of trying to create buffs and signposts of confusion, DD should be reminded that he owes the people not just an explantion about why the water project has become so haunted by political grand-standing, misleading public postures and suddenly become a subject of behind the doors meetings between himself and Gono.
While he arranges a clean-up of the lies that have come to be associated with the project, it would be a good attempt at self-redemption for DD to answer to publicised and very believable
accusations that apart from denying them water, he has also denied the Matabeleland people a chance at economic empowerment by coverting to personal use and laying to waste the timber equipment that Joshua Nkomo bought them with the best of intentions.
The revealtions around the timber equipment theft, abuse and ravaging also leave us wondering if DD is not one of those looking at making more selfish benefits from the MZWP. His timber concessions lie conveniently in the path of the proposed pipeline, with many well-off Zanu PF beneficiaries staking their claims as orderly as they can from Sawmills through the wildlife heartland of Gwayi where government leaders fighting other land invaders over lodges provide a clue of just who should have properties close to the pipeline long before it comes, if it ever will.
If DD was not the liar he has forced all of us to reluctantly accept he is, the whole programme, not just the Gwayi-Shangani would have been completed in 1998, at which time the project was still considered feasible since the country had currency as opposed to the funny money being dragged through the streets of Bulawayo in sleeping bags and tattered grain sacks. More lies than truths have been told about MZWP.
Even Robert Mugabe's repeated proclaimations that "Matabeleland will never die" sound even hollower the more he repeats them, moreso since the region buried ZanuPF and its evils in 2000. DD should be ashamed of himself for betraying and sacrificing his own people on the selfish altar of Zanu PF expediency. If the decades long denial of water to Matabeleland is not a continuation of Gukurahundi as many people in the region can be forgiven to believe, then DD would better give it a name since he is the ruling party's divisional gatekeeper in its grand plan of marginalisation. If the government will ever get serious with MZWT, it will not be because it has the welfare of Bulawayo and Matabeleland at heart. It will only be serving the needs of its henchmen and hangers on that have already taken strategic farms along key water control points on the planned pipeline. It is not a secret that during the chaos of the resettlement exercise, senior Zanu PF officials scrambled for and fought many turf wars over properties along the path of the planned pipeline.
The ongoing land war between John Nkomo and a certain settler in Gwayi is just as good an example of the water war as the fight between Ibbo Mandaza and Obert Mpofu's war veterans in the Bubi-Umguza area. Judging by the number of farms and large-scale personal agricultural projects on the chefs' farms, the biggest thing Bulawayo can ever receive would be a tiny drop of water, if this pipedream ever materialized.
In simple terms, water from the Zambezi will be diverted, yes in the name of Bulawayo and glamorous recitals will be made of possible benefits for the poor man and the local State-owned rags have already done an extensive propaganda job on that. But the reality is not lost to the supposed beneficiaries for they know that the water will not be used to the salvation of the city or the poor people in the hinterlands. The beneficiaries already know themselves, they are lined up and they include many aliens who
should have never gotten land in the region if Zanu PF was not cracking a routine joke when it said that people could only find land in their home districts.
Assuming DD was serious, and not lying as he knows he did, he would also reveal the true nature of the beneficiaries, who can only be such 'right people' as himself. By the 'right people' I mean all yester-year arrivals and party-related cannibals who have so well positioned themselves on the pipeline path and eagerly await to trade briskly on the commodity from the first flow. The so-called green belt of agriculture along the pipeline will possibly come, but it will also not belong to or work for benefit of the local communities.
The only way they can be allowed to trepass into the belt would be if they offer the slave labour that will be required by the new black-capitalist class. Never mind that this class is already looting their timber forests and laying their soils bare. These alien capitalists will also sell them rotten and 'market-unfit' vegetables. Because of the high concentration of Mafia-schooled capitalists along the pipeline path, I also foresee a pipeline of the most expensive water in the world because it will be viewed as private property in private farms. The people of Matabeland have heard more than their fair share of lies, they would feel better if politicians and waht is supposed to be their developmental appendages stopped this severe rationing of the truth. Dabengwa has no capacity to mobilize more funds beyond what he has already looted from the MZWT coffers.
Plenty of things are still going wrong at MZWP and we naturally expect DD to explain. People should refuse to believe in liar DD until Zambezi reaches Bulawayo. We should also not lose sight of the fact that Gono's donation of "understanding" and promises to see MZWP through does not in any way account for the money that has disappeared from the project account. People who continue to mislead the shareholders and beneficiaries at the behest of an unpopular party and discriminatory governing regime should remember that even the so-called gullible people do have long memories, especially for abuses and gross injustice. DD can still salvage some measure of respect for himself by standing up for the people and the truth, not standing against the people as a government vessel of distorting the truth!
Before replaying the old and tired piece of propaganda about work on MZWP resuming soon, DD should have asked himself why the conference, which was not a government or MZWP initiative, had been held in the first place. This way, it would have taken just one straight thinker to bring DD back from wandering in shady hallucinations to a realisation that the hosting of the conference could only be explained in terms the failure of the government, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and MZWP to live up to their age-old promises.
We were told, until we stopped believing tales involving the Chinese and Malaysian mafias, that Zambezi water will transform the sorry state of aridity in Matabeleland into a self-sufficient a green belt in which chronic malnutrition would be displaced with healthy children tired of carrying full tummies all the time. I will not dwell on public funds that were spent by some MZWP office-bearers on trips to illict love nests in Germany and Canada, which sadly never had anything to with the water stress in Bulawayo.
Dabengwa speaks as if Bulawayo's water problems began yesterday and are about to end now that he and a few nameless, faceless undertakers have just explained to Gideon Gono why water security is crucial to the region. Again, I cannot see why the discredited MZWT chairman, who is possibly the "chairman and the members", would approach Gono, a mere Reserve Bank governor and not the Minister of Water or Rural Development to plead for Zambezi water. Maybe the dynamics of power in Zanu PF have changed while Zimbabweans were busy struggling to reconnect their senses after
government sponsored confusion bred by the Gonodollars, but the last time I checked, protocol had not yet designated the RBZ as the right place to take pleas for the funding for national programmes. Pleading with individuals was never a way of implementing projects even in the most rotten of regimes.
If issues are important, they need to be budgeted for on the national fiscus but since the MZWP was not budgeted for in the running financial year, we are left with very limited choices to speculate on. The best of these is to believe that Dabengwa's conviction that Gono is a newly found disciple of the programme because he knows something all of us don't. As a long-serving former 'trial and error' cabinet minister, where he probably failed dismally since he has been rated unfit for any of the post-2000 'war cabinets', DD knows better than just that the MZWP has never been part of any national budget and therefore of no consequence in national priorities.
Urgent programmes like the Pungwe-Mutare pipeline, of which no one had ever dreamt before independence, have come and gone. The Tokwe-Mukosi dam in the south-east was started, swept away by floods and rebudgeted for again although progress remains fast enough to keep pace with a terminally ill tortoise. The non-allocation of money for the MZWP is a historical injustice, repeated and still being perpetrated by the political order in the country. All sorts of schemers and political dreamers emerge every election year, and talk passionately about water security to buy votes, which demonstrates that this has beome a handy object of political manipualtion of the region's population.
However, it becomes so much of a natonal taboo in between the councils and the parliaments that anyone who mentions it is seen as a purveyor of tribalism, a divisionist, a secessionist opposed to the supposed harmony which even kids at Gaborone's Mogoditshane Village 7 kindergarten know has never existed in Zimbabwe.
"The non-allocation of money for the MZWP is a historical injustice, repeated and still being perpetrated by the political order in the country"
OSCAR NKALA
Gono may harbour many ambitions, including that of being president, but he is not even the minister of finance as yet. Fresh double talk and a multiplicity of strange, hawkish bed-fellows pairing up as stakeholders around MZWP also leaves us wondering if Gono has not joined the struggle for both ownership of, or taking the credit for implementing this project. Sugestions that he may be positiong himself for a shot at the presidency are probably weird, but power corupts, and this highly contagious disease is believed to affect high levels of the Zimbabwean government. We are also left wondering if he is not one of the Marco Polos, perennial seekers of personal silk routes, with farms straddling the planned pipeline.
The MZWP is much older than Gono's tenure as RBZ governor, so DD's suggestion that he has been rolled into the ugly bungle smacks of a conspiracy of sorts. It is as if Gono has assured DD not to worry about the inclusion of the MZWP on national budgets and trust that all is well because he will send a personal cheque. DD should stop telling such old and ageing lies. He should start telling the MZWT shareholders why the pipeline project has not taken off since 1992 when things were at a ready-go stage. Water activists are still waiting for him to submit the MZWT ledger files as demanded by the High Court in Bulawayo three years ago. Contempt of court is still an offence in Zimbabwe and it defeated the intended scrutiny of the project finances even before it began. This also suggests that the records could be the graveyard where financial impropriety secrets more scary than Gukurahundi are buried under the chairman's signature.
Like other water activists, I would also prefer a prosecution if it turns out that a secretary and her married boss did spend time holed up in love nests in Canada and Germany on MZWT expenses. From Dabengwa's incoherent eulogy, the Gwayi-Shangani dream will be a reality in 2008 simply because Gono says so. Instead of trying to create buffs and signposts of confusion, DD should be reminded that he owes the people not just an explantion about why the water project has become so haunted by political grand-standing, misleading public postures and suddenly become a subject of behind the doors meetings between himself and Gono.
While he arranges a clean-up of the lies that have come to be associated with the project, it would be a good attempt at self-redemption for DD to answer to publicised and very believable
accusations that apart from denying them water, he has also denied the Matabeleland people a chance at economic empowerment by coverting to personal use and laying to waste the timber equipment that Joshua Nkomo bought them with the best of intentions.
The revealtions around the timber equipment theft, abuse and ravaging also leave us wondering if DD is not one of those looking at making more selfish benefits from the MZWP. His timber concessions lie conveniently in the path of the proposed pipeline, with many well-off Zanu PF beneficiaries staking their claims as orderly as they can from Sawmills through the wildlife heartland of Gwayi where government leaders fighting other land invaders over lodges provide a clue of just who should have properties close to the pipeline long before it comes, if it ever will.
If DD was not the liar he has forced all of us to reluctantly accept he is, the whole programme, not just the Gwayi-Shangani would have been completed in 1998, at which time the project was still considered feasible since the country had currency as opposed to the funny money being dragged through the streets of Bulawayo in sleeping bags and tattered grain sacks. More lies than truths have been told about MZWP.
Even Robert Mugabe's repeated proclaimations that "Matabeleland will never die" sound even hollower the more he repeats them, moreso since the region buried ZanuPF and its evils in 2000. DD should be ashamed of himself for betraying and sacrificing his own people on the selfish altar of Zanu PF expediency. If the decades long denial of water to Matabeleland is not a continuation of Gukurahundi as many people in the region can be forgiven to believe, then DD would better give it a name since he is the ruling party's divisional gatekeeper in its grand plan of marginalisation. If the government will ever get serious with MZWT, it will not be because it has the welfare of Bulawayo and Matabeleland at heart. It will only be serving the needs of its henchmen and hangers on that have already taken strategic farms along key water control points on the planned pipeline. It is not a secret that during the chaos of the resettlement exercise, senior Zanu PF officials scrambled for and fought many turf wars over properties along the path of the planned pipeline.
The ongoing land war between John Nkomo and a certain settler in Gwayi is just as good an example of the water war as the fight between Ibbo Mandaza and Obert Mpofu's war veterans in the Bubi-Umguza area. Judging by the number of farms and large-scale personal agricultural projects on the chefs' farms, the biggest thing Bulawayo can ever receive would be a tiny drop of water, if this pipedream ever materialized.
In simple terms, water from the Zambezi will be diverted, yes in the name of Bulawayo and glamorous recitals will be made of possible benefits for the poor man and the local State-owned rags have already done an extensive propaganda job on that. But the reality is not lost to the supposed beneficiaries for they know that the water will not be used to the salvation of the city or the poor people in the hinterlands. The beneficiaries already know themselves, they are lined up and they include many aliens who
should have never gotten land in the region if Zanu PF was not cracking a routine joke when it said that people could only find land in their home districts.
Assuming DD was serious, and not lying as he knows he did, he would also reveal the true nature of the beneficiaries, who can only be such 'right people' as himself. By the 'right people' I mean all yester-year arrivals and party-related cannibals who have so well positioned themselves on the pipeline path and eagerly await to trade briskly on the commodity from the first flow. The so-called green belt of agriculture along the pipeline will possibly come, but it will also not belong to or work for benefit of the local communities.
The only way they can be allowed to trepass into the belt would be if they offer the slave labour that will be required by the new black-capitalist class. Never mind that this class is already looting their timber forests and laying their soils bare. These alien capitalists will also sell them rotten and 'market-unfit' vegetables. Because of the high concentration of Mafia-schooled capitalists along the pipeline path, I also foresee a pipeline of the most expensive water in the world because it will be viewed as private property in private farms. The people of Matabeland have heard more than their fair share of lies, they would feel better if politicians and waht is supposed to be their developmental appendages stopped this severe rationing of the truth. Dabengwa has no capacity to mobilize more funds beyond what he has already looted from the MZWT coffers.
Plenty of things are still going wrong at MZWP and we naturally expect DD to explain. People should refuse to believe in liar DD until Zambezi reaches Bulawayo. We should also not lose sight of the fact that Gono's donation of "understanding" and promises to see MZWP through does not in any way account for the money that has disappeared from the project account. People who continue to mislead the shareholders and beneficiaries at the behest of an unpopular party and discriminatory governing regime should remember that even the so-called gullible people do have long memories, especially for abuses and gross injustice. DD can still salvage some measure of respect for himself by standing up for the people and the truth, not standing against the people as a government vessel of distorting the truth!
"Nightmarish" Zimbabwe
By Oscar NkalaLast updated: 11/03/2006 08:00:00
THE past two weeks in Zimbabwe will probably go down in history as the most nightmarish for the increasingly skeletal population of a sinking country.
But as people elsewhere struggled to rise above the confusion brought about by the new Gono-dollars, the city of Bulawayo marked a milestone in its struggle for water security.
Apart from the generally acknowledged fact that the water donors conference was a flop, it marked a new chapter in the general pursuit of the century old Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project (MZWP).
The water donors conference was also significant in highlighting that it has finally dawned on the city fathers and everyone that years of Zanu PF lies, deceit and cheap politicking over the regional thirst can never transform the haunted pipedream into a gush of fresh water.
It was a refusal to accept that the people of the region have to go begging to Harare everytime for water that is in fact supposed to be a freely accessible community resource in Binga, Hwange, Victoria Falls and all the villages along the river basin.
While all the other delegates were deliberating on the harsh reality of the water crisis and its economic impact on Bulawayo's shrunken reputation as an industrial hub, a day-dreamer sat among them, replaying the many hallucinations and nightmares he has experienced in many years of being Zanu PF's speaker box of deception on the crucial regional water security agenda.
Dumiso Dabengwa evidently spent too much time messing up the various ministerial portfolios doled out to him on the government's usual trial and error allocation of duties, in which it is not strange to find a former Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) director of operations appointed minister of Housing, Health and Community Services.
I cannot dispute assertions that lying is contagious or that it has become a rather strange syndrome of self-sustenace in the ruling party. Many followers of the MZWP would not have been surprised, therefore, to hear Dabengwa and Zanu PF's compliant media suggest that an ideologically and financially bankrupt government that has so glaringly failed to deliver staple food to ordinary Zimbabweans would complete the Gwayi-Shangani Dam in 2008.
The worst surprise is that the bare Gwayi-Shangani confluence is already called a dam when it has not even become the water body the dreamers want us to believe it will be. It does not exist, and possibly may not, except in the minds of such terrible day-dreamers. Calling an unimplemented dam a dam could be a ploy to create a feeling that something is really being done when the plan has long gathered dust in the offices of civil servants paid for squatting on the project like the legendary Russian bear. Self respecting leaders would not dare strip themselves as naked as DD did in choosing to be the communal purveyor of lies for the convenience of Zanu PF.
Before replaying the old and tired piece of propaganda about work on MZWP resuming soon, DD should have asked himself why the conference, which was not a government or MZWP initiative, had been held in the first place. This way, it would have taken just one straight thinker to bring DD back from wandering in shady hallucinations to a realisation that the hosting of the conference could only be explained in terms the failure of the government, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and MZWP to live up to their age-old promises.
We were told, until we stopped believing tales involving the Chinese and Malaysian mafias, that Zambezi water will transform the sorry state of aridity in Matabeleland into a self-sufficient a green belt in which chronic malnutrition would be displaced with healthy children tired of carrying full tummies all the time. I will not dwell on public funds that were spent by some MZWP office-bearers on trips to illict love nests in Germany and Canada, which sadly never had anything to with the water stress in Bulawayo.
Dabengwa speaks as if Bulawayo's water problems began yesterday and are about to end now that he and a few nameless, faceless undertakers have just explained to Gideon Gono why water security is crucial to the region. Again, I cannot see why the discredited MZWT chairman, who is possibly the "chairman and the members", would approach Gono, a mere Reserve Bank governor and not the Minister of Water or Rural Development to plead for Zambezi water. Maybe the dynamics of power in Zanu PF have changed while Zimbabweans were busy struggling to reconnect their senses after
government sponsored confusion bred by the Gonodollars, but the last time I checked, protocol had not yet designated the RBZ as the right place to take pleas for the funding for national programmes. Pleading with individuals was never a way of implementing projects even in the most rotten of regimes.
If issues are important, they need to be budgeted for on the national fiscus but since the MZWP was not budgeted for in the running financial year, we are left with very limited choices to speculate on. The best of these is to believe that Dabengwa's conviction that Gono is a newly found disciple of the programme because he knows something all of us don't. As a long-serving former 'trial and error' cabinet minister, where he probably failed dismally since he has been rated unfit for any of the post-2000 'war cabinets', DD knows better than just that the MZWP has never been part of any national budget and therefore of no consequence in national priorities.
Urgent programmes like the Pungwe-Mutare pipeline, of which no one had ever dreamt before independence, have come and gone. The Tokwe-Mukosi dam in the south-east was started, swept away by floods and rebudgeted for again although progress remains fast enough to keep pace with a terminally ill tortoise. The non-allocation of money for the MZWP is a historical injustice, repeated and still being perpetrated by the political order in the country. All sorts of schemers and political dreamers emerge every election year, and talk passionately about water security to buy votes, which demonstrates that this has beome a handy object of political manipualtion of the region's population.
However, it becomes so much of a natonal taboo in between the councils and the parliaments that anyone who mentions it is seen as a purveyor of tribalism, a divisionist, a secessionist opposed to the supposed harmony which even kids at Gaborone's Mogoditshane Village 7 kindergarten know has never existed in Zimbabwe.
"The non-allocation of money for the MZWP is a historical injustice, repeated and still being perpetrated by the political order in the country"
OSCAR NKALA
Gono may harbour many ambitions, including that of being president, but he is not even the minister of finance as yet. Fresh double talk and a multiplicity of strange, hawkish bed-fellows pairing up as stakeholders around MZWP also leaves us wondering if Gono has not joined the struggle for both ownership of, or taking the credit for implementing this project. Sugestions that he may be positiong himself for a shot at the presidency are probably weird, but power corupts, and this highly contagious disease is believed to affect high levels of the Zimbabwean government. We are also left wondering if he is not one of the Marco Polos, perennial seekers of personal silk routes, with farms straddling the planned pipeline.
The MZWP is much older than Gono's tenure as RBZ governor, so DD's suggestion that he has been rolled into the ugly bungle smacks of a conspiracy of sorts. It is as if Gono has assured DD not to worry about the inclusion of the MZWP on national budgets and trust that all is well because he will send a personal cheque. DD should stop telling such old and ageing lies. He should start telling the MZWT shareholders why the pipeline project has not taken off since 1992 when things were at a ready-go stage. Water activists are still waiting for him to submit the MZWT ledger files as demanded by the High Court in Bulawayo three years ago. Contempt of court is still an offence in Zimbabwe and it defeated the intended scrutiny of the project finances even before it began. This also suggests that the records could be the graveyard where financial impropriety secrets more scary than Gukurahundi are buried under the chairman's signature.
Like other water activists, I would also prefer a prosecution if it turns out that a secretary and her married boss did spend time holed up in love nests in Canada and Germany on MZWT expenses. From Dabengwa's incoherent eulogy, the Gwayi-Shangani dream will be a reality in 2008 simply because Gono says so. Instead of trying to create buffs and signposts of confusion, DD should be reminded that he owes the people not just an explantion about why the water project has become so haunted by political grand-standing, misleading public postures and suddenly become a subject of behind the doors meetings between himself and Gono.
While he arranges a clean-up of the lies that have come to be associated with the project, it would be a good attempt at self-redemption for DD to answer to publicised and very believable
accusations that apart from denying them water, he has also denied the Matabeleland people a chance at economic empowerment by coverting to personal use and laying to waste the timber equipment that Joshua Nkomo bought them with the best of intentions.
The revealtions around the timber equipment theft, abuse and ravaging also leave us wondering if DD is not one of those looking at making more selfish benefits from the MZWP. His timber concessions lie conveniently in the path of the proposed pipeline, with many well-off Zanu PF beneficiaries staking their claims as orderly as they can from Sawmills through the wildlife heartland of Gwayi where government leaders fighting other land invaders over lodges provide a clue of just who should have properties close to the pipeline long before it comes, if it ever will.
If DD was not the liar he has forced all of us to reluctantly accept he is, the whole programme, not just the Gwayi-Shangani would have been completed in 1998, at which time the project was still considered feasible since the country had currency as opposed to the funny money being dragged through the streets of Bulawayo in sleeping bags and tattered grain sacks. More lies than truths have been told about MZWP.
Even Robert Mugabe's repeated proclaimations that "Matabeleland will never die" sound even hollower the more he repeats them, moreso since the region buried ZanuPF and its evils in 2000. DD should be ashamed of himself for betraying and sacrificing his own people on the selfish altar of Zanu PF expediency. If the decades long denial of water to Matabeleland is not a continuation of Gukurahundi as many people in the region can be forgiven to believe, then DD would better give it a name since he is the ruling party's divisional gatekeeper in its grand plan of marginalisation. If the government will ever get serious with MZWT, it will not be because it has the welfare of Bulawayo and Matabeleland at heart. It will only be serving the needs of its henchmen and hangers on that have already taken strategic farms along key water control points on the planned pipeline. It is not a secret that during the chaos of the resettlement exercise, senior Zanu PF officials scrambled for and fought many turf wars over properties along the path of the planned pipeline.
The ongoing land war between John Nkomo and a certain settler in Gwayi is just as good an example of the water war as the fight between Ibbo Mandaza and Obert Mpofu's war veterans in the Bubi-Umguza area. Judging by the number of farms and large-scale personal agricultural projects on the chefs' farms, the biggest thing Bulawayo can ever receive would be a tiny drop of water, if this pipedream ever materialized.
In simple terms, water from the Zambezi will be diverted, yes in the name of Bulawayo and glamorous recitals will be made of possible benefits for the poor man and the local State-owned rags have already done an extensive propaganda job on that. But the reality is not lost to the supposed beneficiaries for they know that the water will not be used to the salvation of the city or the poor people in the hinterlands. The beneficiaries already know themselves, they are lined up and they include many aliens who
should have never gotten land in the region if Zanu PF was not cracking a routine joke when it said that people could only find land in their home districts.
Assuming DD was serious, and not lying as he knows he did, he would also reveal the true nature of the beneficiaries, who can only be such 'right people' as himself. By the 'right people' I mean all yester-year arrivals and party-related cannibals who have so well positioned themselves on the pipeline path and eagerly await to trade briskly on the commodity from the first flow. The so-called green belt of agriculture along the pipeline will possibly come, but it will also not belong to or work for benefit of the local communities.
The only way they can be allowed to trepass into the belt would be if they offer the slave labour that will be required by the new black-capitalist class. Never mind that this class is already looting their timber forests and laying their soils bare. These alien capitalists will also sell them rotten and 'market-unfit' vegetables. Because of the high concentration of Mafia-schooled capitalists along the pipeline path, I also foresee a pipeline of the most expensive water in the world because it will be viewed as private property in private farms. The people of Matabeland have heard more than their fair share of lies, they would feel better if politicians and waht is supposed to be their developmental appendages stopped this severe rationing of the truth. Dabengwa has no capacity to mobilize more funds beyond what he has already looted from the MZWT coffers.
Plenty of things are still going wrong at MZWP and we naturally expect DD to explain. People should refuse to believe in liar DD until Zambezi reaches Bulawayo. We should also not lose sight of the fact that Gono's donation of "understanding" and promises to see MZWP through does not in any way account for the money that has disappeared from the project account. People who continue to mislead the shareholders and beneficiaries at the behest of an unpopular party and discriminatory governing regime should remember that even the so-called gullible people do have long memories, especially for abuses and gross injustice. DD can still salvage some measure of respect for himself by standing up for the people and the truth, not standing against the
people as a government vessel of distorting the truth!
When they stop telling it like it is
N THE past few weeks, we have witnessed the return of Geoff Nyarota's snippets of self-aggrandisement and re-education, in which he has been battling to clear the not-so-obscure links between his editorship of The Chronicle and the Gukurahundi orgy of genocide in Matabeleland.
While Nyarota has every right to defend and even pronounce himself victorious, supposedly journalists and 'tribalists' seeking to soil his most saintly image, I am sure his would be the very first case in which a human rights violations suspect puts himself in the dock by reckless pronouncement, rolls himself into one to perform the duties of prosecutor, judge and witness and then proceed
to exonerate himself.
Convinced that he has put up a strong case, he even goes ahead to declare victory using such strong propaganda terms as "quashing". With all due respect, the only thing Nyarota "effectively quashed" in the rabid article published in the Financial Gazette, in which we hear CIO own a huge stake, was the last lingering doubts in any right-thinking person's mind (to use his term) that he does indeed have a case to answer.
And he seems to know that this case rotates around his alleged encouragement of the redeployment of the murderous 5 Brigade, specifically in the Matabeleland and Midlands regions. Nyarota implies that the dissident collaborators referred to in the excerpts of one of his editorials could not mean civilians, but he later makes the huge mistake of inviting us to try and make (non)sense of the editorial in question in terms of the political climate of the time. He confirms he penned the editorial. The comments in the specific editorial raise more questions than answers, which makes the claimed victory too hollow to be so volubly declared by any right thinking person.
A snippet from the editorial runs: "The only (was it the ONLY?) way we (WHO was WE?) can think (you, THINKING!) of which would effectively check the dissident menace is to deploy the crack (why not just the army? and what had this unit done to be so named by a public medium?) Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland and the Midlands again. This seems to be the only language (was Gukurahundi a language?) the dissidents and their collaborators (who were the collaborators) understand."
Accepting the suspect's invitation to understand his editorial in the context of the political climate of the time, my interpretation is that at the time, government was peddling lies that the dissidents were ZAPU and they were fed, sheltered and informed by ZAPU supporters in community structures. In the spirit of this line of thought, Nyarota would clearly remember that not long before he ran his editorial, President Robert Mugabe, Enos Nkala and Emmerson Mnangagwa among others, had gone around Matabeleland addressing rallies in which they peddled that same propaganda and used it as an excuse for the 5 Brigade's mass murder of innocent civilians.
Assuming he does not have selective memory lapses, Nyarota will also remember that at one time in the same era, The Chronicle carried comments by Mugabe to the effect that the 5 Brigade could not differentiate between the dissidents and civilians. This line was used to ward off allegations of heavy-handedness.
Here was a human rights conscious Nyarota, a self-appointed Godfather of Zimbabwean journalism, publishing comments, which he clearly knew were designed to exonerate killers and justify civilian murders by cheaply pleading that this so-called crack unit could not tell the stark difference between old women who got raped and murdered and the dissidents that used guarded Zimbabwe Omnibus Company (ZOC) to travel between places and never got caught because they were government employees. Gayigusu, who is now a senior ZANU PF security official at Esigodini, used ZOC buses regularly to travel (sometimes through cordons) between Filabusi, Gwanda and Matopo.
It is not a secret that just as Zanu PF has used the same Chronicle to ram the nonsense of land reform down the throats of scared Zimbabweans since 2000, it also used Nyarota's editorship to reinforce the isolation of Matabeleland and peddle lies that inflamed the security situation and were used to justify gross human rights violations. Only perfect strangers to Zimbabwe can argue otherwise.
Geoff is understandably pained that the cocks are swarming home to roost so early because he likes to see the skeletons remain under lock and key.
But they are out for good. His frustration is that he was used (possible unknowingly) in the psychological warfare of the era, in which state-backed militias would burn a ZOC buses so that the papers would publish stories of anarchy, of a young government under siege from a defeated party of war-mongers and its hawkish supporters. The fact that it took a British publication -- The Observer -- to reveal the massacres in Matabeleland shows that The Chronicle has never been there to report anything beyond hyped-up propaganda that has only worked for Zanu PF since 1980.
Despite having such an "intelligent" editor, all The Chronicle journalists of the time remained so blind as not to see the Gukurahundi massacres begin, a disease which worsened in the 1984 to 1987 period. At the same time, the reporters at Nyarota's publication developed a surprisingly sharp nose for dissident actions, so much that even the murder of innocent civilians by hordes of Zanu PF militias that were roaming the region were reported as that of dissidents. It is also interesting to note that the so-called dissidents never numbered over 100 in the Matabeleland, Midlands and Matabeleland South regions. In fact very few dissidents were ever caught, even those that did were said to be decoys.
Those with an interest in the past and present in Matabeleland will testify that the man called Richard Gwesela, supposedly "killed" by the army in the early 1980s, was never caught and he is very much alive in the township of Johannesburg. Many of the fools that got shot and paraded as dissidents to the doubting world were ordinary criminals trying to make capital out of the confusion of the time. The real dissidents, which I am sure were owned by Zanu PF and supported with state supplies, were in 1987 recalled in a costly campaign in which helicopters that had spent seven years strafing villagers in Matabeleland were used to hail the State's dissidents back home with the promise of an amnesty.
This they did and got back to their party, which has since rewarded them with farms and high party posts. These include Khiwa a butcher who operated in Nkayi, Gayigusu in Gwanda, Matopo and Filabusi and Tennyson "Thambolenyoka" Ndlovu who is now a Zanu PF security chief in Filabusi. The same Chronicle also carried comments in which Emmerson Mnangagwa told a Victoria Falls rally the anti-dissident war would not be won unless "the infrastructure that nurtures them was destroyed".
I spent all the Gukurahundi years in rural Gwanda, and I do not know of a shack, a military camp, a hospital or even underground bunker that could have fitted the description of "dissident infrastructure". We can only speculate that those who said it and those who published it had a better idea of who the "collaborators" that understood the "Gukurahundi language" were. Geoff would be inviting us to take a closer look at his crazy brainwash schemes on Matabeleand if he wants us to believe there could have been any other alleged dissident collaborators who were not ZAPU supporters, and not civilians in the region.
The argument that all dissidents were ZAPU is tired and meaningless. Some could have been in the first few years, but the majority of those who lasted up to 1987 were a surrogate force owned by the powerful who still run the country. Assuming we follow this barren line of reasoning, the only logical supporters of pro-ZAPU dissidents would be ZAPU supporters, which explains why so many ZAPU councillors and villagers were targeted.
Nyarota should also be reminded that his attempt to re-orient the journalists and the people of Matabeleland reeks when compared to The Chronicle's failure to report on the massacres.
| "To try to divide the Zimbabwean media along tribal lines is too big a project for one very scared man to embark on just to save his skin" |
| OSCAR NKALA |
By reading issues of The Chronicle covering the 1982 - 1987 era, one can believe that the 5 Brigade never existed and it never committed atrocities. The same paper covers the 100 or so people reportedly murdered by the dissidents, neglecting the Gukurahundi killings, which were horrendous in both scale and humanitarian impact. For a man who once boasted that he was certain the Mntungwas, who are actually Ngunis of South African decent, were indigenous Kalangas from Plumtree, Geoff does not sound one bit like the good teacher he wants to portray himself as on Matabeleland.
No-one denies that Nyarota was indeed a media icon at one time, if we discount suggestions that his hands could be tainted with Gukurahundi blood, but it is not fair of him to attempt to use this as a the poor cover from which to launch a self-cleansing campaign. The Gukurahundi trials have not begun. The fact that Nyarota is the first non-government person to try to clean off alleged links with this dirty past raises more suspicions than it allays. It is a historical fact that the guilty are always afraid. The control of state media during a time of upheveal is tight and whoever gets that appointment would be a trusted Zanu PF cadre.
As Nyarota himself rightly indicated in numerous editorials in The Daily News, Zanu PF has maintained tight control of state papers since independence. Until someone can prove that these controls were relaxed during Nyarota's tenure at The Chronicle, we will be forgiven to think that he was appointed on the same grounds, which is perhaps why he even proceeded to buy shares at Zimpapers, which he maintained long after the advent of opposing interests in the form of The Daily News.
Nyarota would also do a better than merely slandering others if he enlightens the uninformed journalists from Matabeleland and New Zimbabwe.com readers why as editor of The Chronicle, he and those referred to as "WE" in the editorials, believed the ONLY WAY to deal with the perceived menace was to deploy the 5 Brigade if they ever considered what the published words and incitement would mean for non-dissident and non-collaborator populations in the specified areas.
Reflections are a good resource, so I will go back into the political climate at that time as previously counselled. My memory and personal experience tells me that at the time, people across Matabeleland and the Midlands were so afraid of the name 5 Brigade that they would have voluntarily handed over or betrayed the dissidents if they could find them. The story of the 5 Brigade always followed a trail of fear struck by the tales of its genocidal exploits elsewhere. Massacres had been committed in every village, young men who were suspected of ZAPU links were asked to dig their own graves, queue up on the edge and shot at point blank range. So such incitement meant a lot more than the arraignment of a few dissidents, which never happened.
Here was an editor inviting a repeat of the deployment of the crack brigade, which on account of its previous actions, was seen as the most appropriate by Nyarota and whoever WE was at The Chronicle during that time. The most basic assumption I can make is that the publishers of The Chronicle knew that genocide was the language 5 Brigade used, and they also knew that the process of seeking out the so-called collaborators would involve murder of civilians if past experience was anything they had taken note of.
Nyarota must tell the truth, he needs to drop this big-brother, do-as- I-say attitude in journalism. I am sure those who are worshipping Geoff as their hero have good reasons to do so, and the same should apply to those who are convinced that he is no a saint. Some of us choose to worship none other than God. To try to divide the Zimbabwean media along tribal lines is too big a project for one very scared man to embark on just to save his skin. You reap what you sow.
I would have believed Geoff as a real man of integrity if he had told the truth rather than cook up suspect arguments that raise bigger fires than the small one he is trying to douse. The truth is that as the editor of a monster-government controlled press, Geoff was literally a figurehead editor at The Chronicle, the resident, in-house statue of Zanu PF, attached by strings and highly vulnerable to any epidemic of hysteria that hit the Minister of Information.
He must reveal that he never thought out editorial content, he was told what to publish and how vicious his editorial should be against who. He should not be ashamed to say that the minister's whims always hung like a dagger over his head and that such whims edited the paper, peddling Zanu PF's idea of a one-party state. He must also mention that anyone who opposed this scheme was branded a dissident.
Hiding such facts may lead us to believe the unbelievable; that the long arm of Zanu PF manipulation was not lurking anywhere in The Chronicle corridors at the time. That would leave Geoff Nyarota as the sole originator of the editorials that instigated a fresh deployment of murderous troops, celebrated their past achievements and used such "achievements" as credentials to qualify the unit for their next job, which he declared should be replayed as a matter of urgency in a specific geographical setting.
We all know that newspaper headlines were used by government to prepare the public for a heavy crackdown and therefore justify the acts and reduce alarm. In this regard, a layman can safely conclude that The Chronicle instigated, through a public call, the murder of civilians, which the government did follow-up.
The emotional and hysterical manner in which Nyarota seeks to defend himself by soiling journalists from the Matabeleland region and their media projects also leaves us wondering if he is not asking us to accept the personality cult he is trying to build himself into. This fountain of knowledge now seeks to divine how journalists from Matabeleland should see his role in making their own people's history bloodier that it should have been. His declaration of victory against certain media houses and fellow scribes sounds like the actions of a frustrated divisionist, an unrepentant and thoroughly misinformed tribalist who suddenly finds himself without a paper to edit, and therefore the medium to peddle his gross ignorance of obvious facts as enlightenment. No one, including Geoff, has a monopoly over information.
It is high time so-called senior journalists are reminded that there
are many "juniors" who have been making their way up the same streets in all the decades they have spent receiving awards on behalf of other people. New and equally capable journalists are still coming up the same tracks today and those who think they will be seniors forever must have a re-think. Mugabe can be a Godfather in Zanu PF but the media has colleagues. Most of the "new" journalists are not even tainted by association with the dark past which makes the guilty feel afraid. The last time I heard, terms like boss, senior and junior were confined to the stinking corridors of Zanu PF.
In the same way, there are a number of journalists who do not orginate from the Nyarota era, who have worked the Zimbabwe scene and continue to do an even better job today. I make no apology for saying we should refuse to be held to ransom by people who owe a lot of what they are to accolades earned from the careers of licking Zanu PF boots and supporting crazy schemes against the people. The media is not a perfect venue for staging bids for personality cult status.
Just as Nyarota and other journalists have been telling the Handiendes in Zanu PF to retire to their villages, the media should be fair enough to ask those who overstay their welcome or demand more honour than they deserve from the fraternity to leave without embarking on egos wars with people they seriously underestimate because of warped mindsets. Some wars are simply impossible to win because one cannot fight fact with fiction.
I hate to do it but if I did not respect him, I would have likened Nyarota to a monkey that gets borrowed brains for 24 hours and spends the duration of that time swearing that he is the centre of the universe. Glories of the kind Nyarota has been given by this world (deserving or not) are hard to come by. No one wants to strip him of his awards as yet, a few of which we believe he genuinely sweated for. His is a great achievement by Third World standards, but one would expect that honourable gentlemen, especially as they grow older, should not stoop to fibs.
Neither should they use the pages of suspect newspapers to declare war on entire tribes because they refuse to accept hogwash peddled as the gospel truth. In the same way that Geoff used the pages of The Chronicle to request and be awarded the massacre of civilians in Matabeleland, he is now using the pages of a paper linked to the same State machinery he backed before, to brainwash the people of Matabeleland, starting with the journalists. Geoff must cut the crap and exercise a lot of patience. The Matabeleland War Crimes Tribunal is still a long way off. Before then, anything alleged suspects say now would be used as evidence in court in the not-so-distant future.
The many lies told in your name(s)
By Oscar NkalaMANY journalists in Zimbabwe, by virtue of being close to the politicians, can tell when any minister, given their long stay in power, comes to a press conference or rally drunk.
There is the famous case of one Vice-President who is an addict to London Dry Gin, so much that when he began calling non-ZANU PF supporting Zimbabweans ‘imigodoyi’ in 2000, the fraternity maintained its silence.
In the process, it swallowed the knowledge that such daring insults were the audible effects of London Dry Gin much more than the frothing of an angry revolutionary who wonders why everyone, except himself, has gone haywire.
But the latest drunken rant could have been more surprising than a pangolin for sale at Makokoba People’s Market if it had not come from Patrick Chinamasa, an unwilling prisoner in the iron cage which many years of dictatorship and rule by murdering the people and gang-raping the constitution has firmly locked ZANU PF leaders into. Strange statements, which are infact the diametric opposite of what is happening in Zimbabwe were made to an audience which seemingly dared not ask the speaker to justify his content.
It could have been their continuing complicity in selling our souls on their part, but it could also be because ZANU PF is getting more and more customers of its propaganda in Europe, if recent talk of building bridges, even when Zimbabweans do not see the rivers needing to be crossed, is anything to go by. The strange statement goes thus:
“Allow me, Mr Chairman, to conclude my address by giving the new council (UN Council on Human Rights) the assurance of my country to respect human rights without regard to sex, religion, race…, as provided for in UN charter and the Constitution.”
I have no doubt that the esteemed gentlemen and ladies who sat and listened to such rantings, which could not come from any other place except a non-existent Zimbabwe where only Chinamasa and other imaginary creatures can exist, did not argue because they did not see the merits of arguing with a pepped-up pathological liar. The fact that they know him as the legal face of a regime that lives on the blood of its citizens at home and money-laundered from its own refugees abroad is most obvious, unless they came from a neighbouring planet to the strange one where ZANU PF and its people live.
It should have been worse than unfortunate therefore that earlier in the same statement Chinamasa had ranted at length about how this democratic government wanted the UN to help in protecting it from its own people by preventing funding to organizations that preach human rights in the country. These organizations preach regime change, the minister said, as if there is a school in this world where people need to be taught to hate dictatorships that can’t even feed them.
So democratic is this country that it has drafted a bill which will ensure that the state reads the e-mails of everyone, regardless of whether it is about how badly Joseph Msika is farring in his preferred South African hospital, or to announce the death of a cousin from common flu in Matshetsheni because the ambulance had no fuel and the local clinic had no basic pills.
Without trampling on the rights of its people, the rights-fearing government has also asked the mostly patriotic internet service providers (ISP) if they can the bills for tapping internet. They ISPs have willingly said yes, as they can see that the State indeed has more pressing commitments such as buying Humvees for senators and Korandos for heroic army officers who are dealing with George Bush’s racist attempts to re-colonize the country.
After all, is it not the sovereignty (whatever that word now means after being abused by ZANU PF) of the country and the comfort of our uneducated chiefs, who earn more than UZ graduates, that matters? The delegates should have felt insulted that a man who, in one statement, asks them to help the State in activities of repression, deprivation and denial of rights, goes on to assure them of a commitment to human rights and the rule of law.
There is no need to go to lengths in describing the nature of ZANU PF’s barbarism from 1980 to today. Mugabe knows it better than Chinamasa, which is not strange considering that the minister is a political mafikizolo, who just had the misfortune of being thrown into the deep end of a boiling whirlpool.
I will not mention the Gukurahundi killings, which Mugabe asked all of us to believe happened in a moment of madness. By mere calculation, acts committed by people as mentally deranged, as who-ever was Zimbabwe’s leader at that time cannot be prosecuted until many psychiatrists and magicians confirm that their minds are in a state of disrepair. Therefore, Mugabe wants us to believe that the people who lovingly upheld human rights by embarking on Gukurahundi cannot be prosecuted because they were mad at that time.
As such, Gukurahundi commander Perence Shiri, who preferred to be called Black Jesus because he could take life, was mad. So were one Robert Mugabe and a certain Emmerson Mnangagwa. Many say Enos Nkala was just as mad as Sydney Sekeramayi or the editors of the papers that helped the State criminalise, isolate and and annihilate a whole tribe, but judging by his sound mental state now, I am sure he is a very good actor.
So those who believe in forgiving murderers simply because they plead madness must think again because this is yet another ZANU PF piece of propaganda. It is only meant to say that this people-loving government would not have raped, killed and maimed Matabeleland if it had not collectively lost its senses.
By inference, Zimbabwe’s security forces and government are still made up of dangerous psychopaths who can still convince the world of their commitment to human rights when, by the Mugabe’s own admission, they bay for blood when their moments of madness come, which can take up to eight years considering that they were mad every day between 18 April 1980 and 21 December 1987.
The same psychopaths and paedophiles, which today claim so much fitness and effectiveness in countering a new colonization order, were in 1997 awarded government compensation for as much 100 per cent disabilities ratings for injuries allegedly sustained during the liberation war. It was also part of the human rights culture of this country that the citizens were taxed to the marrow to pay for the sacrifices of dagga-smokers and school drop-outs called war veterans, as if Zimbabweans ever hired mercenaries to liberate their country.
I am sure even world-acclaimed coup specialist and mercenary Bob Denard would have charged less than what our governing cripples paid themselves for liberating us. Denard charged much less for dirtier jobs that even got botched-up in the Comoros Islands, the badly battered economy was shaken but did not collapse like ours.
While Bob Denard ended up face to face with the music, our psycho-paths are still being allowed to go around the world misrepresenting the country and twisting its puerile human rights record into a shining mirror of achievements. Surprisingly, UN commissioners, whom we expect to know better about the dangers of psychopaths in power, still clap, ululate, pledge unending cooperation and mumble over coffee about cordial relations that have never existed.
It is now that the world, apart from blaming Zimbabweans from failing to dislodge the ZANU PF monster, should also play its part by refusing to be lied to about us. I do not believe that the whole essence of democratic discourse and diplomatic respect has the net effect of forcing everyone to listen to long speeches founded on nothing but mere fiction that even lacks imagination. If the people present at Chinamasa’s presentation can tell the difference between white and red, then they should have known better that the assurance of human rights respect was coming from the wrong mouth and from a very strange direction.
Unlike many others in cabinet, Chinamasa does not suffer from intellectual malnutrition, so we can safely assume that he sat down, concocted the lies and even rehearsed how he would present them. Maybe CIO had also provided accurate intelligence on just how gullible the audience would be, but as Zimbabweans we should be able to stand up and tell the world not to tolerate what we cannot tolerate in our country. The Zimbabwean record of human rights abuses, notably the devilish nature of the people who make up both cabinet and parliament, is as clear as muddy water.
It certainly speaks for itself because every other country that matters in this world is playing host to Zimbabwean asylum seekers and refugees.
The exiles are the people who should tell the world about Zimbabwe’s hatred of human rights other than those of the Zezurus in ZANU PF, the Gushungo family and their touts. The language used by Chinamasa should leave the ever-doubting Thomases at UN in no doubt that the government of Zimbabwe intends to do more of trampling than upholding the rights of its citizens.
ZANU PF’s pre-occupation with power should tell the world that whatever the government does is not for the good of the people, but the security of a deeply unpopular regime which fears prosecution for human rights abuses much more than the fragmented opposition. Somebody said that sovereignty and patriotism alone cannot feed the country and I agree. The narrow and badly bastardized meaning of sovereignty as it refers to ZANU PF is not good for the hungry man in Gwanda or Murambinda.
It is high time that the whole world started refusing to accept statements like the land being the economy, sovereignty and patriotism. Zimbabweans have already sacrificied everything except their children. It therefore makes no sense for Mugabe to keep saying they should sacrifice for the sovereignty of the country. Sacrifice what for what? Why is the sovereignty issue so confined to stinking ZANU PF corridors if the whole country has the right to bask in its preservation?
The diet of patriotism we are being fed on is thoroughly nauseating diarrhoea, which should also bring the world’s attention to our acute shortage of medicines. These are the very issues around which ZANU PF has built a not-so intricate web of lies that is luckily full of self-inflicted holes. These issues have become the very altar on which the rights of Zimbabweans have been sacrificed since 1980.
Chinamasa also needs to know that ZANU PF does not enjoy a complete monopoly in terms of access and dissemination of information. There are more eyes looking at Zimbabwe’s than the blind ones in ZANU PF.
Government can decide what gets published in its mouthpieces or tell its megaphones at Newsnet how to beam the day’s biggest lies as headlines. However, the illusion of a monopoly is a monumental blunder which ZANU PF and those who believe in it should be made to pay for. But that will still depend on whether as Zimbabweans, we refuse to be lied to and lied about.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Has anyone seen anything resembling preparations for this big election?
By Oscar NkalaI do wonder about a lot of things. Some strange, some queer, others absurd and many others that are annoying to say the least. But one ceaseless worry in my mind has been whether Zimbabwe will really extricate itself from this path of demise we have been led down in nearly thirty years.
This year Zimbabwe will hold one of the most sophisticated elections where voters, who are growing fewer by day as people skip the borders in search of the dollar and HIV/AIDS harvests a conservative number estimated at 4000 weekly, will have to elect their president, their member of parliament, their senator and the local ward councillor.
Many new political parties have been formed, with some acquiring such strange names as Voice of the People, which sounds more like a newspaper or one radio station I know of. While democracy allows even a hundred parties to contest for the votes of five people, I can frankly say the new parties here do not realize that they are in dilemma.
It appears the majority of people are not even aware that there are elections, they do no know many of the strangers who aspire to be MP, they know several other contestants as thieves who stole the last election, left empty promises and disappeared behind their high walls until the need for votes forced them out into the slums where the real king-makers live. But it seems the people are more concerned about scratching the next meal together than choosing the next bunch of rulers.
I have not seen any sign of a campaign, and most of those I meet here tell me they are too busy trying to cope with the crisis; so much that making political decisions is not in the least one of their priorities. I will tell you more about why there are still no election posters, with only 56 days to go before what we mistakenly believed would be the poll of the century..
Its tough..I mean being a Zimbabwean these days
I have lived almost all my life in the city of Bulawayo in Zimbabwe.
That the economic crisis is biting everything out of the food baskets has been said and repeated a trillion times. In the country, everyone is a millionaire.
But there are so many beggars and they are the subject of this snippet. Its one hard choice for the blind and the handicapped, they know better than anyone that there are no more generous people in the country. No one parts with a penny, and coins have long since ceased to be part of the currency, which has been temporary since 2003.
I will be posting a serious feature article detailing the trials and tribulations of these unfortunate people, who are doubly unfortunate in that their number on the streets is increasing daily, as is that of madmen and vagrants. Get ready for a trip down the alleyways..
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