Source: Financial Times, London
Investors bet on new dawn for Zimbabwe
By By William Wallis in London and Alec Russell in Johannesburg
Published: July 20 2007 20:38
Last updated: July 20 2007 20:38
Foreign investors tend to avoid imploding African economies. But a small crew are bucking the trend in Zimbabwe, lured by plunging asset prices and a belief that once 83-year-old President Robert Mugabe goes, recovery could be swift.
Leading the charge is Lonrho, the conglomerate that has been seeking to rebuild the African empire created by the late Tiny Rowland.
It announced on Friday that it had raised an initial £32.3m ($66.4m, €48m) from shareholders towards a new subsidiary – Lonzim – to buy up assets in Zimbabwe with a “significant opportunity for future growth”.
David Lenigas, Lonrho’s executive chairman, told the Financial Times that he aimed to raise a total of £100m for the company through a share offer to be launched in London soon.
He said demand for Lonzim shares was coming from Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. But it had been strongest among institutional investors including pension and hedge funds in the US.
He thought this was driven by a broader appetite for African risk.
“They see Africa as the last big investment frontier. Africa is where Asia was 30 years ago,” he said.
Looking beyond current figures for Zimbabwe – 15,000 per cent inflation and an economy shrinking by 12 per cent a year – he said the country’s infrastructure, skilled workforce and farming potential provided the basis for a solid recovery.
Lonzim would focus on recapitalising companies that had been starved of credit, buying up and rehabilitating hotels and game parks.
It would also target commercial property and build stakes in transport, construction and aviation. “We are trying to hold these things together and wait for recovery,” said Mr Lenigas.
Lonrho – whose name derives partly from the old British colony, Rhodesia – has a long history in Zimbabwe. But others with less experience are betting on the country, too. Botswana-based Imara asset management launched a $13.5m (£6.57m, €9.8m) fund to invest in Zimbabwe earlier this year, the day after Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, emerged battered from a Harare jail.
It is a “punt”, concedes Mark Tunmer, Imara’s chief executive. But he adds that the country’s natural and human resources are still there and people are “prepared to put their cash down on that in the expectation of a return to free markets”.
One such punter is Sean Jackson, a British entrepreneur based in Cambridge, who invested in land in Poland when prices were cheap in the aftermath of communism there. His stake has increased by about 20 times since then, he says. He is now looking at Zimbabwe as a similar long-term investment opportunity.
Kola Karim, chief executive of Shoreline Energy International, a Nigerian group, says he hopes to seal two deals in Zimbabwe in the next month – both with European companies who have had enough there.
“We are not going to asset-strip. We can buy big international names for cheap and stay in partnership with locals to drive the business as we have done, for example, in Tanzania and Uganda,” he said. In one case he hoped to acquire a company for roughly a tenth of its 1997 value.
There is concern among some Zimbabwean businessmen that properties will be sold off at rock-bottom prices.
“But the investors are not seen as vultures,” said the chief executive of a Bulawayo-based small manufacturing firm. “It gives us hope for the future that people from the outside are interested.”
At a Bulawayo business forum this week, many members seemed determined to batten down the hatches and not to sell.
There may be other disincentives to investors on the way. Possibly the greatest would be the Indigenisation and Empowerment Bill, which the government has promised to pass into law within a month. This would authorise the authorities to seize 51 per cent of the shareholding of foreign firms in order to “empower” black Zimbabweans.
Dianna Games, director of Africa@Work, a southern African business consultancy, expressed caution, saying that the bill – and Mr Mugabe’s recently enforced price cuts on many commodities – had changed the climate from one of an “investment opportunity to a bit of a fire sale”.
“There is a lot of talk around dinner party tables [in South Africa and Zimbabwe]” about opportunities, she said. But it was far from clear that the situation would be transformed when Mr Mugabe finally left power.
“Everyone seems to think that when Mugabe goes, all kinds of doors may open . . . but we don’t know.”
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Predicting that Zimbabwe will come to a total collapse
All the papers are predicting that Zimbabwe will come to a total collapse middle of next week - Nothing to buy - not even petrol..... Quo Vadis Zimbabwe ???
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A Warning ..I hope nobody thinks that next week will be business as usual. This week the private sector has gradually wound down its operations. The retail sector – most retailers carry stock for a month approximately, are the last to shut down but already you can see empty shelves and shortages of all the fast moving basic items are now widespread.Butcheries and bakeries that work on stock levels of about a week are already closed as their stocks ran out. The same with filling stations. Manufacturers must work with quite significant stock levels – especially of imported items and they will run these down and then close unless there is a U-turn on the part of the government and new directives which are half reasonable.There are no signs as yet as to what the State will do when this shutdown occurs. But all that we are seeing and hearing right now are threats and an insistence that this situation is going to be maintained for some time.
The most immediate problem is the very basics – fuel for transport and the essential foods, maize meal, rice, bread, meat and milk. By Monday all of these will be virtually unobtainable. Farmers with pigs and poultry are pondering what to do with their animals as they run out of stock feed, dairy farmers also face huge problems as they cannot pay their feed bills and must start winding down – how do you tell a cow in milk, used to being milked three times a day, that she must stop producing?Hundreds of thousands of workers and non-formal sector businesspersons are being faced with no work and are being forced to stay home – at present on full pay, but in a few weeks what then?
There is no law to turn to; there are no political leaders to go to with any sort of sense and authority. We are in the hands of a madman who has nothing to loose but his life and has his back to the wall and is using the only tools that he knows to try and stay afloat while the country drowns.How will the average Zimbabwean respond? Friends of mine are doing a day trip to Francistown in Botswana – just 200 kilometers away, today. They will buy what they need for next week and return. A few will do the same. Others are going on holiday, unable to stand the specter of seeing all that they have built up over the past decades swept away. They are the lucky ones – what about the rest?
There is only one way out and that is across the Limpopo. I must warn South Africa that they will now face a huge upsurge in economic refugees and they had better brace themselves for that if nothing effective is done to halt this madness. I mean hundreds of thousands of new, desperate, hungry Zimbabweans flooding in and disappearing into the vast urban slums that surround all South African cities.The alternative is a military coup led by the junior officers with the compliance of some in the ruling Party who see that this situation is not sustainable and that it is creating a regional crisis of substantial proportions. Such an event would close the door to the SADC process under way today in South Africa and plunge the country and the region into a huge political crisis that would require military intervention. Am I being alarmist? I do not think so. The actions of this rogue regime in the past week have been enough to tip us over and into a state of crisis we have never faced before.Irreparable damage is being done to the country and if this is not stopped in its tracks by immediate and radical measures taken by regional governments very serious consequences are going to follow.The humanitarian and economic crisis that is about to break out in Zimbabwe is simply staggering and certainly way beyond the capacity of the country to handle on its own.
Eddie Cross
Bulawayo, 7th July 2007
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A Warning ..I hope nobody thinks that next week will be business as usual. This week the private sector has gradually wound down its operations. The retail sector – most retailers carry stock for a month approximately, are the last to shut down but already you can see empty shelves and shortages of all the fast moving basic items are now widespread.Butcheries and bakeries that work on stock levels of about a week are already closed as their stocks ran out. The same with filling stations. Manufacturers must work with quite significant stock levels – especially of imported items and they will run these down and then close unless there is a U-turn on the part of the government and new directives which are half reasonable.There are no signs as yet as to what the State will do when this shutdown occurs. But all that we are seeing and hearing right now are threats and an insistence that this situation is going to be maintained for some time.
The most immediate problem is the very basics – fuel for transport and the essential foods, maize meal, rice, bread, meat and milk. By Monday all of these will be virtually unobtainable. Farmers with pigs and poultry are pondering what to do with their animals as they run out of stock feed, dairy farmers also face huge problems as they cannot pay their feed bills and must start winding down – how do you tell a cow in milk, used to being milked three times a day, that she must stop producing?Hundreds of thousands of workers and non-formal sector businesspersons are being faced with no work and are being forced to stay home – at present on full pay, but in a few weeks what then?
There is no law to turn to; there are no political leaders to go to with any sort of sense and authority. We are in the hands of a madman who has nothing to loose but his life and has his back to the wall and is using the only tools that he knows to try and stay afloat while the country drowns.How will the average Zimbabwean respond? Friends of mine are doing a day trip to Francistown in Botswana – just 200 kilometers away, today. They will buy what they need for next week and return. A few will do the same. Others are going on holiday, unable to stand the specter of seeing all that they have built up over the past decades swept away. They are the lucky ones – what about the rest?
There is only one way out and that is across the Limpopo. I must warn South Africa that they will now face a huge upsurge in economic refugees and they had better brace themselves for that if nothing effective is done to halt this madness. I mean hundreds of thousands of new, desperate, hungry Zimbabweans flooding in and disappearing into the vast urban slums that surround all South African cities.The alternative is a military coup led by the junior officers with the compliance of some in the ruling Party who see that this situation is not sustainable and that it is creating a regional crisis of substantial proportions. Such an event would close the door to the SADC process under way today in South Africa and plunge the country and the region into a huge political crisis that would require military intervention. Am I being alarmist? I do not think so. The actions of this rogue regime in the past week have been enough to tip us over and into a state of crisis we have never faced before.Irreparable damage is being done to the country and if this is not stopped in its tracks by immediate and radical measures taken by regional governments very serious consequences are going to follow.The humanitarian and economic crisis that is about to break out in Zimbabwe is simply staggering and certainly way beyond the capacity of the country to handle on its own.
Eddie Cross
Bulawayo, 7th July 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
Mugabe heads for clash with spurned Mbeki
Mugabe heads for clash with spurned Mbeki
Wisani Wa Ka Ngobeni, Wally Mbhele and Sunday Times Foreign Desk
Published:Jul 15, 2007
President Thabo Mbeki and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe are on course for a head-on collision following the collapse this week of inter-party talks aimed at resolving Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis.
Mugabe has effectively dumped Mbeki as mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis. He has ordered his party’s key negotiators, Patrick Chinamasa and Nicholas Goche, to boycott negotiations that were supposed to resume in Pretoria this week.
The talks are chaired by South Africa’s Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi.
Mugabe took the decision to boycott the talks at his Zanu- PF’s central committee meeting on July 7. He did not give Mbeki any reasons for his team’s no- show this week.
The Sunday Times can, however, reveal that a furious Mugabe has accused Mbeki of promising Western European leaders — in particular former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — that he would secure Mugabe’s exit from Zimbabwean politics.
Mugabe is also said to be unhappy that Pretoria appears sympathetic to the suggestion by the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) that Zimbabwe needs a new constitution before its elections next year.
South African officials were this week frantically trying to rescue the dialogue.
Mugabe’s latest antics come at a time when his political fortunes are increasingly waning within his own Zanu-PF. He is expected to be ousted from office during Zanu-PF’s critical special congress in December due to growing internal opposition and his country’s dire economic meltdown.
Mugabe’s pullout from negotiations also puts him on a collision course with Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders, who appointed Mbeki as mediator in March.
Senior South African government officials say Mbeki would report Mugabe’s actions to the SADC leaders when they meet in Zambia next month.
Mbeki would tell SADC leaders that Mugabe was an “obstacle” to a political settlement. According to senior government officials, Mbeki has been pushing Mugabe to agree to a “draft constitution” that will ensure Zimbabwe has free and fair elections next year.
The draft, the officials said, had been compiled before the 2005 election in Zimbabwe. The document, signed by both Zanu- PF and the MDC, has been gathering dust in Mbeki’s office.
An official said Mugabe had previously agreed to it but was now refusing to endorse it. One of the key issues in the draft is the formation of an independent electoral commission.
The official said: “If Zanu-PF does not come to the negotiating table, President Mbeki would have no option but to go back to SADC leaders and brief them about the developments. He will certainly tell them his view of the situation and the individual who might be preventing the South African government from helping Zimbabweans find a political settlement. SADC will have to decide on the way forward because it is a collective issue,” he said.
The official view in Pretoria is that Mugabe is a “major stumbling block”.
SADC leaders are now expected to confront Mugabe directly for the first time at their summit. Diplomatic sources say the chairman of the SADC organ on politics, defence and security, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, to whom Mbeki reports on the Zimbabwe mediation, is leading a campaign to tackle Mugabe once and for all.
Zanu-PF insiders said party leaders feared that Mugabe’s continued hold on power was threatening their business interests. A faction led by retired army chief General Solomon Mujuru is pushing hard for Mugabe to quit in December.
Mugabe’s close ally, Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono, on Tuesday wrote a “private and confidential” memo to Mugabe warning him his price reduction blitz had led to “unintended consequences” that could lead to the fall of his government within six months.
Wisani Wa Ka Ngobeni, Wally Mbhele and Sunday Times Foreign Desk
Published:Jul 15, 2007
President Thabo Mbeki and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe are on course for a head-on collision following the collapse this week of inter-party talks aimed at resolving Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis.
Mugabe has effectively dumped Mbeki as mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis. He has ordered his party’s key negotiators, Patrick Chinamasa and Nicholas Goche, to boycott negotiations that were supposed to resume in Pretoria this week.
The talks are chaired by South Africa’s Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi.
Mugabe took the decision to boycott the talks at his Zanu- PF’s central committee meeting on July 7. He did not give Mbeki any reasons for his team’s no- show this week.
The Sunday Times can, however, reveal that a furious Mugabe has accused Mbeki of promising Western European leaders — in particular former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — that he would secure Mugabe’s exit from Zimbabwean politics.
Mugabe is also said to be unhappy that Pretoria appears sympathetic to the suggestion by the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) that Zimbabwe needs a new constitution before its elections next year.
South African officials were this week frantically trying to rescue the dialogue.
Mugabe’s latest antics come at a time when his political fortunes are increasingly waning within his own Zanu-PF. He is expected to be ousted from office during Zanu-PF’s critical special congress in December due to growing internal opposition and his country’s dire economic meltdown.
Mugabe’s pullout from negotiations also puts him on a collision course with Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders, who appointed Mbeki as mediator in March.
Senior South African government officials say Mbeki would report Mugabe’s actions to the SADC leaders when they meet in Zambia next month.
Mbeki would tell SADC leaders that Mugabe was an “obstacle” to a political settlement. According to senior government officials, Mbeki has been pushing Mugabe to agree to a “draft constitution” that will ensure Zimbabwe has free and fair elections next year.
The draft, the officials said, had been compiled before the 2005 election in Zimbabwe. The document, signed by both Zanu- PF and the MDC, has been gathering dust in Mbeki’s office.
An official said Mugabe had previously agreed to it but was now refusing to endorse it. One of the key issues in the draft is the formation of an independent electoral commission.
The official said: “If Zanu-PF does not come to the negotiating table, President Mbeki would have no option but to go back to SADC leaders and brief them about the developments. He will certainly tell them his view of the situation and the individual who might be preventing the South African government from helping Zimbabweans find a political settlement. SADC will have to decide on the way forward because it is a collective issue,” he said.
The official view in Pretoria is that Mugabe is a “major stumbling block”.
SADC leaders are now expected to confront Mugabe directly for the first time at their summit. Diplomatic sources say the chairman of the SADC organ on politics, defence and security, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, to whom Mbeki reports on the Zimbabwe mediation, is leading a campaign to tackle Mugabe once and for all.
Zanu-PF insiders said party leaders feared that Mugabe’s continued hold on power was threatening their business interests. A faction led by retired army chief General Solomon Mujuru is pushing hard for Mugabe to quit in December.
Mugabe’s close ally, Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono, on Tuesday wrote a “private and confidential” memo to Mugabe warning him his price reduction blitz had led to “unintended consequences” that could lead to the fall of his government within six months.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Rich Zimbabwe shops differently to poor
Source : www.zwnews.com
Rich Zimbabwe shops differently to poor
AFPDate posted:
Wed 11-Jul-2007Date published:
Tue 10-Jul-2007
Back to previous page
"While everyone else is crying about the shortages, life goes on for those with money"By Fanuel JongweHarare - The shelves may be bare in most of Harare's supermarkets but in Borrowdale Brooke, home to Zimbabwe's rich and famous, everything from lobster to single malt whisky can be bought - at a price. As shoppers in townships such as Chitungwiza have to endure a stampede for groceries in the wake of price cuts ordered by President Robert Mugabe's government, customers at the Spar supermarket in Borrowdale can fill their trolleys with luxuries to a background of soothing piped music.
"You can get anything you want here," said a women who identified herself only as Lindi. "It's just the prices that are too high." Indeed the prices are beyond not only the pay packets but the wildest dreams of most Zimbabweans who are trying to cope with the effects of the world's highest rate of inflation and an 80 percent unemployment rate.A two-kilogramme box of prawns imported from neighbouring Mozambique is currently on sale for Z$9,5-million which is the equivalent of three months' salary for a schoolteacher.
A large packet of imported potato chips cost $459 000, which is what an average family pays their housemaid for a month. Other shelves groan under the weight of imported goods such as nappies, dog food and children's toys which were struck off most shopping lists long ago. "If you check on the shelves you find almost everything you can no longer find in an ordinary supermarket," Lindi said. "While everyone else is crying about the shortages, life goes on for those with money."Borrowdale, with its rows of mansions, has traditionally been home to the country's elite, such as central bank governor Gideo Gono and tennis star Byron Black.
Mugabe himself also has a private home in the neighbourhood. The opulence of Borrowdale is only a 20 minute drive from Chitungwiza, one of the poorest townships in the country where the stench of raw sewage can be smelt several kilometers away. In one of its local supermarkets, the TM store, the shelves are devoid of even basics such as sugar, salt, rice and cooking oil - let alone lobster. The power has been switched off from all the fridges bar one deep freezer where tubs of ice cream are stacked. There are few takers as electricity in this part of town can be blacked out for hours every day, giving rise to fears about food safety.
The scrum of shoppers trying to pack their baskets with the little food that is still available battle for space with an army of shop assistants who work round the clock repricing goods in line with a government directive to slash the prices of all products. More than 1 750 shop owners and business executives have been arrested since the government edict came into force a fortnight ago for defying the price freeze which they claim makes their business unviable.One assistant, speaking on condition of anonymity, worried that he would soon be joining the long ranks of the unemployed as the shops run bare and business instead reverts to the increasingly thriving black market. "Our worry is whether we will still have our jobs because the stocks are running out and no fresh deliveries are coming in," he told AFP.
Crack teams of inspectors are on patrol throughout the capital to ensure stores keep their prices in line with the government controls. Members of the public are also encouraged to ring toll-free hotlines to report any violations. Announcing the freeze on June 26, Industry Minister Obert Mpofu accused manufacturers and supermarkets of colluding with the country's foes in the west to increase price and ignite a revolt against Mugabe.
The price freeze was intended to counter the impact of the galloping inflation rate, now estimated to be running at well beyond 5,000 percent, which has meant prices rising several times a day. But main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Mugabe's former information minister Jonathan Moyo have dismissed the crackdown as a "desperate" propaganda ploy ahead of elections due next year."It is only a clueless government driven by a desperate political party supported by a corrupt and partisan police, national intelligence and national army that can even entertain the inherently foolish thought that pricing in the national economy of a modern society can be run in an effective, efficient and sustainable way on the basis of commissariat commands and decrees," Moyo said in article in the privately-owned weekly, The Zimbabwe Independent
Rich Zimbabwe shops differently to poor
AFPDate posted:
Wed 11-Jul-2007Date published:
Tue 10-Jul-2007
Back to previous page
"While everyone else is crying about the shortages, life goes on for those with money"By Fanuel JongweHarare - The shelves may be bare in most of Harare's supermarkets but in Borrowdale Brooke, home to Zimbabwe's rich and famous, everything from lobster to single malt whisky can be bought - at a price. As shoppers in townships such as Chitungwiza have to endure a stampede for groceries in the wake of price cuts ordered by President Robert Mugabe's government, customers at the Spar supermarket in Borrowdale can fill their trolleys with luxuries to a background of soothing piped music.
"You can get anything you want here," said a women who identified herself only as Lindi. "It's just the prices that are too high." Indeed the prices are beyond not only the pay packets but the wildest dreams of most Zimbabweans who are trying to cope with the effects of the world's highest rate of inflation and an 80 percent unemployment rate.A two-kilogramme box of prawns imported from neighbouring Mozambique is currently on sale for Z$9,5-million which is the equivalent of three months' salary for a schoolteacher.
A large packet of imported potato chips cost $459 000, which is what an average family pays their housemaid for a month. Other shelves groan under the weight of imported goods such as nappies, dog food and children's toys which were struck off most shopping lists long ago. "If you check on the shelves you find almost everything you can no longer find in an ordinary supermarket," Lindi said. "While everyone else is crying about the shortages, life goes on for those with money."Borrowdale, with its rows of mansions, has traditionally been home to the country's elite, such as central bank governor Gideo Gono and tennis star Byron Black.
Mugabe himself also has a private home in the neighbourhood. The opulence of Borrowdale is only a 20 minute drive from Chitungwiza, one of the poorest townships in the country where the stench of raw sewage can be smelt several kilometers away. In one of its local supermarkets, the TM store, the shelves are devoid of even basics such as sugar, salt, rice and cooking oil - let alone lobster. The power has been switched off from all the fridges bar one deep freezer where tubs of ice cream are stacked. There are few takers as electricity in this part of town can be blacked out for hours every day, giving rise to fears about food safety.
The scrum of shoppers trying to pack their baskets with the little food that is still available battle for space with an army of shop assistants who work round the clock repricing goods in line with a government directive to slash the prices of all products. More than 1 750 shop owners and business executives have been arrested since the government edict came into force a fortnight ago for defying the price freeze which they claim makes their business unviable.One assistant, speaking on condition of anonymity, worried that he would soon be joining the long ranks of the unemployed as the shops run bare and business instead reverts to the increasingly thriving black market. "Our worry is whether we will still have our jobs because the stocks are running out and no fresh deliveries are coming in," he told AFP.
Crack teams of inspectors are on patrol throughout the capital to ensure stores keep their prices in line with the government controls. Members of the public are also encouraged to ring toll-free hotlines to report any violations. Announcing the freeze on June 26, Industry Minister Obert Mpofu accused manufacturers and supermarkets of colluding with the country's foes in the west to increase price and ignite a revolt against Mugabe.
The price freeze was intended to counter the impact of the galloping inflation rate, now estimated to be running at well beyond 5,000 percent, which has meant prices rising several times a day. But main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Mugabe's former information minister Jonathan Moyo have dismissed the crackdown as a "desperate" propaganda ploy ahead of elections due next year."It is only a clueless government driven by a desperate political party supported by a corrupt and partisan police, national intelligence and national army that can even entertain the inherently foolish thought that pricing in the national economy of a modern society can be run in an effective, efficient and sustainable way on the basis of commissariat commands and decrees," Moyo said in article in the privately-owned weekly, The Zimbabwe Independent
Sunday, July 08, 2007
For a long time the club had an inscription bearing the words: "No natives no Jews". In other words... only open to people of pure British descent
(posted on the Herald's website)...one paragraph on the Harare Club caught my eye...see below
How the City of Harare Was Born
The Herald (Harare)
COLUMN16
June 2007
Posted to the web
16 June 2007 Harare
After writing at length about Zimbabwe's many breathtakingly beautiful tourist resorts, regular readers of this column have asked me to write something about the origins of the City of Harare.
For some weeks I have resisted that temptation but today, I shall give you an insight into how Harare was born. In later instalments, I shall explain how certain place names came into being.
Clearly, so many things happened since 1890 and I would need acres of space to give write about every event that shaped Harare. Next week I will touch on the dramatic changes that have taken place since independence in 1980.
Harare, as we know it today, was born at 10am on September 13 1890, when Colonel Robert Pannefather's Pioneer Column hoisted their colonial flag -- the Union Jack -- in what is today Africa Unity Square.
But were it not for an accident of geography, the Sunshine City would have been located at Mt Hampden, about 20km west of the current site.
In September 1890, as the Pioneer Column drew closer to their destination -- Mount Hampden -- after travelling about 230 kilometres from Shashi River, in Chirumanzi, near Masvingo, its commander, Col Pannefather, rode ahead to look for a suitable site for what was to become the capital city of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Col Pannefather's initial idea was to establish the city near Gwebi River but realised that it would be too expensive to build there.
As his horse galloped around, he met a man on horseback by the name Frank Johnson, who had been in the area for much longer.
Johnson told Pannefather that there was a good ground near a stream and a "good sized kopje" about 20km east of Mount Hampden that was suitable for a settlement.
When the column reached the recommended spot on September 12, Johnson's Order Book recorded simply that "It is noted for general information that the Column having arrived at its destination will halt. The name of this place will be Fort Salisbury."
The next day on September 13 at 10am, the Pioneers paraded on a piece of land now occupied by Africa Unity Square and named it Cecil Square.
The place was named Cecil Square, not after Cecil John Rhodes, but after bald-headed and heavily bearded Robert Cecil, the Third Marquess of Salisbury, who was three times prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1885 to 1886, 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1902. He also served four times as British Foreign Secretary. He was bestowed with the title of Lord Salisbury.
Lieutenant E. G. Tyndale-Biscoe solemnly hoisted the Union Jack on a Msasa tree pole and Canon Balfour offered a prayer followed by a salute fired from two field guns.
Then they cheered thrice, first for the Queen of England, second for Prime Minister Salisbury after whom the city was then named and for the goodwill of the Pioneers.
The Pioneer Column immediately went to work on the square, turning it into a "living" replica of the British flag.
The fountain in the centre of the square marks the exact spot where the flag was hoisted on a Msasa pole.
In the next two weeks, the appearance of the square changed dramatically with four pathways, one linking Second Street (now Sam Nujoma) with Third Street and the other joining Baker Avenue (now Nelson Mandela) to Stanley Avenue (now Jason Moyo) and two diagonals linking all the four streets. The four pathways met at the centre of the square, transforming it into a Union Jack.
Jacaranda trees were planted around the square at the edge to resemble the edges of the flag and still stand today as a reminder of their legacy.
Other trees, flowers and lawn were planted between the pathways to add colour to the flag.
Thus was born the City of Harare.
At the end of the month the Pioneers were discharged with three months' rations and most of them went off to peg their mining claims or to ride out the farms which were their due reward for successfully expanding the frontiers of the British Empire.
The first Police Quarters were built by Major Forbes on the site of Meikles Hotel, just opposite the park, and the first bakery was a small red house at the corner of First Street and Robert Mugabe Road (now occupied by Standard Chartered Bank), and its oven a great big anthill. It was, in fact, the anthill that put paid to plans to extend First Street up to the railway station, like the rest of the north-south streets in the city centre, notably Second Street (Sam Nujoma), Angwa Street, Julius Nyerere Way, Fourth Street, etc.
The Pioneers immediately built a stable for their horses at what is today the Harare Civil Court. It was previously known as Stables Building.
They also set up a police station at Old Shell House in Nelson Mandela Avenue, then Baker Avenue, and a visit to the some of the rooms there confirms that they were actually holding cells.
They also built a club, now the Harare Club, on Third Street overlooking the Square. For a long time the club had an inscription bearing the words: "No natives no Jews". In other words, it was only open to people of pure British descend.
Those who ventured west of the new city wrote: "Between our laager and the Kopje was a big black marsh which could only be crossed by jumping from tuft to tuft of grass but it could be avoided by going up north where it starts (Harare Gardens near the two NSSA buildings)."
The Pioneers also built the Anglican Cathedral for their church services, in addition to Cecil Hotel, which is now the Parliament Building.
When Salisbury, now Harare, was granted municipal status in 1935, the Africa Unity Square and the surrounding area were taken over by the council. It was Harare City Council's turn in 1982, when Salisbury gave way to Harare.
How the City of Harare Was Born
The Herald (Harare)
COLUMN16
June 2007
Posted to the web
16 June 2007 Harare
After writing at length about Zimbabwe's many breathtakingly beautiful tourist resorts, regular readers of this column have asked me to write something about the origins of the City of Harare.
For some weeks I have resisted that temptation but today, I shall give you an insight into how Harare was born. In later instalments, I shall explain how certain place names came into being.
Clearly, so many things happened since 1890 and I would need acres of space to give write about every event that shaped Harare. Next week I will touch on the dramatic changes that have taken place since independence in 1980.
Harare, as we know it today, was born at 10am on September 13 1890, when Colonel Robert Pannefather's Pioneer Column hoisted their colonial flag -- the Union Jack -- in what is today Africa Unity Square.
But were it not for an accident of geography, the Sunshine City would have been located at Mt Hampden, about 20km west of the current site.
In September 1890, as the Pioneer Column drew closer to their destination -- Mount Hampden -- after travelling about 230 kilometres from Shashi River, in Chirumanzi, near Masvingo, its commander, Col Pannefather, rode ahead to look for a suitable site for what was to become the capital city of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Col Pannefather's initial idea was to establish the city near Gwebi River but realised that it would be too expensive to build there.
As his horse galloped around, he met a man on horseback by the name Frank Johnson, who had been in the area for much longer.
Johnson told Pannefather that there was a good ground near a stream and a "good sized kopje" about 20km east of Mount Hampden that was suitable for a settlement.
When the column reached the recommended spot on September 12, Johnson's Order Book recorded simply that "It is noted for general information that the Column having arrived at its destination will halt. The name of this place will be Fort Salisbury."
The next day on September 13 at 10am, the Pioneers paraded on a piece of land now occupied by Africa Unity Square and named it Cecil Square.
The place was named Cecil Square, not after Cecil John Rhodes, but after bald-headed and heavily bearded Robert Cecil, the Third Marquess of Salisbury, who was three times prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1885 to 1886, 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1902. He also served four times as British Foreign Secretary. He was bestowed with the title of Lord Salisbury.
Lieutenant E. G. Tyndale-Biscoe solemnly hoisted the Union Jack on a Msasa tree pole and Canon Balfour offered a prayer followed by a salute fired from two field guns.
Then they cheered thrice, first for the Queen of England, second for Prime Minister Salisbury after whom the city was then named and for the goodwill of the Pioneers.
The Pioneer Column immediately went to work on the square, turning it into a "living" replica of the British flag.
The fountain in the centre of the square marks the exact spot where the flag was hoisted on a Msasa pole.
In the next two weeks, the appearance of the square changed dramatically with four pathways, one linking Second Street (now Sam Nujoma) with Third Street and the other joining Baker Avenue (now Nelson Mandela) to Stanley Avenue (now Jason Moyo) and two diagonals linking all the four streets. The four pathways met at the centre of the square, transforming it into a Union Jack.
Jacaranda trees were planted around the square at the edge to resemble the edges of the flag and still stand today as a reminder of their legacy.
Other trees, flowers and lawn were planted between the pathways to add colour to the flag.
Thus was born the City of Harare.
At the end of the month the Pioneers were discharged with three months' rations and most of them went off to peg their mining claims or to ride out the farms which were their due reward for successfully expanding the frontiers of the British Empire.
The first Police Quarters were built by Major Forbes on the site of Meikles Hotel, just opposite the park, and the first bakery was a small red house at the corner of First Street and Robert Mugabe Road (now occupied by Standard Chartered Bank), and its oven a great big anthill. It was, in fact, the anthill that put paid to plans to extend First Street up to the railway station, like the rest of the north-south streets in the city centre, notably Second Street (Sam Nujoma), Angwa Street, Julius Nyerere Way, Fourth Street, etc.
The Pioneers immediately built a stable for their horses at what is today the Harare Civil Court. It was previously known as Stables Building.
They also set up a police station at Old Shell House in Nelson Mandela Avenue, then Baker Avenue, and a visit to the some of the rooms there confirms that they were actually holding cells.
They also built a club, now the Harare Club, on Third Street overlooking the Square. For a long time the club had an inscription bearing the words: "No natives no Jews". In other words, it was only open to people of pure British descend.
Those who ventured west of the new city wrote: "Between our laager and the Kopje was a big black marsh which could only be crossed by jumping from tuft to tuft of grass but it could be avoided by going up north where it starts (Harare Gardens near the two NSSA buildings)."
The Pioneers also built the Anglican Cathedral for their church services, in addition to Cecil Hotel, which is now the Parliament Building.
When Salisbury, now Harare, was granted municipal status in 1935, the Africa Unity Square and the surrounding area were taken over by the council. It was Harare City Council's turn in 1982, when Salisbury gave way to Harare.
Hunting in Zimbabwe For Identity And Family Memoir
Hunting in Zimbabwe For Identity And Family Memoir
James Kirchick Tue. Jun 26, 2007
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
By Peter Godwin
Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $24.99.
Last August, I visited an elderly Jewish couple at their spacious apartment in an affluent neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa. A distant family friend had referred to them as people who would welcome the opportunity to take me out for dinner during a long journalistic assignment in a country in which I had few acquaintances. Ronnie and Avner were not South African, however, but Zimbabwean, two of the very few Jews left in that troubled country. They lived in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, where Avner owned a clothing factory, but they frequently traveled to South Africa to escape their country’s awful state of affairs. Avner had fought in the Israeli War of Independence; he and Ronnie visited Israel frequently. I was shocked that an elderly couple with the means to move would continue to live in a country that, since the seizure of white-owned commercial farmland ordered by President Robert Mugabe in 2000, has been steeped in lawlessness, violence and poverty.
A few months later, I heard that Avner had passed away. When I expressed my condolences to Ronnie, she told me that she had finally decided to make aliya. If there is ever a reason for the State of Israel, I thought, Jewish Zimbabweans are it.
In Peter Godwin’s mesmerizing memoir of contemporary Zimbabwe, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” the matter of Israel never comes up. But it was one that nagged me from the minute I read Godwin’s account of the discovery at the heart of this book. When Godwin’s father suffered a heart attack in 1996, Godwin’s mother, Helen, a doctor, told her son to return home. There, hanging on the wall, he saw a photograph of his father’s family that he had never seen before, one that prompted a revelation from his mother: Godwin’s father, George, was not the “Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, with his clipped British accent” that his son had always imagined him to be, but rather a Polish Jew, born Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb.
Thus begins Godwin’s process of self-discovery, through which he attempts to learn more about the fate of the European Jews in general and those of his family in particular. He visits museums and libraries, and contacts various European ministries, in an effort to determine what happened to his father’s mother and sister, from whom George was separated as a young man. Godwin learns that his father managed to escape Poland and joined the Free Poles in England, where he met Helen. After the war, the couple immigrated to Southern Rhodesia, a British colony rich with opportunity due to the postwar boom.
Why did George Godwin invent a new life for himself? For starters, “a white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere,” Godwin writes, referring to the loneliness and terror that haunt his parents in a country where going to the supermarket requires carrying stacks of currency — Zimbabwe has the world’s highest rate of inflation — and risking attack by armed thugs. At any moment, their home could be raided by government apparatchiks or by common criminals calling themselves veterans of their country’s war of independence against white rule. The septuagenarian George once got into fisticuffs with a burglar, forcing Helen to install a bolted “rape door” in the hallway as an extra precaution against home invasion.
There were cultural taboos to resist, as well — including characterization as soutpiels, an Afrikaans epithet meaning “salt penis,” used to describe Anglo-Africans who bestride the ocean with one foot in Africa and the other in Europe, allowing their “genitals to dangle in the ocean where they pickle in the brine of cultural confusion.” And if being European was difficult, life as a European Jew must have seemed unbearable. Once a proud community of several thousand, the Jewish population in Zimbabwe has by now diminished to a few hundred, most of them elderly. During one of Peter’s visits, the synagogue in Bulawayo burned down, likely the victim of Mugabe’s campaign of destruction.
But Godwin stumbled upon a more nuanced explanation at, of all places, his father’s funeral. Surveying the multiracial attendants, Godwin notes, “Mugabe had managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule.” Escaping European antisemitism some 60 years ago, George Godwin was simply not going to let hatred chase him and his wife halfway around the world again. Opting out — as so many white Zimbabweans, including the author, had done — was simply not something this hardy old couple could even contemplate. A new life in Africa was “clearly the antidote to Europe’s great burden of history,” and leaving it would be a betrayal of all the Zimbabweans that the Godwins had come to care for and love.
“Like my father before me, I am rejecting my own identity. I am committing cultural treason,” Godwin writes, referring to his decision to leave Zimbabwe and move to America. Yet this admission evinces not simply the guilt of a man who witnessed grave suffering in his country and feels impassive in its enormity, but also of a conflicted Jew who suddenly feels some ineffable — yet ultimately elusive — connection to a people.
James Kirchick is the assistant to the editor-in-chief of The New Republic and reported from Zimbabwe last year.
James Kirchick Tue. Jun 26, 2007
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
By Peter Godwin
Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $24.99.
Last August, I visited an elderly Jewish couple at their spacious apartment in an affluent neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa. A distant family friend had referred to them as people who would welcome the opportunity to take me out for dinner during a long journalistic assignment in a country in which I had few acquaintances. Ronnie and Avner were not South African, however, but Zimbabwean, two of the very few Jews left in that troubled country. They lived in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, where Avner owned a clothing factory, but they frequently traveled to South Africa to escape their country’s awful state of affairs. Avner had fought in the Israeli War of Independence; he and Ronnie visited Israel frequently. I was shocked that an elderly couple with the means to move would continue to live in a country that, since the seizure of white-owned commercial farmland ordered by President Robert Mugabe in 2000, has been steeped in lawlessness, violence and poverty.
A few months later, I heard that Avner had passed away. When I expressed my condolences to Ronnie, she told me that she had finally decided to make aliya. If there is ever a reason for the State of Israel, I thought, Jewish Zimbabweans are it.
In Peter Godwin’s mesmerizing memoir of contemporary Zimbabwe, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” the matter of Israel never comes up. But it was one that nagged me from the minute I read Godwin’s account of the discovery at the heart of this book. When Godwin’s father suffered a heart attack in 1996, Godwin’s mother, Helen, a doctor, told her son to return home. There, hanging on the wall, he saw a photograph of his father’s family that he had never seen before, one that prompted a revelation from his mother: Godwin’s father, George, was not the “Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, with his clipped British accent” that his son had always imagined him to be, but rather a Polish Jew, born Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb.
Thus begins Godwin’s process of self-discovery, through which he attempts to learn more about the fate of the European Jews in general and those of his family in particular. He visits museums and libraries, and contacts various European ministries, in an effort to determine what happened to his father’s mother and sister, from whom George was separated as a young man. Godwin learns that his father managed to escape Poland and joined the Free Poles in England, where he met Helen. After the war, the couple immigrated to Southern Rhodesia, a British colony rich with opportunity due to the postwar boom.
Why did George Godwin invent a new life for himself? For starters, “a white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere,” Godwin writes, referring to the loneliness and terror that haunt his parents in a country where going to the supermarket requires carrying stacks of currency — Zimbabwe has the world’s highest rate of inflation — and risking attack by armed thugs. At any moment, their home could be raided by government apparatchiks or by common criminals calling themselves veterans of their country’s war of independence against white rule. The septuagenarian George once got into fisticuffs with a burglar, forcing Helen to install a bolted “rape door” in the hallway as an extra precaution against home invasion.
There were cultural taboos to resist, as well — including characterization as soutpiels, an Afrikaans epithet meaning “salt penis,” used to describe Anglo-Africans who bestride the ocean with one foot in Africa and the other in Europe, allowing their “genitals to dangle in the ocean where they pickle in the brine of cultural confusion.” And if being European was difficult, life as a European Jew must have seemed unbearable. Once a proud community of several thousand, the Jewish population in Zimbabwe has by now diminished to a few hundred, most of them elderly. During one of Peter’s visits, the synagogue in Bulawayo burned down, likely the victim of Mugabe’s campaign of destruction.
But Godwin stumbled upon a more nuanced explanation at, of all places, his father’s funeral. Surveying the multiracial attendants, Godwin notes, “Mugabe had managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule.” Escaping European antisemitism some 60 years ago, George Godwin was simply not going to let hatred chase him and his wife halfway around the world again. Opting out — as so many white Zimbabweans, including the author, had done — was simply not something this hardy old couple could even contemplate. A new life in Africa was “clearly the antidote to Europe’s great burden of history,” and leaving it would be a betrayal of all the Zimbabweans that the Godwins had come to care for and love.
“Like my father before me, I am rejecting my own identity. I am committing cultural treason,” Godwin writes, referring to his decision to leave Zimbabwe and move to America. Yet this admission evinces not simply the guilt of a man who witnessed grave suffering in his country and feels impassive in its enormity, but also of a conflicted Jew who suddenly feels some ineffable — yet ultimately elusive — connection to a people.
James Kirchick is the assistant to the editor-in-chief of The New Republic and reported from Zimbabwe last year.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Cutting edge e-commerce and hyperinflation...
Expat Zimbabweans use the Internet to arrange care packages for the folks back home
With the economy collapsing and inflation running wild, there's no longer any point in sending cash to family and friends
STEPHANIE NOLEN
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
July 4, 2007 at 4:17 AM EDT
JOHANNESBURG — What do you get when you combine the cutting edge of e-commerce technology with hyperinflation, a collapsing economy, and a burgeoning humanitarian crisis? You get zimbuyer.com, a website that allows Zimbabweans in exile to make online purchases of food and other necessities for delivery to family back home, letting them know via text message that a sack of corn or cooking oil is waiting.
The website is the brainchild of a 26-year-old named Laz, who left the country in 1999 to study information technology in Texas. But by the time he was finished school, President Robert Mugabe had begun his slide into dictatorship and Zimbabwe's economy - once the healthiest in Africa - was imploding.
Laz knew there was no work back home; instead he stayed abroad and found a job at America Online. Then, last year, it occurred to him that he could put his e-commerce training to work for people back in Zimbabwe. (Like many others working in this field, Laz was afraid to have his surname published for fear of reprisal from the Zimbabwean government, which has criticized initiatives such as this that subvert what remains of the Zimbabwean economy.)
Zimbabwe, like many African countries, has long been dependent on remittances from citizens working abroad (which far exceeds the value of all foreign aid that is delivered to the continent). But these days inflation in Zimbabwe runs at 4,500 per cent, in the government estimate, or twice that, if you believe independent economists. That means that people insist on getting paid their wages daily, that an estimate from a business for work to be done is good for only 30 minutes, and that prices on restaurant menus change from the start of the lunch hour to the end.
It also means that there is little point in Zimbabweans working abroad sending cash: It must be delivered at the posted government exchange rate, rendering it almost worthless, and it loses what value it has in a matter of days.
"The only things that keep value are commodities - petrol, cooking oil, sugar - or foreign currency," said Joeseph, an expatriate Zimbabwean who works in the Alberta oil patch and who uses zimbuyer.com regularly to send parcels to relatives. "And if you don't send help, how are they going to survive?"
So, suddenly there is a thriving business in websites such as this which allow people to send commodities back home, and to help their families negotiate the increasing scarcities in Zimbabwe by electronically providing them with cellphone airtime or fuel vouchers.
On zimbuyer.com, Joeseph can place an order for pork chops, or school notebooks or a generator, and pay for it with a credit card or the Web-based service PayPal. Laz and his staff then e-mail the order through to Harare immediately, and their local team goes into action: Six staffers in Harare and four in Bulawayo physically fill the orders - they are outside the shops at 5 a.m., scouting out a rumoured shipment of cooking oil. When they can't find products to fill an order in Zimbabwe, they cross into South Africa or Botswana and import the products, facing the crippling import taxes and bribes that go with that - but Laz said they are insulated to some degree because their buyers have purchased in foreign exchange. Deliveries are made within 72 hours. (Business could get more complicated in the coming weeks, however, as Mr. Mugabe has deployed riot police to enforce government price controls, which he blames for inflation; as a consequence many shop owners say they simply will not restock.)
Zimbuyer.com has had more than 4,000 clients, and is adding them by the day. "You've got Zimbabweans who are economic migrants all over the world what they have in common is that everyone wants to support their families," said Laz, who now lives in Birmingham, England, and runs the site with his sister. He still has a day job in Web design, while she is a health-care assistant.
Never Ndemera founded zimland.com three years ago, and it focuses on selling food hampers. Mr. Ndemera owns a nursing-placement agency in Britain, at which the majority of his clients are nurses who have fled Zimbabwe's collapsed civil service. Zimland.com grew out of a desire to provide a perk to employees: He knew many were worried about the children they left back home, and wanted to provide a way of reassuring them that they were getting fed each day. Customers place an order on his website, he sends it through to a shop in Zimbabwe, which prepares the parcel - meanwhile, recipients receive a text message advising them of what's waiting and where they can collect it. Mr. Ndemera's agents in Zimbabwe settle their accounts with local shops each week.
The slickest entry into this field is the site mukuru.com, created by a Zimbabwean named Rob, now 29, who went to work in Britain three years ago. He, too, found work in the tech sector, but as he watched British designers get obsessed with videos and gaming on cellphones, it seemed to him they were missing the most obvious thing a cellphone could do.
"You can send 160 characters of information from the First World to Africa in seconds for almost nothing," he said.
So, 1½ years ago he created mukuru.com (the name means "respected" in Shona, one of Zimbabwe's main languages) on this business model: They buy bulk cellphone air time, satellite TV time, or petrol coupons, resell them at a margin in small quantities on the website, then notify people in Zimbabwe than they have been "sent" air time or 50 litres of petrol. "We send a [text message] that says to the recipient, 'Hi, your aunt in London just sent you 40 litres of petrol,' " he said.
This business has been so successful that mukuru.com has expanded into South Africa and will begin imminently to serve Kenya and other African countries, which don't have Zimbabwe's particular desperate need for commodities, but have many expatriate citizens who routinely help out family back home.
The site has had 8,000 customers so far and is adding 50 a day these days as word of its reliability spreads, said Rob - who now has a team of eight and has long since left his cellphone-ring-tone job.
Like Rob, Laz finds himself with a successful e-commerce business in zimbuyer.com, but he would love to pack it all in. "Any Zimbabwean that you ask will tell you, 'I'd rather be back in Zim,' " he said. "It's just the current state of things that's keeping people away - it would make no sense to go back now, I'd have no way of supporting my family."
And how many people is he supporting? The question made him laugh. "I don't even really know. When you add in the cousins, the grandchildren, a lot. Just a lot."
*****
Crippled by inflation
Inflation in Zimbabwe has reached the point where the price of basic goods is now more than 45 times what it was a year ago. The graph shows the percentage increase in the Zimbabwe Consumer Price Index over the previous 12 months. Most independent economists say the real rate of inflation is double the official rate.
January, 2000: 55.9%
May, 2000: 4.530%
SOURCE: RESERVE BANK OF ZIMBABWE, NMBZ HOLDINGS LTD.
With the economy collapsing and inflation running wild, there's no longer any point in sending cash to family and friends
STEPHANIE NOLEN
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
July 4, 2007 at 4:17 AM EDT
JOHANNESBURG — What do you get when you combine the cutting edge of e-commerce technology with hyperinflation, a collapsing economy, and a burgeoning humanitarian crisis? You get zimbuyer.com, a website that allows Zimbabweans in exile to make online purchases of food and other necessities for delivery to family back home, letting them know via text message that a sack of corn or cooking oil is waiting.
The website is the brainchild of a 26-year-old named Laz, who left the country in 1999 to study information technology in Texas. But by the time he was finished school, President Robert Mugabe had begun his slide into dictatorship and Zimbabwe's economy - once the healthiest in Africa - was imploding.
Laz knew there was no work back home; instead he stayed abroad and found a job at America Online. Then, last year, it occurred to him that he could put his e-commerce training to work for people back in Zimbabwe. (Like many others working in this field, Laz was afraid to have his surname published for fear of reprisal from the Zimbabwean government, which has criticized initiatives such as this that subvert what remains of the Zimbabwean economy.)
Zimbabwe, like many African countries, has long been dependent on remittances from citizens working abroad (which far exceeds the value of all foreign aid that is delivered to the continent). But these days inflation in Zimbabwe runs at 4,500 per cent, in the government estimate, or twice that, if you believe independent economists. That means that people insist on getting paid their wages daily, that an estimate from a business for work to be done is good for only 30 minutes, and that prices on restaurant menus change from the start of the lunch hour to the end.
It also means that there is little point in Zimbabweans working abroad sending cash: It must be delivered at the posted government exchange rate, rendering it almost worthless, and it loses what value it has in a matter of days.
"The only things that keep value are commodities - petrol, cooking oil, sugar - or foreign currency," said Joeseph, an expatriate Zimbabwean who works in the Alberta oil patch and who uses zimbuyer.com regularly to send parcels to relatives. "And if you don't send help, how are they going to survive?"
So, suddenly there is a thriving business in websites such as this which allow people to send commodities back home, and to help their families negotiate the increasing scarcities in Zimbabwe by electronically providing them with cellphone airtime or fuel vouchers.
On zimbuyer.com, Joeseph can place an order for pork chops, or school notebooks or a generator, and pay for it with a credit card or the Web-based service PayPal. Laz and his staff then e-mail the order through to Harare immediately, and their local team goes into action: Six staffers in Harare and four in Bulawayo physically fill the orders - they are outside the shops at 5 a.m., scouting out a rumoured shipment of cooking oil. When they can't find products to fill an order in Zimbabwe, they cross into South Africa or Botswana and import the products, facing the crippling import taxes and bribes that go with that - but Laz said they are insulated to some degree because their buyers have purchased in foreign exchange. Deliveries are made within 72 hours. (Business could get more complicated in the coming weeks, however, as Mr. Mugabe has deployed riot police to enforce government price controls, which he blames for inflation; as a consequence many shop owners say they simply will not restock.)
Zimbuyer.com has had more than 4,000 clients, and is adding them by the day. "You've got Zimbabweans who are economic migrants all over the world what they have in common is that everyone wants to support their families," said Laz, who now lives in Birmingham, England, and runs the site with his sister. He still has a day job in Web design, while she is a health-care assistant.
Never Ndemera founded zimland.com three years ago, and it focuses on selling food hampers. Mr. Ndemera owns a nursing-placement agency in Britain, at which the majority of his clients are nurses who have fled Zimbabwe's collapsed civil service. Zimland.com grew out of a desire to provide a perk to employees: He knew many were worried about the children they left back home, and wanted to provide a way of reassuring them that they were getting fed each day. Customers place an order on his website, he sends it through to a shop in Zimbabwe, which prepares the parcel - meanwhile, recipients receive a text message advising them of what's waiting and where they can collect it. Mr. Ndemera's agents in Zimbabwe settle their accounts with local shops each week.
The slickest entry into this field is the site mukuru.com, created by a Zimbabwean named Rob, now 29, who went to work in Britain three years ago. He, too, found work in the tech sector, but as he watched British designers get obsessed with videos and gaming on cellphones, it seemed to him they were missing the most obvious thing a cellphone could do.
"You can send 160 characters of information from the First World to Africa in seconds for almost nothing," he said.
So, 1½ years ago he created mukuru.com (the name means "respected" in Shona, one of Zimbabwe's main languages) on this business model: They buy bulk cellphone air time, satellite TV time, or petrol coupons, resell them at a margin in small quantities on the website, then notify people in Zimbabwe than they have been "sent" air time or 50 litres of petrol. "We send a [text message] that says to the recipient, 'Hi, your aunt in London just sent you 40 litres of petrol,' " he said.
This business has been so successful that mukuru.com has expanded into South Africa and will begin imminently to serve Kenya and other African countries, which don't have Zimbabwe's particular desperate need for commodities, but have many expatriate citizens who routinely help out family back home.
The site has had 8,000 customers so far and is adding 50 a day these days as word of its reliability spreads, said Rob - who now has a team of eight and has long since left his cellphone-ring-tone job.
Like Rob, Laz finds himself with a successful e-commerce business in zimbuyer.com, but he would love to pack it all in. "Any Zimbabwean that you ask will tell you, 'I'd rather be back in Zim,' " he said. "It's just the current state of things that's keeping people away - it would make no sense to go back now, I'd have no way of supporting my family."
And how many people is he supporting? The question made him laugh. "I don't even really know. When you add in the cousins, the grandchildren, a lot. Just a lot."
*****
Crippled by inflation
Inflation in Zimbabwe has reached the point where the price of basic goods is now more than 45 times what it was a year ago. The graph shows the percentage increase in the Zimbabwe Consumer Price Index over the previous 12 months. Most independent economists say the real rate of inflation is double the official rate.
January, 2000: 55.9%
May, 2000: 4.530%
SOURCE: RESERVE BANK OF ZIMBABWE, NMBZ HOLDINGS LTD.
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