Daniel Maposa, Director of Savanna Arts Trust, spoke to me about his work in protest art in Zimbabwe. Click here to listen and read more . . .

Have you faced any political resistance to your work?
Quite a lot, especially during our formative years. We had artists who were arrested in 2007 & 2008 and some were beaten up. We then devised strategies of going around these problems. That is when we said communities should also be able to produce their own work; they should talk to their own issues, instead of us using a top-down approach. We have had events that were banned but we have always found a way out of this. If communities are doing it, it is difficult to ban because it is a movement from that particular community.

This video shows 3000 that joined MSF in New Delhi in protesting against the EU-India Free Trade Agreement.

In the past decade India has earned the moniker ‘pharmacy of the developing world’, through the manufacture of cheap generic drugs which have gone to save countless millions of people who would otherwise be unable to afford life-saving medicines. In particular Anti-Retroviral Therapy for HIV has come down from $10 000 per year in 2000, to $70 per year today because of Indian generics. It is estimated that roughly two and a half million people rely on Indian manufactured generics for their HIV therapies. All this could come to an end with a proposed free trade agreement being negotiated between India and the European Union.  Certain hidden clauses in the agreement could prevent the registration of Indian drugs.

For several months now activists around the world have joined global health organizations like Oxfam, MSF and the WHO in expressing their deep concern about the impact of the agreement on people living with HIV around the world.

It is estimated that Zimbabwe has 2 million people who are living with HIV, with 300 000 people on the free national Anti-Retroviral Programme.

Find out more and join the global protest  here.

This man sells bread at an open-air market. He sells sliced and unsliced bread wrapped in plastic by the loaf. He and another bread vendor complained that business was slow. Behind him is an assortment of second hand sports shoes sold by another vendor.

The SADC Troika Summit of the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation met in Livingstone, Zambia yesterday. The Summit was chaired by Rupiah Banda, President of Malawi, and attended by the heads of state and government of Namibia, South Africa Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The purpose of the meeting was to consider the political and security situation in the region, in particular the republics of Madagascar and Zimbabwe.

On Zimbabwe, the Summit received the report on the political and security situation in the country from President Jacob Zuma. He was commended for the frankness with which the report was presented and also on the work that he has been doing on behalf of SADC.

The Summit noted with disappointment the insufficient progress in the implementation of the GPA, and expressed its impatience with the delays. It also noted with grave concern the polarization of the political environment, characterised by a resurgence of violence, arrests and intimidation in Zimbabwe.

Among the resolutions made was a commitment to the full implementation of the GPA and another to the immediate cessation of violence, intimidation, hate speech, harassment and any other form of action that contradicts the letter and spirit of the GPA.

The Troika Organ also resolved to appoint a team of officials to join the Facilitation Team and work with the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (JOMIC) to ensure monitoring evaluation and implementation of the GPA.

While it is heartening to see that Mr. Zuma’s candid report on Zimbabwe was endorsed by the Troika, previous meetings of regional heads of state and government have made similar resolutions on Zimbabwe without them being translated to reality.

Both the President and Prime Minister have made repeated calls for an end to violence and intimidation with no effect. In fact, the violence has greatly increased. In an article published in Newsday on 22nd February 2011, co-Chairperson of JOMIC is quoted as describing the Committee as a “toothless bulldog” with no legal or statutory powers to implement its resolutions. It will be interesting to see how and if this will change with the appointment of SADC officials to the Facilitation Team.

This homeless Zimbabwean man is rumoured to be insane and has lived in and around the Pomona area for several years. In his hands he holds a 750 000 Zimbabwe dollar note, last used in 2005. Although he keeps to himself and seldom speaks to anyone, both residents and vendors try to steer clear of him.

The first time I heard about sanctions, back in 2005, I thought it was a lie fabricated by Gono et al to justify his heavy handed printing of currency and the resultant inflation as a necessary evil.

No one can deny that this worked in the favour of those with connections and in high office to profiteer off the situation without regard for the plight of the general mass of Zimbabweans. My resentment was always especially directed at ministers and such who casually drove past me in their government issue air conditioned Benz as I stood in a round-the-block queue waiting to get my money from the bank for the Kombi home.

Later in the evening, they would be on ZBC news, well dressed and rotund, emphatically telling a ragged, sinewy audience just in from their drought-stricken fields that ‘we live in poverty because of sanctions”… some of us more than others.

Last week a newsreader on radio was saying that hospitals and are ill-equipped because of sanctions and let loose a diatribe about the effects of poor health care on Zimbabweans. There was little mention of the facts: diagnostic machinery has fallen into disrepair because the companies that sold it to us cannot or will not honour their service agreements because their home countries either make no effort to encourage trade with Zimbabwe, or at worst actively discourage it. A little while ago Natpharm declared that they had run out of stocks for the Malaria TB programme in the height of the malaria season. Again without reference to the fact that the programme is largely funded by the Global Fund, which is heavily influenced by the US government and has for several years rejected applications by Zimbabwe for funding of this and other programmes because of mismanagement by the government and the effects of ZIDERA.

Much has been made by the government of ZIDERA. But the strategy of speaking the name of its demon possessor fails government again. They do not explain that while the act does makes provision for targeted sanctions against individuals, it also empowers the US to use its voting rights and influence (as the main donor) in multilateral lending agencies, such as the IMF, World Bank, and the African Development Bank to veto any applications by Zimbabwe for finance, credit facilities, loan rescheduling, and international debt cancellation. This basically means that the Government of Zimbabwe is not only broke but it is in massive debt, following not only from the governments own over expenditure, corruption and mismanagement but also from the structural adjustment programmes it was ‘encouraged’ to implement by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1990s.

For the ordinary Zimbabwean this means that the government is unable to carry out it’s essential services. It is unable to bring electricity to rural houses, fix potholes in the roads, supply clinics and hospitals with drugs, build dams or increase the capacity of the water delivery system. This in turn means that we have places in Zimbabwe that saw better times in the stone age, and health crises such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and cholera will always be a rainy season away.

Land reform may have been successful, but there is no way to protect people from random acts of nature. In times of drought, such as this year, sanctions mean that the government cannot buy maize to feed its own population. Even without an act of nature the government is unable to fully support farmers as is the policy in more developed countries.

The anti sanctions propaganda fails to explain how exactly sanctions affect the average person living an ordinary life. Our government in its poor application of propaganda fails to understand that they have educated their population beyond their simplistic reasoning, and the contradictions and omissions in the information they liberally propagate on the state broadcaster are not lost on us. Reading Marko Phiri’s blog on the views of the people in Gwanda, I am not surprised to find that many people understand the sanctions to be merely about travel bans.