It has become normal in Zimbabwe to find two organizations doing the same business, and sharing the name but then suffixed somehow with another word to mark a difference. For example, ‘MDC T’, ‘MDC M’, ‘ZINASU Magwini’, ‘ZINASU Chinyere’, ‘CAPS FC’, ‘CAPS United’, just to mention a few. Even Churches have not been spared: ‘Johhane Marange’, ‘Johanne Masowe yeChishanu’, ‘Johanne Masowe yeMadzibaba’ and ‘Johnane Masowe yeVadzidzi’. One wonders why these divisions are happening. Even in these seemly intact institutions, its normal to hear of ‘this faction’ and ‘that other faction’. Many times conflicts are unavoidable, but is separation always the best answer? In every set up since time immemorial, there has always been a provision for dispute settlement. Conflicts are not new in our lives, our failure to handle them should labeled as such: FAILURE.

And this does not only happen at institutional level, but even at social and family level, you find those that were strong bonds now being totally disjointed. Friends, who were friends, are no longer. Parents who shared everything including children are now enemies for life. It is high time that we stop this trend and resort to amicable dispute settling mechanisms, which do not culminate in divisions. We all know that there is power in unity and a unified body is more dignified that its sub-parts. Even the bible makes it clear that “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand” (Matthew 12:25). Even the Shona say that “Shumba mbiri hadzibvutirwi nyama,” which literally means that one cannot take away meat from two lions. Recognising this power of unity, and recalling past experiences were disunity has cost us, it should be a lesson to throw out division forever.

The question is, what kind of precedence are we are setting for our future generations, in terms of professionalism, leadership qualities, comradeship, brotherhood and unity of purpose? The bottom line here is to bring things together when we see them falling apart.

PlusNews Global, an arm of IRIN, reports on HIV/AIDS news and analysis. Here’s one of their recent articles on Zimbabwe:

Moses Mataka, 49, diagnosed with the HIV virus seven years ago, was one of the first male home-based caregivers working in the mining district of Mberengwa, in Midlands Province, Zimbabwe, and perhaps he was one of the first in the country, but his road has not been easy.

“I tested HIV positive in 2003. I had been very ill for a very long time … One day I had a dream that God asked me to get up and do his work. Before I could ask, ‘What kind of work?’ I woke up from the dream and I was feeling stronger. My wife was making porridge for me when I walked into the kitchen. She almost fainted with disbelief.

“From that day I have never been ill to the extent of lying in bed for days. When I thought hard about the dream, I knew that the work I needed to do was to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in my community and save people’s lives. This was very difficult because I also did not have much knowledge about it.

“That was the starting point. I joined a support group and trained as a peer educator; after that I joined a home-based care programme [which closed down in 2005].

“After its closure we didn’t know what to do and our patients were stranded. Although we had no support we continued visiting our clients, giving them moral support.

“After that I joined the Betseranai Home Based Care programme … where we use male caregivers to encourage other men to get tested and support their wives in the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT).

“Most women are afraid to go on this programme, because when the husbands find out they [the wives] are HIV positive they are chased away from the family home – they are blamed for bringing the disease into the home.

“This is the work I do as a “Male Champion”. We go and talk to men so that they understand what the benefits of PMTCT are, but it’s not an easy thing. Sometimes we are chased away from people’s homes; sometimes they close their doors in our faces, but we continue visiting them and trying to convince them.

“We men are just thick-headed – I know that for a fact. We take time to accept issues because we want to live in denial most of the time, but in Mberengwa, I tell you, we are changing mindsets. People are seeing the benefits of the PMTCT programme.”

ZimRights Director, Mr. Okay Machisa was arrested yesterday, Tuesday 23 March 2010 at Gallery Delta. He was in the process of finalising arrangements for the launch of an art exhibition entitled ‘/Reflections’/. Following the intervention by Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights Mr. Okay Machisa was released from Harare Central Police Station.

At a press conference today, Irene Petras, Director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, described the conditions for Mr. Machisa’s arrest and the holding of the photographs in the following press statement:

The Officer Commanding Harare Central District, *Chief Superintendent G Gwangava,* advised that he had ‘/not approved’/ the launch and gave Mr. Machisa seven days to provide ‘/letters of consent from individuals and organisations’/ appearing in the photographs, failing which he threatened to prefer unspecified criminal charges against Mr. Machisa.

It is ZLHR’s considered legal opinion that the seizure and retention of the photographs by the police is unlawful and unjustifiable, as are the threats of criminal prosecution and the attempts to prevent the invitation-only launch from proceeding.

Such actions are solely calculated to instil fear and paralysis within civil society and to prevent free assembly, association and expression around national events and processes. For too long, civil society has been excluded by political parties and state institutions and actors from participating – as is its fundamental right – in issues around governance, national healing and reconciliation, and other matters which are in the national interest.

For this reason, ZLHR has been instructed by ZimRights to file – and has indeed filed – an Urgent Chamber Application demanding the immediate return of the photographs. The application also challenges the unjustifiable attempt to prevent the launch from taking place today, and the threats to prefer criminal charges, which, in our considered legal opinion, have no basis in law.

Mr. MacDonald Lewanika, co-ordinator for Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition expressed civic society’s concern regarding the unlawful arrest and harassment of civic activists by state security agents. These actions have escalated in the last few months. Other ZimRights officials as well as Mr. Machisa have received threats via cell phone and email. In addition, the Secretary General of the General Agriculture and plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe has also recently experienced harassment and intimidation from state agents. Mr Lewanika stressed that this behaviour was unwarranted and unjustifiable. Crisis In Zimbabwe Coalition is working to bring these matters to the attention of the mediators in the dialogue process around Zimbabwe’s political agreement, including President of South Africa Jacob Zuma. When asked about engaging the Ministers of Home Affairs in this issue he said:

“I think that the question of local remedies in Zimbabwe in situations like this, and this kind of behaviour by the police shows that as a place where you can run to [for protection] they are not an option. This idea of even engaging the Co-Ministers of Home Affairs Mr. Giles Mutsekwa and his counterpart Mr. Kembo Mohadi, is something that even while we do it, we think that that is no way for a country to operate. You can’t ask for ministerial intervention every time that something happens. It shows us that the problems we are trying to deal with are more fundamental than what we are looking at. Which is why this is important. The exhibition itself sought to raise the issues around the conduct of the police services. The police need to conduct themselves in a manner that ensures that such actions [intervention by high ranking members of government] are not necessary.”

ZHLR is currently waiting to hear from the Judge President, and has asked for the photos to be returned. The launch, which Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is expected to attend, will go on as planned.

I was more interested in reading the comments on an article about the postponed New Zealand cricket tour to Zimbabwe on NewZimbabwe.com, than the actual article itself. The assertion by David Coltart that Zimbabwe is safer than the UK and other countries is resoundingly accurate. That is if you’re a member of a visiting sports team. But if you’re a human rights defender, an information activist, or a member of the general public who wants to wear an MDC t-shirt, you’re in big trouble. One of the readers who commented on the Coltart article likened Zanu PF to a terrorist organisation. How right, or wrong is this suggestion? Another reader berates Coltart for flip-flopping because until fairly recently, Coltart would have grabbed with two hands, any excuse for a sports boycott whether the grounds for the boycott were defendable, or spurious. Then again, I’d be interested to know whether this same reader who thinks Coltart has flip-flopped would praise Coltart for calling for a boycott of any international soccer team that wanted to play in Zimbabwe? I think not. New Zealand is using security as an excuse. They don’t want to tour Zimbabwe because of the Mugabe regime. And perhaps they have issues with Mugabe being the patron of Zimbabwe cricket. In which case they might well have to stand to attention on the green grass of Harare Sports Club and shake Mr M’s hand. And of course, Coltart, in a bid to woo the Kiwis, like many other politicians, suggests that the GNU has replaced a dictatorship when it clearly hasn’t.

Check out the blogs on New Internationalist if you want to access some refreshing reading. Blogger Jo Lateu recently shared some words of wisdom on homophobia from Desmond Tutu. Of course, the hysterical homophobic elements of society are likely to be as reactive as ever, but more fool them. If there are any pearly gates, the haters among us are certainly going to struggle to gain entry when they pop their sandaks.

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity – or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.

It is time to stand up against another wrong.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counselling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding – away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offence is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said ‘love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones’. Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

‘But they are sinners,’ I can hear the preachers and politicians say. ‘They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished.’ My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin colour, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

The writer is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

The article first appeared in the Washington Post.

According to an article published on www.africanliberty.org, “Rejoice Ngwenya simply rejects Mugabe’s cohorts anthem of western sanctions being responsible for starvation in Zimbabwe.” Instead, Rejoice demands that Africans stop blaming others for self-inflicted misery.

Robert Mugabe’s brutal thirty year-old reign in Zimbabwe, compounded by a frenzied ten-year mutilation of property rights, is once again on the cover page of the country’s annals of food insecurity.  The pillaging, plunder of strategic commercial farms and national resources by privileged political elite has over the past decade emaciated our country’s productive capacity. At the epicentre of this carnage is central bank governor Dr Gideon Gordon who masqueraded as the benevolent bankroller of the curiously named ‘farm mechanisation program’ that mostly looted NGO funds to prop up Mugabe’s plummeting political fortunes.

To rub salt to injury, habitual ZANU-PF choirmaster Dr Joseph Made, now head of an apparition termed ‘ministry of agricultural mechanisation’ has been spewing brain-damaging propaganda via the Mugabe-owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. He trumpets the discredited theory that ‘illegal Western-imposed sanctions’ are to blame for all our harvest misfortunes.

Progressive Zimbabweans know that white farmers were evicted overnight from their properties with no time to pack, and then whole villages frog-marched to vast tracts of arable land that now lie fallow. Confronted with high-value assets but no expertise, these Mugabe foot soldiers looted the once profitable farms, unplugging irrigation pumps, uprooting pipes and stripping electrical fittings for quick disposal on the black market. Now, in a show of award-winning naivety, Joseph Made tells the world that ‘resettled farmers fail to produce because Western-imposed sanctions limit their access to equipment spares’. He must think we Africans are daft!

The Red Cross and World Food Program predict patched lips for Zimbabwe’s legion of rural citizens in 2010. Ironically, sophisticated farmer and MDC agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennet faces the hangman’s noose for a yet-to-be-substantiated terrorism charge while his counterpart, Tendai Biti conspires an epic cap-in-hand safari in search of food aid. My question: if ZANU-PF moguls are hoarding multi-million US dollar diamond mine claims in Marange, why would a sensible government want to further burden suffering citizens with more debts?

The cause of inevitable starvation is not all about scrappy weather patterns and as ZANU-PF apologists would like to claim, ‘illegal sanctions’. For almost a decade, Gideon Gono and Robert Mugabe poisoned our minds with a false doctrine that ‘Government is God’ so much so that dependency became habitual. Now that a more sustainable fiscal management and national accountability system is in place, ZANU-PF’s seemingly eternal pool of benevolence has evaporated. In any case, for all the so-called investment in farming that Gono spearheaded, there is nothing to show for it except a ‘ministry of mechanisation’, de-forestation, the first lady’s Gushungo Dairy Estates and two million vulnerable citizens!  Zimbabwean villagers stare starvation in the eye, yet there is a cruel twist to fate linked with this plot.

It was in the year 2000 that Robert Mugabe and his militant gang of ‘war veterans’ dismantled organised farming. To achieve their sinister political motive, they exploited idle village idiots, wherefore this rhythm of destruction was replicated in subsequent elections, causing internal and external displacement of millions of Zimbabweans. Ironically, these Jurassic ZANU-PF outcasts and their families also now face starvation. Arguing from a pedestal of high moral ground, the Tsvangirayi half of government cannot worry only about the welfare of their supporters, even where most beneficiaries of free land, free fertiliser, free seed and free fuel were ONLY ZANU-PF activists. The machinery of patronage, running right from the president’s office through to provincial governors, district administrators, chiefs, headmen was and still has ZANU-PF imprints. Former military officers control the Grain Marketing Board to compliment this toxic cycle of patronage. Remember that in all election years, Mugabe used to ‘ban’ NGOs from rural areas, claiming that food humanitarian agencies were ‘advancing a regime change agenda!”

Now here is my rationale. In Somalia, Uganda, Sudan and DR Congo, food relief is known to be routinely ‘hijacked’ by insurgents either for re-sale or personal use. More often than not, these are the same clowns responsible for food insecurity in those regions, but are first in handout queues when peace prevails. Now that Morgan Tsvangirayi and Tendai Biti are – to use ZANU-PF lingo – in ‘control of food relief’, Mugabe supporters are screaming ‘murder!’ and yet those are the same marauding gangs responsible for causing the current food production deficit in the first place! My humble submission is that these shameless citizens and members of their families should not be allowed within a fifty-kilometre radius of ‘MDC or NGO-sourced’ food distribution. Instead, Gideon Gono and Joseph Made must be hauled before a court of law to explain how the so-called ‘farm mechanisation’ and the freebies doled out since 2000 have added zilch to our country’s strategic food reserves. What we see, however, is Mugabe and his cronies persistently refusing to allow an official land audit in the hope that this gigantic fraud called ‘land reform’ will remain confined to a sealed black box.  I want to ask: of what use is a land revolution if all it produces is mass starvation, a tattered country reputation, few wealthy political elites, broken families and half a million displaced farm workers?

So what am I saying: the cruel reality is that everyone who participated in the plunder and destruction of Zimbabwe’s food productive capacity must not taste a single morsel of food relief. Those who are in the current echelons of governance like Made, Gono and even Mugabe – must be subject to a Parliamentary enquiry to explain why millions of US dollar investments in free agriculture inputs over the past ten years have failed to yield sustainable food surpluses. The sanctions story will be excluded from the repertoire of defence. It is not only an excuse of small minds but an insult to our intelligence. Community-based organisations and progressive activists can identify ZANU-PF collaborators who beat up, maimed and exiled villagers, publish names to inform them that they will not receive anything from an MDC-inspired humanitarian effort. Just for once, we Africans must learn to be responsible for our actions and refrain from time-worn scapegoats.