Over the past few years, life in Zimbabwe has increasingly come to resemble an Ionesco drama. One ridiculous government policy follows another, each more unconscionable than the last. And somehow, the stated purpose of the legislation never seems to gel with what the policy actually accomplishes.

Take, for example, the latest genius move on the part of Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono. On Thursday he suspended the RTGS transfer payment scheme, because he had found that it had become “an active vehicle for illicit foreign exchange parallel market dealings, as well as a convenient excuse by sellers of goods and services to overprice their commodities.”

Never mind that it had also become an essential method of organising payments in an environment where bank queues take up literally hours of every working day. The RTGS and Internet banking set up enabled some people to perform transactions without having to join the bank queues – thus saving their own time, and keeping the queues a bit shorter than they otherwise would be.

Suspending RTGS to curb corruption is like using a machete to clean out the infection from your finger. In an economy where people can get to the bank at 6am and still be only number 3,478 in the queue, suspending RTGS makes the simple, basic, ordinary transactions of daily life and business impossible. To add insult to injury, it will put more people into the queues – the people in building societies like CABS, who don’t have cheque books and now need to get bank cheques drawn to pay their bills, and the people who need to deposit these cheques. Transactions at the bank near us had already begun to take longer than they used to – in part because the tellers are on go slow in the hopes that they can earn more overtime. Meanwhile, the kinds of people who were taking advantage of RTGS to profiteer off Zimbabwe’s crumbling economy will just find other corrupt ways in which to make their money – Your cash barons ye shall always have with you.

And yet, despite the outrage of it all, the Sunday Mail refers to the move as one to “bring sanity in the banking sector.” It also warns Zimbabweans that the Reserve Bank will be keeping tabs on everyone who is withdrawing money from the bank every day – to establish “what kind of business they are into.” With transport having gone up to $4,000 one way, bread costing $6,000 and the maximum daily withdrawal only $20,000, might it just be possible that people withdrawing money every day are just into the business of getting to work, having something to eat, and getting home again?

Here at Kubatana, we are enough of politicians fiddling whilst Zimbabweans starve. Our current electronic activism campaign encourages people to get in touch with the offices of the President and the Prime Minister designate to urge them to stop stalling and start governing.

Getting contact information for the President’s office, though, was no easy matter.

First off, when I used the numbers in the telephone directory, as soon as I asked for contact information they’d transfer me to the Ministry of Information. No wonder Zanu PF wants to keep control of the Ministry of Information. It would be too hard to reconfigure all the telephone lines to separate them from the numbers for the President’s office!

When I finally got through to the right person, I asked for their email address. I could hear the receptionist shouting across the office to one of her colleagues –

“These people want our email address. Can I give it?” She asked.

“Which people?” Her colleague asked.

“These people on the phone. They’re calling from Harare. They want the email address for our office. Can I give them?”

“Who are they?”

“They’re on the phone.”

“What do they want?”

“They want our email address can I give them?”

“No. Don’t give them our email address. We don’t know who they are.”

The whole exchange reminded me an awful lot of trying to get Zanu PF’s email address.

She then came back on the line and told me they weren’t on email so she couldn’t give me the email address. So I asked for fax number. She said the fax was down. So if I have an urgent message for the President’s office? How am I meant to get it to them? She told me to phone the Ministry of Information.

It took four more phone calls and uncountable inter-office transfers for them to eventually give me their fax number – and to get them to give me a fax tone when it rang.

This is exactly what needs to change in the new Zimbabwe. As much as we need government to start governing again, this must be a New government, with a new attitude about itself and its responsibilities to the people, and a new approach towards listening to Zimbabweans and responding to what we want.

Fax the President’s office on +263 4 251641 and let them know that you want a new government – and you want it now.

I’ve been thinking lately about the ways in which politics – particularly Zimbabwean politics of late – is performance. These words from Tinashe Chimedza give voice to the concerns many Zimbabweans are raising about The Deal.

Pass me the cognac

The elites scramble for power and profit
The poor become footnotes
We write epitaphs ‘rest in peace Cde Tonde’
The bubbly flows
Pass me the Borboun
Am tired of the imported Cognac
More drivers, another motorcade
Four more motorcades
Another charade
Dish me my share of toil
‘Ndakadashurwa’ – any questions?
The rubble will eat tomorrow
Who wants to jump with them anyway,
The commoners, teach them culture first
Am waiting for my OBE
They are fodder, my cdes remind me
Lets dance ball room tonite
On the bellies of the filth

~ Tinashe L Chimedza

“Zanu yaora Baba . . . Zanu yaora Baba . . . .” It’s the middle of the night, the 25th of June 2000. I’m in a car full of MDC activists and we’re careening through the streets of Harare, singing our lungs out, high on the promise of a Parliamentary election in which the MDC, barely nine months old, might just win the majority of elected seats. As it turned out, we were close but not quite. And the giddy optimism that, just maybe, we could put Zimbabwe back on the path to democracy in a matter of months, not years or decades, proved hollow.

Eight years, four elections, untold campaigns, and uncountable political-broken-heart moments later, I’m older, wiser, and a bit more jaded about the whole process. So when Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara and Robert Mugabe signed their agreement on “resolving the challenges facing Zimbabwe” yesterday, I have to confess to no small amount of cynicism.

But, thinking that it was perhaps unfair of me to be so suspicious of a moment where so many were finding hope, I decided to take my cynicism to the streets and have a look around. I’ve long said that I will know that Zimbabwe is on the right track again when Harare’s Seventh Street – the road past State House – is no longer closed after dark. So I was disappointed, last night, to find it still barricaded, and I’ve been thinking about things like attachment, expectations, and anticlimax.

Speaking with others on my street, the general mood was “let’s wait and see.” So I’m taking their advice and doing my level best to reserve my judgement until we see how things pan out. But I’m sceptical about a power-sharing agreement, particularly about one that seems simply to have expanded the size of the Cake of National Elite so that everyone can have a slice. And I’m wondering how is it all going to work. Where will Morgan sleep as Prime Minister? Will he move into Zimbabwe House, over the road from Bob? The Zimbabwe I dream of is one without any head of state motorcade – not two. And I’m waiting for the Zimbabwe without any head of state portraits on the walls – not two.

In the past few months, we’ve asked Zimbabweans what they think about a Government of National Unity, and what changes they’d like to see in a New Zimbabwe. Once the country starts making progress towards these issues, I’ll know it’s time to celebrate.

When Robert Mugabe opened Parliament last month, he was jeered and heckled by the MDC’s Members of Parliament. Some thought this was a positive sign – an act of defiance on the part of a long-suffering opposition party. A few people, however, thought the MDC was stooping too low in a childish act of name calling.

The exchange was shown once on national television before the state broadcaster yanked that part of the footage. But CNN got a copy of it, and the clip has since been posted online. In our email newsletter yesterday, we sent people the link to the footage, and asked them for their feedback.

So far, the responses have all been positive, for example:

There is nothing wrong with that kind of behaviour. Mugabe after stealing the vote several times, beating and murdering his own people, how can he expect people to respect him. People have been oppressed for very long and that is the only platform they had to express sentiments from their constituencies.

—

Fantastic. They reflected the exact sentiment of the people they represent. That is their mandate is it not?

—

Jeering and heckling in Parliament is the stuff of lively democratic debate the world over and a test of the temerity, wit and strength of the representatives. And puhleese, they have the arrogance to puff up and bluster about the heckling whilst our equally important honorable Members of Parliament are being hauled off and clapped in irons and being subjected to the degradation of our ever so proud government’s filthy prison cells. Pride comes before the fall. The critics of the heckling are also past masters of equally derrogatory behaviour in Parliament – they must now step up and get ready for some of their own medicine and prove their worthiness to the people of Zimbabwe – or are they all a bunch of wimps?

Watch the footage here or here and email info [at] kubatana [dot] org [dot] zw to let us know what you think.

I am happy I cried
A man needs tears
Without tears, he is incomplete
~ From When a man cries, Siphiwo Mahala

Ezra Chitando, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Zimbabwe, is looking for Zimbabewan male leaders who can cry. He was speaking at a discussion on leadership and masculinities in Shimmer Chinodya’s Strife, published by Weaver Press. Chitando made a plea for leaders who can look at the desperation facing Zimbabweans today – the poverty, the queues, the hunger and collapsed health care system – and feel compassion.

Where the male characters of Strife fall short, argued Chitando, so might one observe other male leaders in society falling short. “Zimbabwe’s collective failure of leadership is perhaps an outworking of exhausted patriarchy,” he said. “Men have not been effective leaders – of families, extended families or of nations.”

Read and listen to more of the discussion with Chitando and lawyer Nokuthula Moyo here