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Archive for January, 2009

The queue for air time

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Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 by Bev Reeler

For the past few weeks it has been impossible to buy air time for cell phones
- Christmas without communication due to some incomprehensible banking/foreign currency/political manoeuvre

So the new queue to get air time for cell phones in January was enthusiastically long
with everyone waving the ‘now legal tender’ – US$ notes – to activate connections.
We smile at one another in hopeful expectation
One young man gives us a rundown on the names and lives of all the Presidents and Generals pictured on the US$ notes
‘I am a history scholar’ he says
the queue nod encouragingly
Another explains that today our dollar has reached a new low
(1 to the power of 19, I think)
‘that many! for one US$!- imagine what the equivalent value to 100 US$ looks like’
we chuckle together at the unfathomable quality of it all

A tired and gentle voice of the teller breaks through our exchange
‘We do not accept crumpled or creased notes’
(pointing at a hand written sign stuck to the wall)
we all look from the sign to our pictures of Presidents
with creased and crumpled faces
Franklin and Grant and Lincoln
our path to freedom
old and used
and disallowed

‘well’, the woman behind me explains
‘all that is needed is a quick dip in Sta-soft*
and a warm iron – just like new’

‘Sta-soft?’
the two young men look at one another
here, finally, is something they didn’t know

* Sta-soft is a fabric softener

Geoff gives Morgan some advice

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Monday, January 19th, 2009 by Bev Clark

Whilst the MDC continue to dilly dally about What To Do, Geoff Nyarota has come up with a plan of action. And I reckon it’s not half bad:

Mugabe has neither respect nor faith in Tsvangirai. I suspect that feeling is mutual between the two. If Tsvangirai thinks he can return from self-imposed exile to sit down with the very man he fled from and negotiate genuine strategies to bring our nation back on track, then he may not be as astute a politician as his followers have assumed. He has the greatest error of the Late Dr Joshua Nkomo, the Unity Agreement, to draw salutary lessons from.

1. The MDC should, without qualm, opt out of the proposed GNU.
2. Zimbabweans, not just the MDC, should come up with a Plan B.
3. The cornerstone of Plan B would be a new initiative that seeks to unite the people of Zimbabwe as one progressive force fighting dictatorship.
4. The GNU should be replaced by a transitional arrangement with neither Mugabe nor Tsvangirai as leader.
5. A transitional leader would be identified and appointed. There is certainly no shortage of patriotic Zimbabweans of good stature and excellent credentials. For example, the name of Wilson Sandura, recently lauded for his many good qualities, immediately comes to mind. If Mugabe could emerge from the bush to take over at State House, I personally don’t see why any other citizen with a reasonable academic background, an understanding of affairs of state and a heart in the right place cannot run Zimbabwe, especially if they have the ability to build a team of appropriately qualified and experienced people around them. There is an abundance of such people both in Zimbabwe and in the Diaspora.
6. Meanwhile the current crop of political leaders, particularly those whose political stature is now tainted by their recent performance will be prevailed upon to swallow their misplaced pride and throw in their lot with the rest.
7. The transitional arrangement would lead to new elections supervised by the United Nations and observed by who ever wishes to – the more the better. They will bring in much needed foreign currency, in any case.
8. These will be free and fair elections. Even Arthur Mutambara, if he still wishes and if he plays his cards well, can become the next President of ZImbabwe, not merely Deputy Prime Minister through the back door, as he is currently and impatiently trying to do.
9. Above all, Zimbabweans wherever they are, must declare a commitment to the transitional arrangement. Let us all join hands, whether we are Shona or Ndebele, white or black, Zanu-PF or MDC to work in unity to liberate ourselves from the yoke of colon..sorry… post colonial oppression, injustice and humiliation. Mugabe has partly survived by driving a wedge between Shona and Ndebele and another between white and black.
10. Once we have achieved our new independence let a referendum be held so that Zimbabweans can decide whether they want to pardon Mugabe for his many sins or to prosecute him.
11. The international community would support this whole process with clean hands as it were. Some African leaders believe the West has become part of the problem of Zimbabwe through their alleged tendency to prescribe the course of political events in Zimbabwe. By their very attitude and actions or lack thereof, the African leaders have themselves also become part of the problem of Zimbabwe.
12. We need the support of the outside world as we strive as a nation to polish our tarnished jewel, Zimbabwe.

We are a people in limbo

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Friday, January 16th, 2009 by Sophie Zvapera

Zimbabweans where ever they are and what ever they are doing are a people who do not know what tomorrow holds for them.

You do not know whether to wake up expecting a heavy military and police presence in all the streets of Harare and all other major towns, or to wake up to the information that a mother and her two-year-old son have been abducted.

You are not sure of whether your colleague, church mate or neighbour will be alive tomorrow due to cholera, starvation or some such evil that might easily befall them over night.

In Zimbabwe you wake up not knowing whether there will be power, water to drink or food to eat. You just wake up because it is dawn but you have no plans for tomorrow! What kind of a life is that?

In Zimbabwe we wait and we do not know whether schools, colleges and universities will open this year. We also do not know whether teachers, lecturers and all workers will go back to work so that the education system can function. My friend awaits her son’s Grade 7 and her daughter’s O level results not knowing whether they will ever get their results and will those results be theirs or someone else’s? We wait anxiously, hoping against hope that one day she will have those results.

Others decided to leave Zimbabwe and look for a better life but no sooner had they left did they find that they are also in limbo in South Africa not knowing whether they will be able to get any legal papers or not. The situation is not any better in the UK. While the UK government has said it will stop deporting Zimbabweans for the time being, those applying for asylum cannot work and they wait in limbo not knowing what will happen to their future. Whether they will get their papers or not. What does tomorrow hold for them?

And the families that are left behind. They all wait for either their mum or dad to come back or to take them and start a new life in any country where one or both their parents would have managed to settle down. So where ever they are, generally Zimbabweans in the Diaspora, are in a limbo waiting for the time when they will be able to freely come back home.

The question is when will this be? Some are really desperate to come back home but at the moment they cannot dare think of it and all they can do is hope.

So how long do we have to wait in limbo before we get respite? Zimbabweans have hope but you also say for how long are we going to keep on hoping because to cap it all, politically we are in a paralysis, making us all comatose.

Empathy and admiration

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Thursday, January 15th, 2009 by Susan Pietrzyk

The other day a friend asked what I knew about the recent elections in Ghana.   Happens often, because I’ve lived in one African country, people think this translates into knowledge about the entire continent.   I told my friend I knew nothing about the elections in Ghana, but commented knowing nothing was potentially a good sign.  Means that the elections didn’t make major headlines.  Wasn’t like in Zimbabwe where CNN and BBC provided around the clock coverage including frequent conversations with Bright Matonga who always had something so outlandish to say that it became entertaining. And the New York Times had above the fold cover stories day after day. Not even knowing an election happened in Ghana probably means it went off peacefully, or at least not unpeacefully enough to make the news.

This got me thinking about how the news is oriented toward reporting on the ills of the world.  The crisis’s, violence, devastation, deaths, scandals, suffering, bombs, murders, angst, corruption, and on it goes.  This is what makes the headlines. The happy stuff is rarely in the headlines.  Zimbabwe is a good example.  All the average consumer of news sees are stories about what a mess things are in Zimbabwe.

I have a folder of 516 ZWNEWS’ dating from late 2006 to the present.  When I did a word search for violence, 324 of the ZWNEWS daily email newsletters had at least one article where the word violence was used.  With arrested the total was 348, death 243, and beaten 192.  A word search on celebration came out to 49. And likely that word was used to describe Mugabe’s lavish birthdays.  Hardly shocking that news out of Zimbabwe is harsh, not celebratory; and I’m not meaning to diminish the importance of covering these realities. Being a reader of harsh news, however, drums up a range of emotions, one of which is empathy for the real people in each of the stories and empathy about the broader context in which they live.

It’s curious the concept of empathy.  To feel it means you are a caring and compassionate person.  You recognize the brave ways people fight against insurmountable odds.  But I wonder too when feeling empathy dangerously limits the power to feel things which are peacefully pure and good.  I started thinking about people I admire.  As the list grew, I was having a hard time identifying admiration that didn’t also involve empathy.  Try it.  Make a list of who you admire and I bet at least half the people on the list you admire because you empathize with their struggle and what they are fighting for.  Can’t help but imagine a better world, one where admiration does not necessarily also involve empathy.

Laying our hands on the problem

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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 by Bev Clark

Every day, along the road I live on in Harare, there are groups of people waiting outside houses that have bore holes. They wait, sitting and standing, next to different shapes and sizes of containers. They wait for water. People carry the containers of water on their heads. They roll drums of water down the road. They use shopping trolley’s from the nearby TM Supermarket to push the water home.

In Greendale we haven’t had a consistent supply of municipal water for over two years.

I drove past a sign on Enterprise Road recently. It caught my eye because in big red letters the word BEWARE jumped out at me. The sign advised that most bore hole water in Harare, and the rest of Zimbabwe, isn’t as clean as we need it to be.

So while reading the December issue of The New York Times Magazine recently, a story on a man called Ron Rivera, by writer Sara Corbett, caught my eye. His story is about getting clean water to people.

Have a read.

Early on, Ron Rivera was a left-leaning, power-to-the-people sort of young man, full of vague ideas about social justice and eradicating poverty. Fresh out of college in Puerto Rico, he joined the Peace Corps and spent six years moving between the poorest parts of Ecuador and Panama, engaged in noble but sometimes futile-seeming community-development work. But then, during a stay in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1972, he met an older male potter who took him in as an apprentice. And as if by magic, the vagueness and futility dissipated, replaced by possibility. Why? Because Ron Rivera was now a left-leaning, power-to-the-people potter.

Pottery became Rivera’s way of laying his hands on the world’s problems. He moved to Nicaragua during the Contra war and worked to start a program to help injured veterans make ceramic insulators for electrical lines. He later joined the staff of a small organization called Potters for Peace, seeking out indigenous potters across Latin America and helping them refine the way they mixed glazes and built kilns in order to increase their profits and therefore their power.

Working with rural women who made clay piggy banks and sold them to exploitative middle-men, Rivera encouraged them to create something similar but new-ceramic armadillos, say – and then triple the price. When the middlemen grew indignant, demanding to know why this nearly identical type of ware cost more, he counseled the women to respond with a whiff of their own indignation, “Because it is an armadillo and not a pig.”

Then one day in October 1998, Hurricane Mitch hit Central America, flooding roads and triggering mudslides, killing an estimated 11,000 people. At home in Managua, knowing how readily bacterial disease follows on the heels of disaster, Rivera remembered an object he encountered years earlier in Ecuador, a simple terra cotta pot that looked like the sort of thing in which the rest of us-the earth’s less vulnerable-might plant our springtime geraniums. Made of clay mixed with some grist-usually sawdust or ground rice husk that would burn off later in the kiln-and then shaped carefully, this pot had thousands of micropores. And those pores, along with a coating of antibacterial silver solution, allowed it to perform a small but significant miracle: removing 98 to 100 percent of the bacteria from contaminated water, making it safe to drink.

Convinced that he could help indigenous potters mass-produce clay-pot water filters for their own communities if the process for making them could be standardized, Rivera began to experiment, calculating the optimal size and clay composition. He then designed a mold for the filter and a special clay press that was operated with a tire jack, which he figured was one of earth’s more universally available bits of technology. Rather than applying for a patent, Rivera posted his work, in painstaking detail, on the Internet. The filter, which costs roughly $15 to make, rests inside a lidded five-gallon plastic bucket with a spigot. It purifies enough daily water for a family of six.

Collaborating with health organizations and relief groups, Rivera helped native potters build filter factories in Colombia, Honduras and El Salvador. He did it in Kenya, Cambodia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Darfur. He often traveled in the wake of water-related disasters-following floods in Ghana or a Tsunami Sri Lanka-capitalizing on the rush of aid money to establish a locally owned enterprise that would sustain itself long after he left.

According to the United Nations, more than five million people die each year from diseases related to unclean drinking water. Most live in developing countries and, overwhelmingly, they are children under the age of 5. Rivera liked to say that he wouldn’t rest until he “put a dent” in the problem, which by his calculation meant setting up 100 water-filter factories, creating enough pottery to provide safe water to at least four million people. His friends nicknamed him “Ron Rapido” for his velocity and vigor and for the impatient way he suffered through meetings.

In August, standing in a village in rural Nigeria, having just finished his 30th filter factory, Rivera expressed a larger impatience. “How is it”, he mused to an engineering student with whom he was traveling, “that scientists can work so hard on improving TVs and cell phones when so many people don’t even have clean water to drink?”

He didn’t yet know that a mosquito, presumably bred in a nearby swamp, would infect him with a particularly virulent form of malaria, nor that he would die-back in Managua, his wife at his side-only two weeks later. But surely he knew by then that solutions, like problems, are capable of crossing borders, of pollinating like seeds on the wind. Since his death, Rivera’s protégés at Potters for Peace have fanned out to continue the work. There are filter factories planned for Bolivia, Rwanda, Somaliland and Mozambique-a global legion of local potters, as Rivera would have it, poised to lay their hands on the problem.

Ron Rivera born 1948, died 2008

Shake, rattle and roll

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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 by Bev Clark

A couple of things.

I was rather amused to get an email from Sunset Tours this morning with the subject title: Air Zimbabwe Specials and Extra Baggage Allowances. The departure hall at Harare International Airport is a scary sight on the night that Air Zimbabwe flies to London. You can hardly swing a bag for the masses fleeing our sinking ship. Now with Extra Baggage Allowances one wonders if the plane will even get off the ground. By the sound of it (low and loud) it would seem that ScareZim clears my roof – I’m in the flight path – by barely a few feet as it is.

Then I laughed at a headline just seen: Zimbabwe Places Military On Alert: Says Opposition Planning A Coup. Hmmm. The Movement for Democratic can plan an election at best, and interminable board meetings at worst. But a coup is certainly outside of their capabilities. A headline like this is just another example of the type of propaganda that’s churned out by the state.

Meanwhile Tendai Dumbutshena writing for the Zimbabwe Times seems to have his head screwed on right going by his article Time for MDC to make big decision. OK, we got that, awhile back. Besides the fact that they are way over the deadline on making a decision, the fact is that they need to make a decision. Scary thought, I know. But Tendai puts things quite clearly . . .

Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC meets on Sunday 18 January to decide whether to join the proposed inclusive government. It is imperative for the MDC to arrive at a clear decision that leaves no room for uncertainty or ambiguity. It is now four months since the Global Political Agreement (GPA) was signed on 15 September 2008. A lot has transpired in that time. The MDC should be in a position to make a firm decision based on concrete facts and not unrealistic hopes.

This is no time to dilly-dally. The party is either joining the government or opting out. There are no more SADC summits that will help the situation. All parties including SADC have made their positions crystal clear. It is decision time for the MDC.

A coalition or unity government only works if parties in it have a common purpose. In Zimbabwe this is clearly not the case. Mugabe sees the inclusive government as a tactical ploy to ultimately outmaneuvre the MDC.  He does not see it as a vehicle through which the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe can be genuinely tackled. His main objective is not to bring prosperity to the people of Zimbabwe but to rule them until he drops dead. He only signed the agreement to secure legitimacy for his presidency which he could not obtain through the ballot box. He detests the idea of having the MDC in government even as junior partners.

He has no intention of allowing the inclusive government to serve a full five – year term. His intention is to call for an early election when he believes the MDC is sufficiently weakened. Mugabe is shrewd enough to know that the MDC’s presence as junior partners in a largely ineffectual government will have serious political consequences for it. With no improvement in the lives of Zimbabweans the MDC’s political fortunes will rapidly nosedive. At the same time the MDC’s foot soldiers – the backbone of the party – will continue to be killed, arrested, tortured and displaced. With its organizers battered and demoralized and its structures crippled, the MDC will be ripe for easy pickings in an early snap election.

We should however debate one of the observations Tendai makes . . .

The argument is often presented by some analysts that the MDC will be cast into the political wilderness if it declines to join the inclusive government. This is a false argument bereft of any merit. The MDC’s raison d’etre is to seek democratic change in Zimbabwe. That is supposed to be its mission. It is not to seek political accommodation with a regime hell bent on preserving its own tyrannical rule.

As Amanda raised in her recent blog, perhaps the MDC is in fact seeking some sort of political accommodation rather than the ousting of Mugabe. Clearly the MDC has struggled to get rid of Mugabe democratically, and if they are unable to pull off a coup (and who wants one anyway), then politicians (rather than freedom fighters) opt for political accommodation.

On the 18th January Tsvangirai will have a hard time persuading his colleagues and MPs to walk away from a negotiated settlement. They will want to keep the dollars and perks that Mugabe has been dangling in front of them.