Nothing to loose.
I have just been into the largest wholesaler in Bulawayo. We are quite large buyers and the staff greeted me cheerfully. Then I collected a trolley and started to walk through the company premises - I came out in a state of shock. Whole rows of shelving were absolutely empty - to the roof. There was no soap powder, no bath soaps, no cooking oil, no fats, no sugar and no maize meal, no flour and no rice, no milk products of any kind and no children's foods.
We walked out empty handed and I said to the floor manager that I was shocked - he simply nodded his head and said, "what can we do?" Frankly, I find this situation very scary.
We need 36 000 tonnes of basic food imports a week, these will cost about
US$20 million. One of my friends sat in a fuel queue yesterday for 13 hours to get a tank of petrol. Most garages have queues outside their premises - even if they have no fuel. It has never been so bad as now. To top this serious situation we have started to experience load shedding by the State controlled electricity utility.
When we had an economy to speak of, we used about 5,5 million liters of
petroleum fuels a day - I would guess that today we use about 3 million
liters. Even that will cost about US$700 000 a day - or nearly US$5 million
a week - so just for the basics we need US$25 million a week. In fact we
earn about that from our exports each week but that leaves no margin for
anything else.
Yesterday I saw the new Chinese fighter jets fly over - we have just spent
US$400 million on these plus some Mig 23's, attack helicopters and military vehicles. Most of it from China. We have also just purchased two Chinese passenger jets for regional routes to augment the three remaining aircraft still flying for Air Zimbuggered.
These ill-advised purchases have flattened our foreign exchange resources, in fact I hear that we have sold 25 tonnes of gold forward (US$500 million) and we have also sold our tobacco production forward. The main problem with these transactions is that we no longer can produce 25 tonnes of gold in a year and we have produced a very small and inferior tobacco crop.
Last year Gideon Gono was the local hero when he succeeded in herding all local foreign exchange resources into the coffers of the Reserve Bank but in doing so he has effectively spelled the death of the export industries that fed the system. His hope of harnessing the US$75 million a month that comes back to local families from Zimbabweans working abroad has flopped totally - after handling a mere US$45 million in the past year, receipts are now virtually zero.
The election results and the aftermath have not helped - we remain
completely isolated, people have no faith in the future, capital flight is
accelerating and the parallel market has taken off into the stratosphere.
The fact that the Reserve Bank was going to devalue by nearly 100 per cent was leaked last week and there is a sudden frosty silence in that quarter.
The first month of sales on the tobacco floors - always an important period
in Zimbuggered, has yielded prices in Zimbuggered dollars below last years. This simply puts paid to any hopes of a tobacco led recovery this year, or next.
The reaction of President Mugape to these shocking facts was to hold a
"Silver Jubilee" celebration, which costs billions. Undertake a spending
spree for the air force in a country where we have no external or internal
threats and a vague promise by a muted Gono that a "recovery plan" is being prepared. Oh yes - they fired the poor GM of the Grain Marketing Board and kept that idiot Made (Minister of Agriculture) in an enlarged Cabinet.
We have had confirmation from official sources that the maize crop now being reaped is a disaster - our estimate of about 400 000 tonnes seems about right. There is a flurry of activity going on to try and get a wheat crop into the ground before the 15th of May but it is unlikely they will get more than the 50 000 tonnes or so they grew last year. So we are now faced with a severe famine and no foreign resources with which to buy the food and other products we need. In fact, if we had the resources we could hardly move this volume given the parlous state of our infrastructure.
Official UN sources estimate that we have nearly 6 million people who need food aid - donors are feeding about 1 million people at present - mainly children. This leaves 5 million people at risk of starvation out of a
population of 11 million. The rest of us will simply have to fend for
ourselves - faced with rising prices, shortages and other problems. It seems to me that South Africa will have to step in and pick up the pieces, as it is very largely responsible for this sorry state of affairs.
The big question is what do we do about this situation. The one thing that
sticks out a mile is that Zanu has no solutions and we simply cannot let
things stand as they are. The MDC has put its own plans into action and at
this stage they are saying: -
1. The MDC does not accept the results of the election.
2. The MDC now accepts that neither democracy nor the legal system here offer any way forward at present.
3. The MDC demands the resignation of the new government and the negotiation of an interim administration to begin to resolve the immediate crisis situation we are in.
4. The MDC demands the convening of a constitutional conference involving all civic groups to draft a new constitution for the country with fresh elections to be held under the new constitution and under the supervision of the international community.
To back up these demands a broad coalition of civic groups is being formed and will be charged with taking mass action against the new government. The MDC will employ all forms of political action required to support the efforts by civil society to rescue the country from the grip of a small, self-seeking elite that simply refuses to allow the people to select the government of their choice. It will call on the armed forces to support this initiative in the broader interests of the country and its people.
The Ministry of Defense has stated that it will "crush" any mass action
launched by the opposition or civic society. On Monday last week thousands took to the streets in Bulawayo after a football match on Independence Day - it took the Police and the Army 7 hours to stop the rioting. To local observers the policemen involved had little heart for the activity they were involved in - next time it will be worse.
Eddie Cross
Bulawayo, 26th April 2005
Will we ever get a chance to show what we can really do?
Zimbuggered is a fantastic country - with wonderful people living in it. It has
a diversity of climate, some areas are quite high and temperate with good
rainfall and there are the bits down below 500 m above sea level that are
hot and dry. They all have their own charm.
April and May are my favorite months - the wet season is over but the veldt is still green and lush, the days are warm and the nights cool and it is
mostly bone dry. Blue skies and fresh mornings complete the picture.
We are also a rich country - we produce 32 minerals, of which 4 have global significance. We used to have an advanced and progressive agriculture supported by a sophisticated supply chain and marketing agencies and supported by world renown research and extension services. Until 2000 we were largely self sufficient in basic goods and over 90 per cent of what we bought in an average store will come out of our own farms and factories.
Our people were the best educated in the region and were accepted as
motivated and hard working. We played hard and produced many individuals with world-class skills. Migrants from this country were highly regarded wherever they went and were quickly absorbed into the economic structures of the countries they went to. There was no real class system and race relations were by and large, very good.
So why are we now so far down in the scheme of things? We are cited as a
frightening example of just how quickly a country can be destroyed by bad
governance - I guess that has some value as a warning to others not take
such things for granted. We are now the subject of global concern as a
country that is unable to feed itself, support its own health and education
systems and where the quality of human life is at best, short, nasty and
blighted.
But then we need to remember that this country has never had it easy. My
father who spent his life here said to me once that he could hardly remember a time when we were not dealing with a crisis of one kind or another. The Shona and Ndebele rebellions at the end of the 19th century, the Boer War, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the aftermath and then a brief 10 years of stability and growth during the Federation followed by the crisis in 1962 then UDI and that was followed by 15 years of sanctions and the civil war from 1972 to 1980.
When finally the country obtained democracy in 1980, we should have seen better days - it was not to be. In 1983 the struggle between Zanu and Zapu came to a head and was only settled when Zapu was absorbed into Zanu in 1988 under the "Unity Accord". Even then there was little real peace and progress. The new government ran up a huge public debt and experimented with all sorts of economic policies - none of which really worked.
Faced with a faltering economy and growing unrest in the labor unions and in civil society, the ruling elite - growing older but reluctant to allow any sort of succession or real democracy simply clamped down on the peoples freedoms and rights until eventually the MDC was formed and successfully challenged the ruling elite for power in the year 2000. That experience triggered an outburst of violence and repression that continues today and which has led to the country being increasingly isolated internationally and it put the economy into a steep decline.
So today we look back on 25 years of independence under a government which has held onto power by the skin of its teeth in the past 5 years and in the process become ever more unpopular and myopic. It is a tragedy of enormous proportions that the great promise of 1980 has not been realized and to appreciate that our failure as a country is due entirely to our own bad governance.
The country is still great - the people terrific but we just do not seem to
get it right. A business leader I once worked with said to me that in real
life you need a bit of luck. We seem to have been unable to find that
singular ingredient in our search for a better life and prosperity for our
people.
I have no doubt that our leaders are entirely to blame for this state of
affairs - we cannot blame the country as it has all that we need to succeed.
The question is how do we change them and get ourselves a new set of
leadership that will allow Zimbuggered - the real Zimbuggered, to stand proud
again.
We - the democrats - have given democratic principle our very best in the
past five years with little or no help from anyone outside and certainly not
from the region. We have won all the democratic contests in the past 5 years
starting with the referendum which we won by a 5 per cent margin - I estimate
that the real margin was closed to 20 per cent. We won the 200
election - we actually got 52 per cent of the vote but if you factor out the
rigging element, we actually won handsomely. Then in the 2002 presidential
election we won again - I estimate that Tsvangirai was actually elected by a
margin of 65 per cent to 35 per cent. Now in the 2005 election there is growing
evidence that we took close to 75 per cent of the real vote.
But none of this makes any difference - Mugape still took the elections by
rigging the final counts and there is absolutely nothing we democrats can do
about it except suffer the consequences.
We are all agreed that there will be no chance of the legal route yielding
any sort of justice to the efforts of the MDC and its supporters to elect a
new and more accountable administration. So what do we do? More of the
same is not enough this time, there is simply no way we can accept another
5 years of Zanu PF misrule and corruption. Perhaps the economy and the
deepening food and foreign exchange crisis will do it for us, but in the end
I suspect we are going to have to do something more to put our beloved
country back where it belongs.
Eddie Cross Bulawayo, 18th April 2005
Elephants eaten at Zimbuggered independence celebrations!
JANE FIELDS
IN HARARE
Faced with worsening food shortages, president Robert Mugape's
officials have resorted to killing elephants to pacify hungry
Zimbabweans, it was claimed yesterday.
Game rangers near the western resort town of Kariba were told to
kill at least four elephants ahead of celebrations to mark
Zimbuggered's 25th anniversary of independence this week, said Johnny
Rodrigues, the chairman of the Zimbuggered Conservation Task Force
(ZCTF).
Elephant meat is not traditionally eaten by Zimbabweans but other
kinds of meat are increasingly scarce in this once prosperous
farming nation.
Mr Mugape used Monday's independence celebrations to boast about
Zimbuggered's "enormous" achievements since independence in 1980. The
southern African country is now entering its fourth year of food
shortages.
The Zimbabwean president says the crisis has nothing to do with his
chaotic programme of white farm seizures but is simply a result of
drought.
Dear Family and Friends,
Things have deteriorating noticeably in Zimbuggered in the three weeks since
the ruling party declared they had won the elections. Prices have shot up,
basic foodstuffs are becoming harder and harder to find and the fuel
supply is sporadic. Water from taps has become a luxury and the state
owned television this week gave us a long story to explain that as winter
approaches electricity cuts are going to be regular occurrences.
This week the MDC finally gave up their prolonged diplomatic game and
openly declared that the South Africans were not honest brokers in mediating
in the Zimbabwean crisis. They said that it was now apparent
that the South African stance of "Quiet Diplomacy" was in a reality just a
"package of lies and pretence." The statement of this sad fact and an end
to the nonsensical diplomatic pretence, comes as a relief to Zimbabweans.
We had watched with shock and disgust the line taken by the SABC TV news
presenter reporting from Zimbuggered during the election period and few people
believed they had remained impartial.
Zimbabweans feel so utterly betrayed by our African neighbours and at
least now the talk has become straightforward and to the point. By all
accounts there are probably less than 20 or 30 000 white people left in
Zimbuggered and it is matter of continental shame that our regional
neighbours cannot and will not see the suffering of 11 million ordinary
people but choose to keep on and on hiding behind the now 25 year old
"colonialist" scapegoat.
It is very hard to be optimistic about anything at the moment but there is
a joke doing the rounds which is particularly appropriate as we hurtle
backwards into the dark ages. Using a stick, an old shoelace and a bent
paper clip a hungry man crafts a crude fishing rod and goes down to try
his luck at the river. Against all the odds he manages to catch a small
fish and he hurries home to his wife with the first meat they've seen for
weeks. He asks his wife to grill the fish immediately but she says she
can't because they are having an extended power cut. Then he suggests
that she uses the paraffin stove instead and poaches the fish but she
can't do that either because there is no paraffin in the country for the stove.
The man goes off to collect firewood and says now they can fry the fish but
that is also impossible because there is neither margarine nor cooking oil
in the country. In despair, the hungry man suggests they simply boil the
fish but that too is impossible as there is no water in the taps. Resigned
to just smoking the fish on an open fire, the hungry man bends to light
the sticks but cannot even do that as the country even ran out of matches
this week. In disgust he gets up, grabs the fish and takes it back to the
river. The fish slides into the water and turns back to wave a fin at the
hungry man and says: "Well, you voted for them."
Until next week, with love, cathy. Copyright cathy buckle 23 April 2005
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