A Zanu PF Chivi South legislator Irvine Dzingirai, has grabbed Renco Mine in Masvingo in what he alleges to be ‘indigenisation’. Dzingirai in the report by NewsDay, boasts of having a diploma in mining which equips him with the skills to run the gold mine. Earlier on in the week wives of the mineworkers held a strike demanding their better wages and working conditions. The acts of this legislator go further to show how indigenisation has gone wrong in Zimbabwe. The whole process has been politicised making it defy its purpose which could have been beneficial to local Zimbabweans had it been done in the right manner.

I believe in small acts and gestures to show my son I love him. And this too applies to the love we have for our country in the various cities we live in. I listened on Star FM’s breakfast show this week about an initiative by With Love Foundation in collaboration with the Proudly Zimbabwe Foundation of cleaning the City of Harare. To me citizens who avoid littering or take part in cleaning up the city, is an act of love for Zimbabwe. Speaking during the show, representatives of the two Foundations reminded us that we love to live in clean homes and we don’t find ourselves throwing litter in our own homes, why then throw litter on the streets? The Zim Clean Campaign is trying to attract 2400 volunteers.

According to the With Love Foundation:
“The aim of this drive is to keep our city clean. We intend to do this by mobilising the general public to keep their streets clean. The demise in street sweeping activity should motivate us not to sit back and complain but should mobilise us to act. We as responsible citizens of Zimbabwe should then be empowered to re-create our Zimbabwe.’

Details for the clean up campaign are as follows:

Date and Time: 26 January 2013 at 1330 hours in Harare CBD
Points of assembly:
Market Square Bus Terminus (0772867300)
Fourth Street Bus rank (0772264471)
Harare City Library (0736971414).
Dress in jeans, sneakers and white top; if you do not have do not worry. We just need YOU.
All volunteers will receive a Community Service Certificate.

Now you know, please share with all your friends.

I don’t know about you, but when I think about the water that isn’t in my tap more often than it is, the potholes which have become craters that stretch across the width of our roads, and the fact that rubbish is collected sporadically, not weekly or on schedule, I wouldn’t rate Harare’s services Average. But in a recent performance review of the City of Harare, the Combined Harare Residents Association scored the City a C, on a scale of A-F.

But a C sounds high, when the report card breaks down as follows:

-    Water: “The Harare City council failed to efficiently and effectively provide water to the bulk of Harare’s suburbs in 2012.”
-    Infrastructure: “Not much has been done to deal with the state of our roads despite efforts being made to deal with the issue of potholes mainly in the Central Business District.”
-    Housing: “The housing backlog of council remains pregnant with at least one million people waiting to be allocated land.”
-    Health: “Health delivery has been generally good mainly due to the affordability of the services at community level.”
-    Refuse collection: “Refuse collection has general been good considering that council has been able to procure more refuse collection trucks.”
-    Budget formulation: “The budget formulation process remains as one that is shallow and lacks credibility.”
-    Financial management: “How finances are run in council remains a secret of the technocrats.”
-    Human resources: “The 2011 human resource audit reveals that there are more than 300 ghost workers on the council’s payroll but nothing has been done.”

So. Fail, do not much, keep a backlog, delivery a few things well enough, manage your money secretively and keep ghost workers on the payroll, and you get a C? Low standards overstate Harare City performance? Have we been so traumatized by years of F*-grade service delivery, that we’ll be so grateful for sub-par performance we’ll still call it average?

The success of the system is dependent on us believing them –

‘that we are all enemies and cannot trust one another
we are all competing for the same piece of pie
that we are not safe’.

What if we stopped believing this?
What if we met our assumed foes with the voice of friendship and our fears with courage and trust?

As we stand poised on the brink of yet another year
with the same power in the same places
and  Zimbabwe under the threat of yet another election and the accompanying intimidation and violence

we wait
as the leadership juggles around their personal advantages against what might happen
. . . if the choice to was given to the people (god forbid)

It can look pretty dark out there

But what we see depends on where we look.
Perhaps if we choose where look more carefully we can see the next steps in the journey

Two stories have given this year a certain impetus for me:

One from my niece, Hayley, who teaches at a junior girls school in England

‘……they are from a very wealthy section of London society – it’s a private school with small classes so they get lots of individual attention, and I often want them to understand how lucky they are – not so that they feel guilty but more so that they become aware of how they can help others. And so I introduced R.A.C.K to my class – Random Acts of Care and Kindness. I made a paper bunting strip that hung at the back of my class and told the girls that every time they did something nice for someone else they could write it on one of the paper triangles from a particular box and I’d hang it up. They quickly got the idea and within two weeks the string was full, so I added more on two sides of my room… and they filled up too.

None of the good deeds are very dramatic but they are sweet – helping a neighbour wash his car, getting a box on a high shelf for an elderly person in a supermarket etc.

The thing is, these girls have decided that they love helping others. They understand that a smile and friendly greeting go a long way. In fact before Christmas when the whole school walked across the town to the local church for a carol concert practice, the whole procession was held up by my class chatting to the homeless guy outside Marks and Spencer’s who was selling The Big Issue. It made my heart sing!

And slowly, the girls are changing the world one smile at a time.’

The other was an event offered by Barbara, Jonathan and Sam, who celebrated the birthday of their friend  Carrie, in South Africa:

‘Carrie is one of those generous souls who do things like (to quote her) – “dancing the whole night through until sunrise (preferably in a small, hot shebeen in Nairobi), baking cookies for your neighbours, going to a dinner party and spending the entire evening playing with the children, paying the toll for the car behind you, stopping to help someone stuck on the side of the road (even though you know NOTHING about car mechanics), giving someone an unexpected present, eating an entire box of chocolates, deliver a meal to someone in need, spamming your friends with (hopefully) inspirational text messages, organising or attending a demonstration for something you feel passionately about….” You get the idea? ‘

At her request, B, J and S  ‘Did it like Carrie’, by going through the collection of books and DVD’s, and holding an open house  yesterday afternoon with an invitation to us all to come and collect what we would like.  We had tea and caught up with one another, shared stories and began the year in our community in an act of generosity.

Do we look, forever, to the dark out there, to have our fears echoed back at us
or do we walk into it, shining our own?

In the face of whatever is coming – these random acts of generosity carry with them the possibility of something different

and they begin a spiral of patterns that has no know ultimate end.

It calls to me.

It was about time we did something different so I booked a table for two at La Fonteine. I sent a text to my dinner date confirming arrangements and she asked what the dress code was. I said “chic grunge”. Then, thinking about the 5 stars that Meikle’s is meant to have, I swiftly sent another text; “more chic than tat.” She turned up in impressive high heels, silver and shimmery. She got taller, I felt shorter. Thank God they were hard to walk in because they were soon ditched for sneakers. On our way to dinner I asked her how long since she’d been into the city at night. HIFA she said. We had a pre dinner drink in the Can Can Bar. The cocktail list is extensive and in a voice infused with doubt, I asked Wellington, the barman, whether he could make All the cocktails so temptingly advertised. In our very Zimbabwean way he said yes but not all. I played it safe and asked for a Cosmopolitan. At the Can Can it’s made with apple juice instead of cranberry juice. It took Wellington a full five minutes to convince me that This Would Be OK; in fact it’s even better than the usual way he said. And it was. I ended up having three. My date settled on an Old Fashioned. She winced when she had her first sip. I told Wellington that this was a good sign. She had two. I sat back and listened to some poetry that materialised out of my companion’s back pocket. She shared a poem by Barbara Ras; you can’t have it all, but there is this. Dinner menus were brought to us at the bar. There was a choice between a set menu or a la carte. Luke, one of the most gracious waiters I’ve ever met, said it would be fine to have a starter from one menu and a main from the other. Flexible restaurants rock! The starters we chose; mushroom soup and salmon pate with prawn toast, were faultless. We both chose the same main course, slow cooked lamb with an aubergine sauce. Again, the food was fabulous. The only down side was the insipid crème brule and the very weak and uninspired cappuccinos. The Can Can Bar and La Fonteine are well worth a visit. Compared with other restaurants in Harare its way ahead of the game and a visit won’t break the bank. You’ll also experience the best service in town. And if you’re worried about the safety of your car, you get free parking in the Meikles Hotel guarded car park. I’ll be back sooner rather than later especially if the pianist adds Fly Me To The Moon to his repertoire.