(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.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
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.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Inflation in Zimbabwe hits 4,500%
Inflation in Zimbabwe hits 4,500%
Calcutta News.Net
Saturday 23rd June, 2007
The Zimbabwe dollar has gone into free fall with the supply of hard currency in the country evaporating.
Late this week it took 150,000 Zimbabwe dollars to buy just one U.S. dollar. Last month the cost was 50,000.On informal offshore exchanges the Zimbabwe currency tumbled to Z$300,000 to the greenback in larger financial exchanges usually involving businesses.The Zimbabwean dollar's accelerating depreciation reflects surging inflation, recently estimated at 4,500% over the 12 months through May – the country's Central Statistical Office has not yet released the official version of the data. The currency's steep slide and the soaring inflation rate prompted U.S. Ambassador Christopher Dell, soon to leave Harare for Kabul, Afghanistan – to issue predictions that economic pressures will drive the administration of President Robert Mugabe and the ruling ZANU-PF party out of power sooner than political opponents.He quoted economists as saying inflation could hit 1.5 million percent by year's end. Opposition Movement for Democratic Change founding president Morgan Tsvangirai, in Britain late this week, voiced similar sentiments, saying the collapsing economy would force President Mugabe to allow free and fair elections to be held.Economist Tony Hawkins, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s Graduate School of Management, told reporter Blessing Zulu of VOA's Studio 7 for Zimbabwe that the economic meltdown can be attributed directly to the policies pursued by Harare.
Calcutta News.Net
Saturday 23rd June, 2007
The Zimbabwe dollar has gone into free fall with the supply of hard currency in the country evaporating.
Late this week it took 150,000 Zimbabwe dollars to buy just one U.S. dollar. Last month the cost was 50,000.On informal offshore exchanges the Zimbabwe currency tumbled to Z$300,000 to the greenback in larger financial exchanges usually involving businesses.The Zimbabwean dollar's accelerating depreciation reflects surging inflation, recently estimated at 4,500% over the 12 months through May – the country's Central Statistical Office has not yet released the official version of the data. The currency's steep slide and the soaring inflation rate prompted U.S. Ambassador Christopher Dell, soon to leave Harare for Kabul, Afghanistan – to issue predictions that economic pressures will drive the administration of President Robert Mugabe and the ruling ZANU-PF party out of power sooner than political opponents.He quoted economists as saying inflation could hit 1.5 million percent by year's end. Opposition Movement for Democratic Change founding president Morgan Tsvangirai, in Britain late this week, voiced similar sentiments, saying the collapsing economy would force President Mugabe to allow free and fair elections to be held.Economist Tony Hawkins, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s Graduate School of Management, told reporter Blessing Zulu of VOA's Studio 7 for Zimbabwe that the economic meltdown can be attributed directly to the policies pursued by Harare.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Which way is up
Which way is up
Saturday 9th june 2007
Dear Family and Friends,
This week all semblances of normalcy collapsed in most parts of Zimbabwe. The supply of electricity was negligible for most of the week and we found ourselves behaving in the most absurd fashion in order to remain functional. Going to bed at 7 in the evening in the cold and the dark - and 'waking up' when the lights came on at 11pm.Mostly your body doesn't know which way is up as it struggles to understand your new absurd routine. Doing the ironing at 11 pm; downloading emails and working on the computer at midnight. Getting up again at 4am to cook porridge for breakfast and being thankful for that achievement as the electricity goes off again at 5am and another day of insanity starts.
The eerie silence characterising suburban life was not much better in shopping and business centres - machines not working, lifts not moving, supermarket meat fridges defrosting, butchery saws silent, bakery ovens cold, food going bad and people just sitting out on walls and pavements. The absurditities of the situation kept slapping you in the face all week. One evening, in the cold and dark, Short Wave Radio Africa interviewed a top official in ZESA ( Electricity Supply Authority). Bear in mind this Radio Station is banned from operating in Zimbabwe and it's staff members are prohibited from returning to the country - and yet the ZESA executive speaks openly on the forbidden radio station!
She had a great swathe of excuses in order to apportion blame for this diabolical situation and then uses the opportunity to announce a 50% increase in the price of electricity. Oh really, what electricity is that! On Tuesday it was World Environment Day and again Zimbabwe was in the quiet and the dark - at least we were doing our bit for the world - however unintentionally!
That absurd irony was then punctuated all day by the sound of tree chopping and the sight of people pouring out of the bush carrying sticks, branches and cart loads of newly cut indigenous timber. 60 year old trees felled in minutes - what tragedy for Zimbabwe and what a disgrace for the country whose Minister of Tourism heads the UN body on Sustainable Development. What disgrace too for the world who chose him for the job. The near complete collapse of Zimbabwe's electricity supply is affecting country areas too. In a rural area near me people are walking up to six kilometres to reach the nearest grinding mill.
They arrive to find the mill not able to function without electricity and there is no option but to leave your precious bag of maize and return the next day to collect it - hoping that most of it is still there. The millers are having to work at night or whenever the power comes back on - its all about survival. Perhaps the greatest irony of the power cuts is that at least now we physically don't have the means to listen to or watch the propaganda on ZBC radio and TV - a blessed relief, particularly as the bigwigs have begun positioning themselves for the next round of elections - just eight months away.
Until next week, thanks for reading and please take note of my new website address: www.cathybuckle.com
Love cathy
Speaker and Spectator
Saturday 2nd June 2007
Dear Family and Friends,
As ridiculous as it may sound, little lights of hope are flickering on all the time now in Zimbabwe. They are not practical everyday lights of decreasing prices, increasing food and medical supplies or improved services - quite the contrary in fact. The lights of hope that I am talking about are those that are beginning to illuminate the future direction. Some are from events across the border where it seems there are actually things going on - although no one is saying what! Other signs of hope are coming from within.
One is the blatantly obvious declining interest and support by people in rural areas for overweight politicians in smart clothes and fancy cars who come only at election time - and then shout and threaten people in their bid to garner votes. A prime example is underway at the moment in the run up to a by election about to be held in Zaka East. At last both sides of the MDC have managed to stand together and say they will not contest the seat - what is the point if conditions are not free and fair.
This leaves Zanu PF standing against two virtually unknown parties, the UPP (United People's Party) and the UPDP (United People's Democratic Party). Some of the earlier ZANU PF rallies were shown on ZBC television and it was embarrassing to watch great obese men, shouting and waving their fists at the painfully thin people, sitting barefoot in the dust staring blankly ahead. The contrast between speaker and spectators was so extreme it was a wonder it was shown on national TV at all. A few days later, arriving to whip up support for the ruling party candidate , a former soldier, disappointment was immediate and the rally cancelled. Zanu PF Chairman, John Nkomo, said: "We have to postpone this rally to Thursday next week because we cannot address these few people."
The days of Zanu PF being able to take support for granted - even in remote dusty villages - are gone. Other reasons for hope are coming from people in positions of responsibility who are making courageous decisions and are standing up to do the right thing - politics and propaganda aside.This week High Court Judge Tedious Karwi granted bail to Ian Makone - one of 32 leading opposition officials and activists arrested in late March who have been held without trial for the past 2 months and 2 days. In making the bail ruling Judge Karwi stated a fact which of late is not guaranteed and has been very elusive in Zimbabwe. The Judge said:" Our law presumes people to be innocent until proven guilty." Until next week, thanks for reading, love cathy.
Saturday 9th june 2007
Dear Family and Friends,
This week all semblances of normalcy collapsed in most parts of Zimbabwe. The supply of electricity was negligible for most of the week and we found ourselves behaving in the most absurd fashion in order to remain functional. Going to bed at 7 in the evening in the cold and the dark - and 'waking up' when the lights came on at 11pm.Mostly your body doesn't know which way is up as it struggles to understand your new absurd routine. Doing the ironing at 11 pm; downloading emails and working on the computer at midnight. Getting up again at 4am to cook porridge for breakfast and being thankful for that achievement as the electricity goes off again at 5am and another day of insanity starts.
The eerie silence characterising suburban life was not much better in shopping and business centres - machines not working, lifts not moving, supermarket meat fridges defrosting, butchery saws silent, bakery ovens cold, food going bad and people just sitting out on walls and pavements. The absurditities of the situation kept slapping you in the face all week. One evening, in the cold and dark, Short Wave Radio Africa interviewed a top official in ZESA ( Electricity Supply Authority). Bear in mind this Radio Station is banned from operating in Zimbabwe and it's staff members are prohibited from returning to the country - and yet the ZESA executive speaks openly on the forbidden radio station!
She had a great swathe of excuses in order to apportion blame for this diabolical situation and then uses the opportunity to announce a 50% increase in the price of electricity. Oh really, what electricity is that! On Tuesday it was World Environment Day and again Zimbabwe was in the quiet and the dark - at least we were doing our bit for the world - however unintentionally!
That absurd irony was then punctuated all day by the sound of tree chopping and the sight of people pouring out of the bush carrying sticks, branches and cart loads of newly cut indigenous timber. 60 year old trees felled in minutes - what tragedy for Zimbabwe and what a disgrace for the country whose Minister of Tourism heads the UN body on Sustainable Development. What disgrace too for the world who chose him for the job. The near complete collapse of Zimbabwe's electricity supply is affecting country areas too. In a rural area near me people are walking up to six kilometres to reach the nearest grinding mill.
They arrive to find the mill not able to function without electricity and there is no option but to leave your precious bag of maize and return the next day to collect it - hoping that most of it is still there. The millers are having to work at night or whenever the power comes back on - its all about survival. Perhaps the greatest irony of the power cuts is that at least now we physically don't have the means to listen to or watch the propaganda on ZBC radio and TV - a blessed relief, particularly as the bigwigs have begun positioning themselves for the next round of elections - just eight months away.
Until next week, thanks for reading and please take note of my new website address: www.cathybuckle.com
Love cathy
Speaker and Spectator
Saturday 2nd June 2007
Dear Family and Friends,
As ridiculous as it may sound, little lights of hope are flickering on all the time now in Zimbabwe. They are not practical everyday lights of decreasing prices, increasing food and medical supplies or improved services - quite the contrary in fact. The lights of hope that I am talking about are those that are beginning to illuminate the future direction. Some are from events across the border where it seems there are actually things going on - although no one is saying what! Other signs of hope are coming from within.
One is the blatantly obvious declining interest and support by people in rural areas for overweight politicians in smart clothes and fancy cars who come only at election time - and then shout and threaten people in their bid to garner votes. A prime example is underway at the moment in the run up to a by election about to be held in Zaka East. At last both sides of the MDC have managed to stand together and say they will not contest the seat - what is the point if conditions are not free and fair.
This leaves Zanu PF standing against two virtually unknown parties, the UPP (United People's Party) and the UPDP (United People's Democratic Party). Some of the earlier ZANU PF rallies were shown on ZBC television and it was embarrassing to watch great obese men, shouting and waving their fists at the painfully thin people, sitting barefoot in the dust staring blankly ahead. The contrast between speaker and spectators was so extreme it was a wonder it was shown on national TV at all. A few days later, arriving to whip up support for the ruling party candidate , a former soldier, disappointment was immediate and the rally cancelled. Zanu PF Chairman, John Nkomo, said: "We have to postpone this rally to Thursday next week because we cannot address these few people."
The days of Zanu PF being able to take support for granted - even in remote dusty villages - are gone. Other reasons for hope are coming from people in positions of responsibility who are making courageous decisions and are standing up to do the right thing - politics and propaganda aside.This week High Court Judge Tedious Karwi granted bail to Ian Makone - one of 32 leading opposition officials and activists arrested in late March who have been held without trial for the past 2 months and 2 days. In making the bail ruling Judge Karwi stated a fact which of late is not guaranteed and has been very elusive in Zimbabwe. The Judge said:" Our law presumes people to be innocent until proven guilty." Until next week, thanks for reading, love cathy.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Eddie Cross on Zimbabwe - Collapse looms
29th May 2007
Subject: Eddie Cross on Zimbabwe
Collapse looms.
In my own business we passed a milestone today – by our calculations inflation in our business now exceeds 10 000 percent per annum. I was told by my supplier today that flour for the bakery would now cost me Z$250 000 for a 50 kilogram bag and that I have to collect it at my own cost from Harare – 600 kilometers distant, the last time I bought flour from the same supplier it was Z$30 000 a 50 kilogram bag delivered to Bulawayo.
We have given our staff a 100 per cent raise at the month end for two months now – it still leaves them with insufficient funds to cover their basic costs of living. We started today to provide food to them in addition to their wages or they simply will not be able to feed their families and come to work.
One major supplier told me today that they are selling every product in their range below cost. They are headed for bankruptcy and do not know what to do next. Another service provider told me they were not able to replace their stocks of spares and essential inputs. When they had run their stocks down to zero, they would then go onto a hand to mouth basis, asking their clients to source the required spares and raw materials before they could start work.
Fuel is trading at Z$45 000 a litre, the dollar at Z$50 000 to 1 against the US dollar and it has depreciated by 50 per cent in a week. I estimate prices are rising 20 per cent a day and this is putting huge pressure on all firms.
There is no sign of this process slowing down and with the government simply spending wildly in anticipation of an election in 2008, we cannot expect inflation to slow – we are headed for super inflation in the near future. It will then be impossible to hold money – people will have to consider barter and the widespread use of another currency. In Mozambique when they were experiencing similar conditions the common currency was the US dollar. The same situation existed in Angola but because of the shortage of actual foreign currency notes there, they also used things such as canned beer and coca cola as currency.
The difficulty in Zimbabwe is that we have a relatively sophisticated economy and strict currency controls. The use of either the Rand or the US dollar for exchange would actually be illegal at present.
From other countries experience this situation will be bound to escalate the collapse of the formal sector, exacerbate human and capital flight, destroy the value of savings in any form except property and the stock market and plunge civil servants, whose conditions of service are less flexible, into a state of crisis.
In the face of these critical concerns, neither the government nor the Reserve Bank exhibits any concern or understanding of just what they are doing. Their remedies suggest they have little understanding of the complexities of macro economic management policy or how the economy and business actually functions. Virtually every prescription they have trundled out in recent weeks has simply made things worse.
Food is scarce and unaffordable and a real humanitarian crisis is building up – one that might still threaten national stability and put the lives of millions are at stake. There is plenty of evidence that Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora are pouring money into the country to try and keep their families afloat. With some 4,5 million adult Zimbabweans abroad, this carries quite a punch and is probably the single most important factor in helping keep things stable.
Eddie Cross Bulawayo, 29th May 2007
Subject: Eddie Cross on Zimbabwe
Collapse looms.
In my own business we passed a milestone today – by our calculations inflation in our business now exceeds 10 000 percent per annum. I was told by my supplier today that flour for the bakery would now cost me Z$250 000 for a 50 kilogram bag and that I have to collect it at my own cost from Harare – 600 kilometers distant, the last time I bought flour from the same supplier it was Z$30 000 a 50 kilogram bag delivered to Bulawayo.
We have given our staff a 100 per cent raise at the month end for two months now – it still leaves them with insufficient funds to cover their basic costs of living. We started today to provide food to them in addition to their wages or they simply will not be able to feed their families and come to work.
One major supplier told me today that they are selling every product in their range below cost. They are headed for bankruptcy and do not know what to do next. Another service provider told me they were not able to replace their stocks of spares and essential inputs. When they had run their stocks down to zero, they would then go onto a hand to mouth basis, asking their clients to source the required spares and raw materials before they could start work.
Fuel is trading at Z$45 000 a litre, the dollar at Z$50 000 to 1 against the US dollar and it has depreciated by 50 per cent in a week. I estimate prices are rising 20 per cent a day and this is putting huge pressure on all firms.
There is no sign of this process slowing down and with the government simply spending wildly in anticipation of an election in 2008, we cannot expect inflation to slow – we are headed for super inflation in the near future. It will then be impossible to hold money – people will have to consider barter and the widespread use of another currency. In Mozambique when they were experiencing similar conditions the common currency was the US dollar. The same situation existed in Angola but because of the shortage of actual foreign currency notes there, they also used things such as canned beer and coca cola as currency.
The difficulty in Zimbabwe is that we have a relatively sophisticated economy and strict currency controls. The use of either the Rand or the US dollar for exchange would actually be illegal at present.
From other countries experience this situation will be bound to escalate the collapse of the formal sector, exacerbate human and capital flight, destroy the value of savings in any form except property and the stock market and plunge civil servants, whose conditions of service are less flexible, into a state of crisis.
In the face of these critical concerns, neither the government nor the Reserve Bank exhibits any concern or understanding of just what they are doing. Their remedies suggest they have little understanding of the complexities of macro economic management policy or how the economy and business actually functions. Virtually every prescription they have trundled out in recent weeks has simply made things worse.
Food is scarce and unaffordable and a real humanitarian crisis is building up – one that might still threaten national stability and put the lives of millions are at stake. There is plenty of evidence that Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora are pouring money into the country to try and keep their families afloat. With some 4,5 million adult Zimbabweans abroad, this carries quite a punch and is probably the single most important factor in helping keep things stable.
Eddie Cross Bulawayo, 29th May 2007
Monday, March 19, 2007
The Left's Abandonment of Zimbabwe
source : www.jewishcomment.com
The Left's Abandonment of Zimbabwe
Last uploaded : Monday 19th Mar 2007 at 04:45
Contributed by : Carol Gould
London18 March 2007
It has been a revelation this past week registering the reactions of people on the political Left when the subject of Zimbabwe creeps into the conversation.I have been following the fortunes of Morgan Tsvangarai for some time because of my British friends’ admiration for his valiant battle against the tyranny of Robert Mugabe. These friends have family in Zimbabwe on farmland there until suffering total destruction and even brutal murder in recent years. Last week Morgan, the head of the Movement for Democratic Change, was nearly beaten to death in what was described as a police detention after an anti-government demonstration. His colleagues, including two prominent female officials, were brutalised and barely left alive. According to reports from African correspondents in London an activist was shot dead and then the mourners at his funeral shot by police. One corpse was taken miles away and buried by the authorities to avoid a further demonstration.
This weekend MP Nelson Chamisa was stopped at Harare airport and brutally beaten as he was preparing to leave for a conference in Belgium. Already badly injured from last week’s police station attack, it is feared he has a cracked skull. Arthur Mutambara, leader of one of the factions of the MDC, was re-arrested on Saturday, and is now being held at Harare central police station. His fate does not bear thinking about. Frail Grace Kwinje and Sekai Holland, who also suffered beatings in the police roundup, were on their way to South Africa to receive treatment on Saturday, Tafadzwa Mugabe, a lawyer who accompanied them, told the BBC's World Today programme. Ms Mugabe said all their papers were in order but just before boarding the flight officials said the women needed a supplemental "clearance letter from the ministry of health". This is a sorry state of affairs.
Two British friends, one of whom I had not heard from in a year, rang me last week to thank America for intervening before Tsvangarai was murdered. Indeed, it was the US envoy who protested and was reported to have been instrumental in getting the wounded activists to hospital. The American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also intervened. President Mugabe reacted by threatening to expel any Western envoys who interfered in the running of the country. What this all adds up to is a remarkable sequence of reactions that have come my way in the past few days from anti-war, anti-Israel, anti-Bush campaigners and hangers-on. I rang a colleague who is active with Jews for Justice for Palestinians and she very nearly deafened me with a screaming rebuke that went something like this: ’ There are plenty of people dying in the Congo and Rwanda and nobody is making headlines about that.’
I tried to explain that Zimbabwe, once the Orchard, Bread Basket and Garden of Africa, was now suffering 80% unemployment and 1700% inflation, not to mention the murders of white farmers, and she could only rage more about how she ‘did not care’ about Morgan Tsvangarai.I thought I had caught this lady on a bad day. But then I saw Clare Short MP on BBC ‘Question Time’ and to my utter disbelief she showed not one ounce of sympathy for the campaigners and said that the rest of Africa was not stepping in to help because Britain had sullied its reputation with them when it had expressed concern for the white farmers. What twisted logic! Nobody on the panel challenged her on this and I was stunned.
Clare Short will spend hours complaining with considerable passion about the plight of the Palestinians, but where is her compassion for the people of Zimbabwe?This puzzle of the heartless Left came better into focus tonight when I watched ‘Dateline London’ on BBC News 24, and Abdel Bari Atwan of Al Quds newspaper said the problems of Zimbabwe stem solely from the sanctions imposed by Britain and America. (Oh, yes, blame evil America for the countless murders and burning of farms across that once fertile paradise.) Thankfully the panel demolished this idea and suggested it was the brutality of Mugabe and the stupidity of his replacing the white farmers with cronies who knew nothing about agriculture that had caused the famine and economic catastrophe gripping the nation. ( Later Bari Atwan made sure to get in a dig at the USA about using up 90% of the world’s consumer goods each year. When will these Third World pundits get a life? )
So, it seems that the Left that rails against Israel and the USA and organises marches for the liberation of Palestine is going to do nothing about the plight of Zimbabwe because that means siding with America. Such twisted logic is sickening. As of this posting the brutality of the regime is becoming the shame of Africa. Desmond Tutu has scolded the rest of Africa for doing nothing and sitting in silence. If the USA has to step in to save Zimbabwe from total destruction so be it; if saving lives and putting food on tables is the result then God Bless America, and Clare Short, Bari Atwan and the ‘peace’ movement be damned.
The Left's Abandonment of Zimbabwe
Last uploaded : Monday 19th Mar 2007 at 04:45
Contributed by : Carol Gould
London18 March 2007
It has been a revelation this past week registering the reactions of people on the political Left when the subject of Zimbabwe creeps into the conversation.I have been following the fortunes of Morgan Tsvangarai for some time because of my British friends’ admiration for his valiant battle against the tyranny of Robert Mugabe. These friends have family in Zimbabwe on farmland there until suffering total destruction and even brutal murder in recent years. Last week Morgan, the head of the Movement for Democratic Change, was nearly beaten to death in what was described as a police detention after an anti-government demonstration. His colleagues, including two prominent female officials, were brutalised and barely left alive. According to reports from African correspondents in London an activist was shot dead and then the mourners at his funeral shot by police. One corpse was taken miles away and buried by the authorities to avoid a further demonstration.
This weekend MP Nelson Chamisa was stopped at Harare airport and brutally beaten as he was preparing to leave for a conference in Belgium. Already badly injured from last week’s police station attack, it is feared he has a cracked skull. Arthur Mutambara, leader of one of the factions of the MDC, was re-arrested on Saturday, and is now being held at Harare central police station. His fate does not bear thinking about. Frail Grace Kwinje and Sekai Holland, who also suffered beatings in the police roundup, were on their way to South Africa to receive treatment on Saturday, Tafadzwa Mugabe, a lawyer who accompanied them, told the BBC's World Today programme. Ms Mugabe said all their papers were in order but just before boarding the flight officials said the women needed a supplemental "clearance letter from the ministry of health". This is a sorry state of affairs.
Two British friends, one of whom I had not heard from in a year, rang me last week to thank America for intervening before Tsvangarai was murdered. Indeed, it was the US envoy who protested and was reported to have been instrumental in getting the wounded activists to hospital. The American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also intervened. President Mugabe reacted by threatening to expel any Western envoys who interfered in the running of the country. What this all adds up to is a remarkable sequence of reactions that have come my way in the past few days from anti-war, anti-Israel, anti-Bush campaigners and hangers-on. I rang a colleague who is active with Jews for Justice for Palestinians and she very nearly deafened me with a screaming rebuke that went something like this: ’ There are plenty of people dying in the Congo and Rwanda and nobody is making headlines about that.’
I tried to explain that Zimbabwe, once the Orchard, Bread Basket and Garden of Africa, was now suffering 80% unemployment and 1700% inflation, not to mention the murders of white farmers, and she could only rage more about how she ‘did not care’ about Morgan Tsvangarai.I thought I had caught this lady on a bad day. But then I saw Clare Short MP on BBC ‘Question Time’ and to my utter disbelief she showed not one ounce of sympathy for the campaigners and said that the rest of Africa was not stepping in to help because Britain had sullied its reputation with them when it had expressed concern for the white farmers. What twisted logic! Nobody on the panel challenged her on this and I was stunned.
Clare Short will spend hours complaining with considerable passion about the plight of the Palestinians, but where is her compassion for the people of Zimbabwe?This puzzle of the heartless Left came better into focus tonight when I watched ‘Dateline London’ on BBC News 24, and Abdel Bari Atwan of Al Quds newspaper said the problems of Zimbabwe stem solely from the sanctions imposed by Britain and America. (Oh, yes, blame evil America for the countless murders and burning of farms across that once fertile paradise.) Thankfully the panel demolished this idea and suggested it was the brutality of Mugabe and the stupidity of his replacing the white farmers with cronies who knew nothing about agriculture that had caused the famine and economic catastrophe gripping the nation. ( Later Bari Atwan made sure to get in a dig at the USA about using up 90% of the world’s consumer goods each year. When will these Third World pundits get a life? )
So, it seems that the Left that rails against Israel and the USA and organises marches for the liberation of Palestine is going to do nothing about the plight of Zimbabwe because that means siding with America. Such twisted logic is sickening. As of this posting the brutality of the regime is becoming the shame of Africa. Desmond Tutu has scolded the rest of Africa for doing nothing and sitting in silence. If the USA has to step in to save Zimbabwe from total destruction so be it; if saving lives and putting food on tables is the result then God Bless America, and Clare Short, Bari Atwan and the ‘peace’ movement be damned.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Family secrets emerge from the ruins of Zimbabwe
Family secrets emerge from the ruins of Zimbabwe
Night falls, and I am sitting beside a fire with Prince Galenja Biyela in Zululand. I am there on an assignment for National Geographic magazine and the old Prince wants to relive the glory days of his grandfather, Nkosani, the hero of the battle of Isandlwana, in which the Zulus famously trounced the British in 1879.
He is interrupted by a jarring ring tone. "Umakhalekhukhwini," says one of his acolytes. It means "the screaming in the pocket", Zulu for a mobile phone.
It is mine. My mother's voice, 800 miles north in Zimbabwe, sounds strained. "It's your father," she says. "He's had a heart attack. I think you'd better come home."
Scroll down for more...
Family: Peter Godwin as a boy with his father (top), and a picture of his family before the war
I drive fast through the night to Johannesburg to catch a flight north. When I arrive at my father's bedside, his eyes are shut. His hair, usually tamed by some sort of pomade, has become unruly, sprouting out in small horns over his ears onto the thin hospital pillow.
I sit by Dad's bed. Contemplating his death, I think how remote I have been from him all my life. At boarding school from the age of six, then university in England and working abroad as a journalist, I have been a largely absent son.
He is emotionally truculent, quick to anger, irascible, rather forbidding - a Victorian paterfamilias.
I imagine trying to write his obituary and realise that I know almost nothing about his family or past, just the basics: born in England, in 1924, he fought in World War II, before coming out to Africa to run copper mines and timber estates. He is survived by a wife and two children.
Mentally, I start deal-making. If my father survives I will ... what? I could stop running around the world and come home to Africa. Come back and spend time with my father.
My suggested deal works and Dad recovers. I've got my reprieve. So now I embark on my strange journey, getting to know my father - witnessing the destruction of my beautiful homeland, Zimbabwe, uncovering our family secret and watching my parents' lives ebb away.
At home in Zimbabwe for the wedding of my sister, Georgina, in March 1997, I find that Dad has shrugged off his brush with mortality and is restored to his old, bluff, inaccessible self, fiddling happily in the garden.
Georgina had returned from English drama school three years previously and now reads the local TV news and wears big hats to open supermarkets. She is marrying Jeremy, a blond photographer.
My Dad, however, is being difficult, refusing to wear a dinner jacket. Mum says quietly: "It's because he's afraid. Afraid to enjoy this wedding, after what happened before Jain's wedding."
Jain is my other sister, my dead sister, older than me by seven years, but forever frozen at 27, killed in 1978, during the civil war, just weeks before her own wedding.
A primary school teacher, she and her fiance ran into an army ambush preparing to attack guerrillas. Their car was destroyed and she died instantly. Her death is a sore that after all these years still suppurates.
The wedding goes ahead. Dad still can't bring himself to acknowledge its lethal precedent, so it just hangs there full of menace.
In 1999, I return with my girlfriend Joanna. We bring our new baby, Thomas. My parents seem nonplussed that we have a baby but are not married. Dad in particular.
But later, when I examine the photographs of our visit, I realise that I had somehow missed his glowing smile.
The following year, I return on an assignment for the New York Times Magazine. I am flying into a firestorm. After ten years of one-party rule, President Robert Mugabe, described by South African church leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu as "the very caricature of an African tyrant" - has suddenly encountered real opposition.
In response, he is ordering the seizure of white farmland and its redistribution to black peasants.
People calling themselves "war vets" - ex- combatants from the civil war and Mugabe supporters - have begun to squat on white-owned farms.
When the farm killings began, it took my parents by surprise. Farmer Martin Olds was murdered on April 18, 2000, at his farm 300 miles south of Harare. A hundred men, with AK47s and machetes arrived in a 14-vehicle convoy when he was alone.
I speak to a family friend, Maria, the widow of David Stevens, the first farmer to die. He was abducted from his farm, forced to drink diesel oil and then shot.
I visit her at a temporary safe-house as her twin 20-month-old boys crawl restlessly over her.
I visit other white Zimbabweans, living under siege, terrorised by the drunk or stoned war vets occupying their land. I worry for my ageing parents in their adopted land.
The government's fury has been stoked recently on the streets of London when Peter Tatchell, head of the gay-rights group Outrage!, tried to perform a citizen's arrest on Robert Mugabe as he arrived to shop at Harrods.
I say to my parents it might be time for them to think of leaving. But they won't. This is their home. They're damned if they will allow Mugabe to drive them out, to win. Ordinary people don't hate us, my father says. They couldn't be nicer.
Mum, a doctor, is still working at her medical clinic, there is no one to replace her, and the country is being ravaged by Aids.
On a visit home the following year, I find Dad's eye is swollen shut, and there are deep gashes along his arm and face. He had been car-jacked at gunpoint. As we eat, I look at Dad. He seems smaller, hunched. His health is failing.
On my last day, I see a new picture hanging on the wall. It is a black and white photograph of a middle-aged couple and a young girl.
"Who are these people?" I ask my mother.
She takes a deep breath. "They are Dad's parents and his younger sister, your grandparents and your aunt," she says. "I'm afraid we haven't been entirely honest with you. Dad's family wasn't from England. They were from Poland. He's from Poland. They were Jews."
For a moment I can't quite grasp what she's saying. My father, George Godwin, with his clipped British accent, is an invention? All these years he has been living a lie?
"What's his real name?" I ask. "Goldfarb," she says. "Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb." She asks me not to talk to Dad about it until he is feeling stronger.
Not long after, when I am back in New York, Georgina writes to say she is planning to leave Zimbabwe for London with her baby daughter and Jeremy.
She is helping to start a new opposition radio station, which will broadcast to Africa free of the censorship and threats of the Mugabe regime.
My father sends me a family tree. I see his sister, Halina Goldfarb, born 1926. The 12-year-old girl stands frozen in the photograph, an Alice band holding back her long hair.
Next to her name, Dad has written a series of codes. His footnotes explain that they mean "Died"; "Holocaust"; "Extinction of branch of family".
I count the symbols. Of the 24 family members in Poland at the time, 16 were killed in the Holocaust, including his mother and sister.
There are also some terse instructions. It seems that my father wants me to initiate a Red Cross tracing inquiry for his family.
An e-mail arrives from Dad. "It is so hard, Pete, after all this time," he says. "I find it quite amazing how little I remember."
He is trying to see into the heart of a Polish boy in Warsaw a lifetime ago. Trying to reimagine whom he'd once been. He remembers a fancy dress party, his sister dressed as Marie Antoinette in a long white dress, her beautiful curls topped with a bonnet.
At 13 he began to learn English. After a lot of discussion with his parents, he wrote to the Daily Mail in London asking them to recommend places where he might study for the summer. The Goldfarbs chose an establishment in St Leonard's-on-Sea, and Kazio set off in June 1939.
In September, Hitler invaded Poland and Dad was stranded. He took a job as a camera rewind boy in a cinema, and went on to fight with the Allies.
At the end of the war, his father back in Poland wrote to tell him that his mother and sister had been picked up by a Nazi patrol and never seen again.
"I knew then that everything I had known in Poland was gone, destroyed. And that I would never go back," says Dad. A few years later, he received a cable from Poland to say that his father, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, had died.
He met my mother, Helen, at university in London. She comes from four generations of Anglican churchmen. Together, they made a life together and moved to Africa, a hopeful place.
When I next visit Zimbabwe, I ask Dad: "Why did you conceal the Jewish stuff?' He looks at me as though I am being deliberately obtuse. "For you," he says. "So that you could be safe. So that what happened to my mother and sister would never happen to you."
He adds: "Being a white here is starting to feel a bit like being a Jew in Poland in 1939, an endangered minority, the target of ethnic cleansing."
In our regular transatlantic calls, my parents assure me that all is well, while everything I read describes Zimbabwe as collapsing in a quickening downward spiral.
Back home in May 2003, I find Mum has retreated to her bed permanently, in need of a hip replacement.
Water and the electricity are intermittent. Hyper-inflation means they can barely afford their medicines and food. They keep a loaded revolver to protect themselves.
Everyone is talking about the latest atrocities being committed by Mugabe's henchmen. And the next day, I leave. As our plane soars away into a cloudless sky, I feel the profound guilt of those who can escape. I am abandoning my post. Like my father before me, I am rejecting my own identity.
On my next trip home, I stop over in London to see my sister. Georgina's husband Jeremy has decided he is gay, and has moved out, leaving her alone with their small daughter, Xanthe.
She is banned from entering Zimbabwe, thanks to her radio broadcasts. "Xanthe will never know Africa the way we did," she weeps.
Already in the grip of diabetes, Dad is now rotting alive from his feet upward - he has gangrene. Mum tells me that he is suicidally depressed and we decide to remove all the guns from the house.
Dad has asked me to find out what happened to his mother and sister. It seems that as they prepared to leave Warsaw, Halina and Janina were arrested. They were put on a death camp train and died at Treblinka, an industrial-sized killing factory in Poland to which up to 12,000 Jews a day were sent.
Women's heads were shaved before they were stripped naked and gassed. I think of Halina's glossy dark hair, that exuberant mane in her family portrait. I think of her died. This is a conversation I had been anticipating and yet it still seems so unexpected. It is January 2004, he was a week short of his 80th birthday.
I pack my black suit, and head for the airport. We decide Georgina should not come - Mum is terrified she will be arrested.
On that first evening in Africa after my father died, it rains. My mother and I sit on the veranda. "When Dad was a boy at St Leonard's before the war, his mother sent him some Polish delicacies in a box wrapped in brown paper and tied with string," says Mum.
"He saved a piece of that string and carried it around in his pocket for years. He said it was the last contact he had with his mother before she was killed by the Nazis. The last thing that she had actually touched. When he lost the string, not very long ago, he was heartbroken."
At the church, I know I have to speak and yet great sobs swell up inside me, pure and angry, grief not just at the loss of my father, but for the loss of it all, the loss of hope. Grief at our solitude, our transience. Grief too, at my father's isolation.
Tears roll down my face and splash onto my suit. At the end of the service, we file out to a variation on the hymn "God Bless Africa".
Emerging into the light, I look at the long line of people of all races waiting to offer condolences, and I realise then that Mugabe has unintentionally managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive; he has created a real racial unity, a hard-won sense of comradeship, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule.
I realise just how African my parents have become. That my mother will stay. That this is their home. That my father really has died at home. That in this most unpromising of places, where he could never be regarded as truly indigenous, finally, he belonged.
• ABRIDGED extract from When A Crocodile Eats The Sun by Peter Godwin, published by Picador at £16.99. ° Peter Godwin 2007. To order a copy at £15.30 (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Mugabe faces dilemma
Mugabe faces dilemma
Author: Brian Raftopoulos
Category: Zimbabwe
Date: 2/24/2007
Source: The Zimbabwe Independent.
Source Website: http://www.thezimbabweindependent.com
Summary & Comment: The Zimbabwean crisis has reached the point where a
number of factors are combining to introduce a new political dynamic into
the current situation. These include the confluence of drastic economic
decline, growing internal dissent within the ruling party, a renewed wave
of labour and civic activism, and the continued isolation of the regime by
Western countries.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mugabe faces dilemma
http://www.thezimbabweindependent.com/viewinfo.cfm?linkid=21&id=10068&siteid=1
The Zimbabwean crisis has reached the point where a number of factors are
combining to introduce a new political dynamic into the current situation.
These include:
- the confluence of drastic economic decline,
- growing internal dissent within the ruling party,
- a renewed wave of labour and civic activism, and
- the continued isolation of the regime by Western countries.
In the face of these growing challenges, the response of President Robert
Mugabe has been to seek an extension of his presidential mandate until 2010
in order to seek more time to deal with the destructive succession debate
in the ruling Zanu PF party, ensure his own immunity from possible
prosecution and create more frustration for the divided opposition Movement
for Democratic Change (MDC).
The economic challenges facing the Mugabe regime are immense
In a statement responding to the monetary policy statement by the Reserve
Bank governor, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) painted a
gloomy picture of the indicators of economic decline. These included
hyperinflation of 1 600% as at December 2006, a cumulative economic decline
of about 50% over the past seven years, an unsustainable budget deficit of
43% of GDP, chronic shortage of foreign currency, sporadic availability of
fuel, skills shortages, and mass unemployment and the collapse of real
earnings of workers.
In this regard there is anecdotal evidence of numbers of workers preferring
not to continue working in the formal sector because of the high cost of
staying in employment, preferring instead to engage in various informal
sector activities. The ZCTU and both factions of the MDC agree in
characterising the contemporary Zimbabwean economy as based on
"rent-seeking" and speculative behaviour. Distortions created by
developments such as price controls and foreign exchange controls create
rents.
As Zimbabwean economist Rob Davies writes, this "creates an incentive for
people to devote resources capturing rents, rather then using them for
productive purposes". Tendai Biti, the economic spokesperson of the
Tsvangirai MDC, observes that at the core of the crisis is the crippled
supply side of the economy. "The scenario of non-existent supply," notes
Biti, "creates fertile ground for middlemen and the rule of rent-seeking
activities." Evidence of this rent-seeking behaviour abounds in the
Zimbabwean economy. The Grain Marketing Board (GMB) was, until last week,
buying maize at $52 000 per tonne and selling it to select millers at $600
per tonne. Politically connected individuals were able to buy the
subsidised maize from the GMB, get it milled at commercial millers and then
sell it at exorbitant prices.
Similar speculative activities take place in the fuel and fertiliser
sectors where the new farmers who have benefited from the land occupations
are receiving subsidised inputs from the state and selling them rather than
using them for productive activities. As Arthur Mutambara, leader of the
other MDC faction, states: "The distortions in our economy create
opportunities for arbitrage."
In such an economy the emphasis of many of the emerging business
individuals is on fast-track accumulation through such speculative
activities, exploiting the breakdown of the rule of law and the corruption
of the state to accumulate vast profits through unproductive activities.
This is a key constituency that has been created by the authoritarian
politics of the Mugabe regime, and the indigenisation of economic
activities has largely been carried out through this means. Moreover, an
important part of the battle for succession within ZANU PF has been fought
over access to various such rent-seeking activities, and the fortunes that
then become available for further political consolidation within the party.
In the midst of these activities there are no doubt businesspersons who
continue to think about the longer-term need to maintain and build up
productive activities both in the industrial and agricultural sectors. The
problem, however, is that this parasitic accumulation model is taking place
within a broader context of endemic poverty and a steady decrease in the
percentage share of wages in the gross domestic income. The standard of
living of workers has reached desperately low levels, fuelled by a general
ruling party antipathy to urban workers, and epitomised by the massive
human rights violations of the "urban clean up" Operation Murambatsvina in
mid-2005. The result has been a renewed wave of labour, student and civic
protests since the beginning of the year.
In the field of labour protests, public sector workers have led the
response to the state. Junior doctors earning $56 000 per month, nurses $35
000 and teachers $84 000 have come out on strike or go-slows. Even unions
that have had less confrontational relations with the state, such as the
Zimbabwe Teachers' Association and the Public Services Association, have
threatened to take industrial action in the next week if their salary
demands are not met. Other protests from the constitutional movement,
women's organisations and students have created additional pressure on the
state.
These protests resemble the labour unrest in the second half of the 1990s,
also triggered by the 1996 public sector strike that was the first
indicator of the force of labour that would play a major part in
challenging the state during this period. There are, however, some
differences with this current period of unrest. In the late 1990s the
structures of the labour movement were much stronger, developed through
strong organisational and educational capacity in the ZCTU.
The effective use of consultative labour forums ensured greater ownership
of collective actions by the union membership. Additionally during this
period the labour movement was able to "speak for the nation" in their
messaging and demands and build effective alliances with other civic
groups. In the current period the structures of the labour movement have
been weakened by a combination of structural changes in the labour force,
state repression, decreased organisational and educational capacity and a
leadership that has placed more emphasis on the ZCTU taking actions on its
own with less emphasis on building broader civic alliances.
Part of the explanation for this more narrow focus of the ZCTU can be found
in the difficult relations that have arisen between the labour movement and
both the MDC and the civics. The labour leadership perhaps feels that it
has been used and marginalised within the broader political processes in
the opposition. However, this recoil from coalition building is likely to
encounter limits very quickly given the need to develop a broad front
against Zimbabwe's authoritarian state. It is thus unclear whether the
militancy of the present leadership will translate unto a broader
participation by the union membership and the general public in mass actions.
There is little doubt also that the division in the MDC that took place
after October 12 2005 has weakened both sides of the party and created
confusion and demoralisation among its supporters and in the civic
movement. Over the last year there have been attempts to heal the breach in
the opposition and this has led to the signing of a code of conduct between
the two formations, designed to lessen their public hostility and violence.
This has certainly been a step forward for both sides, but urgent efforts
need to be taken to strengthen the strategic and electoral cooperation
between the two groups, whether there is a presidential election in 2008 or
2010.
Both formations at present belong to the Save Zimbabwe Campaign led by
church leaders, and also bringing together all the major civic groups in
the country. The major demand of this campaign is that there should be a
presidential election in 2008 under a new constitution, thus opposing
Mugabe's move to delay this election to 2010. One of the consequences of
both MDC formations working under this umbrella is that one or both
factions may feel less need to pursue the possibility of re-unification,
but instead use the momentum of the campaign to push their separate
agendas. This is likely to be a mistake in the longer term as closer
cooperation between the two MDCs is essential to confront Zanu PF.
It is against this background that the recent monetary statement by Reserve
Bank governor Gideon Gono needs to be understood. In many ways the
statement is an admission of a policy dead-end and recognition that the
primary problem in the country is the political blockage being created by
Mugabe's actions. In the statement, Gono desperately called for the
establishment of a social contract between the government, business and
labour, seeking to use this vehicle to attempt to achieve what the
political leadership is unwilling to attempt. Clearly in the present
political conditions the call for a social contract is unrealistic, given
the unwillingness of the state to confront the political challenges around
democratisation, which would be essential to a workable agreement between
the three legs of a tripartite arrangement.
Gono's call for a social contract in Zimbabwe is not new, as the ZCTU
proposed it, under different circumstances, in its 1996 document "Beyond
Esap". Instead the government set up the National Economic Consultative
Forum in 1997 and the Tripartite Negotiating Forum in 1998 which, in the
words of the Labour and Economic Development Institute of Zimbabwe, "have
either become talk-shops or their decisions have been largely ignored".
Both Mugabe's attempt to extend his presidency to 2010 and Gono's attempt
to draw other social forces into a social contract should be seen as
Mugabe's attempt to control change in Zimbabwe under his tutelage and that
of his party. The recent cabinet reshuffle confirmed Mugabe's need to
maintain the support of his loyalists as he attempts to get his proposal
for a 2010 extension of the presidential election confirmed by the ZANU PF
politburo. Under this proposal it is likely that Mugabe would appoint a
prime minister who would still be responsible to him, as his position as a
purportedly "ceremonial president" provides him with continued immunity
from possible prosecution for crimes against humanity.
Such a move could then possibly be a precursor to small reforms in the
political and economic arenas, as a prelude to an election in which Mugabe
would hope to defeat the opposition under a new candidate, and prepare the
way for a "normalisation" of his regime. However, Alexis de Tocqueville's
warning that the "most dangerous time for a bad government is when it
starts to reform itself" should be a reminder to Mugabe that once small
reforms are introduced it is often difficult to control the change. Under
the present political conditions Mugabe's government, as with all
authoritarian regimes, must continue to choose between compromise and
repression, or more specifically the particular blend of both. It is likely
that in the short term Mugabe will continue to emphasise state coercion in
dealing with dissent in the country.
However, the continued availability of this option will depend among other
factors on the capacity of the opposition and civic forces to mount more
effective popular resistance to the regime, the continued loyalty of the
police and army in the face of deteriorating economic conditions for the
armed forces, Mugabe's capacity to contain and resolve the succession
debate in his party and the ongoing pressure and isolation from the West.
Mugabe is likely to be acutely aware of the transition dangers that befell
the authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe after 1989 and the lessons of
his Chinese friends at Tiananmen Square.
All the indications are that 2007 will be a crucial year marking the
Zimbabwean crisis. If Mugabe continues to deploy authoritarian strategies
in response to the political opposition, both the economic and the
political conditions will deteriorate further, and the international
isolation of the regime is likely to continue. On the other hand if Mugabe
attempts a controlled reform process, the new political spaces opened are
likely to provide additional momentum for the political and civic
opposition, and the internal threat to ZANU PF will intensify. Caught
between an unproductive confrontational strategy that he would prefer and a
reform strategy whose consequences he is unlikely to be able to control,
Mugabe is faced with a very difficult political dilemma.
On the other hand ZANU PF's capacity to re-invent itself in part should not
be dismissed, especially if the opposition forces facilitate this option by
further strategic blunders. It would not be the first time that
authoritarian regimes have carried out a semblance of reform while
retaining the core of the former government. There are several such
examples in both Africa and Eastern Europe. Such an outcome would not be
unfavourable for a South African government that has always been more
concerned with the "stability" of its neighbour than with a more profound
democratic transition.
*Brian Raftopoulos is head of the Africa programme at the Institute for
Justice
and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa.
Author: Brian Raftopoulos
Category: Zimbabwe
Date: 2/24/2007
Source: The Zimbabwe Independent.
Source Website: http://www.thezimbabweindependent.com
Summary & Comment: The Zimbabwean crisis has reached the point where a
number of factors are combining to introduce a new political dynamic into
the current situation. These include the confluence of drastic economic
decline, growing internal dissent within the ruling party, a renewed wave
of labour and civic activism, and the continued isolation of the regime by
Western countries.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mugabe faces dilemma
http://www.thezimbabweindependent.com/viewinfo.cfm?linkid=21&id=10068&siteid=1
The Zimbabwean crisis has reached the point where a number of factors are
combining to introduce a new political dynamic into the current situation.
These include:
- the confluence of drastic economic decline,
- growing internal dissent within the ruling party,
- a renewed wave of labour and civic activism, and
- the continued isolation of the regime by Western countries.
In the face of these growing challenges, the response of President Robert
Mugabe has been to seek an extension of his presidential mandate until 2010
in order to seek more time to deal with the destructive succession debate
in the ruling Zanu PF party, ensure his own immunity from possible
prosecution and create more frustration for the divided opposition Movement
for Democratic Change (MDC).
The economic challenges facing the Mugabe regime are immense
In a statement responding to the monetary policy statement by the Reserve
Bank governor, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) painted a
gloomy picture of the indicators of economic decline. These included
hyperinflation of 1 600% as at December 2006, a cumulative economic decline
of about 50% over the past seven years, an unsustainable budget deficit of
43% of GDP, chronic shortage of foreign currency, sporadic availability of
fuel, skills shortages, and mass unemployment and the collapse of real
earnings of workers.
In this regard there is anecdotal evidence of numbers of workers preferring
not to continue working in the formal sector because of the high cost of
staying in employment, preferring instead to engage in various informal
sector activities. The ZCTU and both factions of the MDC agree in
characterising the contemporary Zimbabwean economy as based on
"rent-seeking" and speculative behaviour. Distortions created by
developments such as price controls and foreign exchange controls create
rents.
As Zimbabwean economist Rob Davies writes, this "creates an incentive for
people to devote resources capturing rents, rather then using them for
productive purposes". Tendai Biti, the economic spokesperson of the
Tsvangirai MDC, observes that at the core of the crisis is the crippled
supply side of the economy. "The scenario of non-existent supply," notes
Biti, "creates fertile ground for middlemen and the rule of rent-seeking
activities." Evidence of this rent-seeking behaviour abounds in the
Zimbabwean economy. The Grain Marketing Board (GMB) was, until last week,
buying maize at $52 000 per tonne and selling it to select millers at $600
per tonne. Politically connected individuals were able to buy the
subsidised maize from the GMB, get it milled at commercial millers and then
sell it at exorbitant prices.
Similar speculative activities take place in the fuel and fertiliser
sectors where the new farmers who have benefited from the land occupations
are receiving subsidised inputs from the state and selling them rather than
using them for productive activities. As Arthur Mutambara, leader of the
other MDC faction, states: "The distortions in our economy create
opportunities for arbitrage."
In such an economy the emphasis of many of the emerging business
individuals is on fast-track accumulation through such speculative
activities, exploiting the breakdown of the rule of law and the corruption
of the state to accumulate vast profits through unproductive activities.
This is a key constituency that has been created by the authoritarian
politics of the Mugabe regime, and the indigenisation of economic
activities has largely been carried out through this means. Moreover, an
important part of the battle for succession within ZANU PF has been fought
over access to various such rent-seeking activities, and the fortunes that
then become available for further political consolidation within the party.
In the midst of these activities there are no doubt businesspersons who
continue to think about the longer-term need to maintain and build up
productive activities both in the industrial and agricultural sectors. The
problem, however, is that this parasitic accumulation model is taking place
within a broader context of endemic poverty and a steady decrease in the
percentage share of wages in the gross domestic income. The standard of
living of workers has reached desperately low levels, fuelled by a general
ruling party antipathy to urban workers, and epitomised by the massive
human rights violations of the "urban clean up" Operation Murambatsvina in
mid-2005. The result has been a renewed wave of labour, student and civic
protests since the beginning of the year.
In the field of labour protests, public sector workers have led the
response to the state. Junior doctors earning $56 000 per month, nurses $35
000 and teachers $84 000 have come out on strike or go-slows. Even unions
that have had less confrontational relations with the state, such as the
Zimbabwe Teachers' Association and the Public Services Association, have
threatened to take industrial action in the next week if their salary
demands are not met. Other protests from the constitutional movement,
women's organisations and students have created additional pressure on the
state.
These protests resemble the labour unrest in the second half of the 1990s,
also triggered by the 1996 public sector strike that was the first
indicator of the force of labour that would play a major part in
challenging the state during this period. There are, however, some
differences with this current period of unrest. In the late 1990s the
structures of the labour movement were much stronger, developed through
strong organisational and educational capacity in the ZCTU.
The effective use of consultative labour forums ensured greater ownership
of collective actions by the union membership. Additionally during this
period the labour movement was able to "speak for the nation" in their
messaging and demands and build effective alliances with other civic
groups. In the current period the structures of the labour movement have
been weakened by a combination of structural changes in the labour force,
state repression, decreased organisational and educational capacity and a
leadership that has placed more emphasis on the ZCTU taking actions on its
own with less emphasis on building broader civic alliances.
Part of the explanation for this more narrow focus of the ZCTU can be found
in the difficult relations that have arisen between the labour movement and
both the MDC and the civics. The labour leadership perhaps feels that it
has been used and marginalised within the broader political processes in
the opposition. However, this recoil from coalition building is likely to
encounter limits very quickly given the need to develop a broad front
against Zimbabwe's authoritarian state. It is thus unclear whether the
militancy of the present leadership will translate unto a broader
participation by the union membership and the general public in mass actions.
There is little doubt also that the division in the MDC that took place
after October 12 2005 has weakened both sides of the party and created
confusion and demoralisation among its supporters and in the civic
movement. Over the last year there have been attempts to heal the breach in
the opposition and this has led to the signing of a code of conduct between
the two formations, designed to lessen their public hostility and violence.
This has certainly been a step forward for both sides, but urgent efforts
need to be taken to strengthen the strategic and electoral cooperation
between the two groups, whether there is a presidential election in 2008 or
2010.
Both formations at present belong to the Save Zimbabwe Campaign led by
church leaders, and also bringing together all the major civic groups in
the country. The major demand of this campaign is that there should be a
presidential election in 2008 under a new constitution, thus opposing
Mugabe's move to delay this election to 2010. One of the consequences of
both MDC formations working under this umbrella is that one or both
factions may feel less need to pursue the possibility of re-unification,
but instead use the momentum of the campaign to push their separate
agendas. This is likely to be a mistake in the longer term as closer
cooperation between the two MDCs is essential to confront Zanu PF.
It is against this background that the recent monetary statement by Reserve
Bank governor Gideon Gono needs to be understood. In many ways the
statement is an admission of a policy dead-end and recognition that the
primary problem in the country is the political blockage being created by
Mugabe's actions. In the statement, Gono desperately called for the
establishment of a social contract between the government, business and
labour, seeking to use this vehicle to attempt to achieve what the
political leadership is unwilling to attempt. Clearly in the present
political conditions the call for a social contract is unrealistic, given
the unwillingness of the state to confront the political challenges around
democratisation, which would be essential to a workable agreement between
the three legs of a tripartite arrangement.
Gono's call for a social contract in Zimbabwe is not new, as the ZCTU
proposed it, under different circumstances, in its 1996 document "Beyond
Esap". Instead the government set up the National Economic Consultative
Forum in 1997 and the Tripartite Negotiating Forum in 1998 which, in the
words of the Labour and Economic Development Institute of Zimbabwe, "have
either become talk-shops or their decisions have been largely ignored".
Both Mugabe's attempt to extend his presidency to 2010 and Gono's attempt
to draw other social forces into a social contract should be seen as
Mugabe's attempt to control change in Zimbabwe under his tutelage and that
of his party. The recent cabinet reshuffle confirmed Mugabe's need to
maintain the support of his loyalists as he attempts to get his proposal
for a 2010 extension of the presidential election confirmed by the ZANU PF
politburo. Under this proposal it is likely that Mugabe would appoint a
prime minister who would still be responsible to him, as his position as a
purportedly "ceremonial president" provides him with continued immunity
from possible prosecution for crimes against humanity.
Such a move could then possibly be a precursor to small reforms in the
political and economic arenas, as a prelude to an election in which Mugabe
would hope to defeat the opposition under a new candidate, and prepare the
way for a "normalisation" of his regime. However, Alexis de Tocqueville's
warning that the "most dangerous time for a bad government is when it
starts to reform itself" should be a reminder to Mugabe that once small
reforms are introduced it is often difficult to control the change. Under
the present political conditions Mugabe's government, as with all
authoritarian regimes, must continue to choose between compromise and
repression, or more specifically the particular blend of both. It is likely
that in the short term Mugabe will continue to emphasise state coercion in
dealing with dissent in the country.
However, the continued availability of this option will depend among other
factors on the capacity of the opposition and civic forces to mount more
effective popular resistance to the regime, the continued loyalty of the
police and army in the face of deteriorating economic conditions for the
armed forces, Mugabe's capacity to contain and resolve the succession
debate in his party and the ongoing pressure and isolation from the West.
Mugabe is likely to be acutely aware of the transition dangers that befell
the authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe after 1989 and the lessons of
his Chinese friends at Tiananmen Square.
All the indications are that 2007 will be a crucial year marking the
Zimbabwean crisis. If Mugabe continues to deploy authoritarian strategies
in response to the political opposition, both the economic and the
political conditions will deteriorate further, and the international
isolation of the regime is likely to continue. On the other hand if Mugabe
attempts a controlled reform process, the new political spaces opened are
likely to provide additional momentum for the political and civic
opposition, and the internal threat to ZANU PF will intensify. Caught
between an unproductive confrontational strategy that he would prefer and a
reform strategy whose consequences he is unlikely to be able to control,
Mugabe is faced with a very difficult political dilemma.
On the other hand ZANU PF's capacity to re-invent itself in part should not
be dismissed, especially if the opposition forces facilitate this option by
further strategic blunders. It would not be the first time that
authoritarian regimes have carried out a semblance of reform while
retaining the core of the former government. There are several such
examples in both Africa and Eastern Europe. Such an outcome would not be
unfavourable for a South African government that has always been more
concerned with the "stability" of its neighbour than with a more profound
democratic transition.
*Brian Raftopoulos is head of the Africa programme at the Institute for
Justice
and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Zimbabwe: Teachers End Strike After Pay Deal
New York Times Fri, 23 Feb 2007 7:50 PM PST
Teachers ended a three-week strike after President Robert G. Mugabe?s government partly met their demands for a 400 percent pay increase, raising basic salaries to more than $100 a month, still below the poverty line for a family of five. Because Zimbabwe struggles with rampant inflation, now at an annual rate of nearly 1,600 percent, it was unclear how long the new salaries would satisfy union ...
Anger mounts in Zimbabwe as crisis nears
AP via Yahoo! News Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:01 AM PST
Zimbabwe is reaching the end game, witnessing the last, desperate throes of a regime that has destroyed one of Africa's few successful economies, plunged millions of people into grinding poverty and led to the deaths of tens of thousands from malnutrition and lack of medical care.
Zimbabwe, once a breadbasket, now a basket case under Mugabe
Seattle Times Sat, 24 Feb 2007 0:21 AM PST
Zimbabwe is reaching the end game, witnessing the last, desperate throes of a regime that has destroyed one of Africa's few successful economies...
Zimbabwe's Mugabe Curbs Political Activity
NPR Fri, 23 Feb 2007 4:03 PM PST
Zimbabwe sees political unrest, as President Robert Mugabe attempts to postpone the country's presidential election. Meanwhile, thousands of protesters take to the streets after Mugabe refuses to let an opposition party host a public rally. Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks with Farai Chideya.
Zimbabwe's economic crisis a 'deep concern'
News Interactive Sat, 24 Feb 2007 2:00 AM PST
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe has held his 83rd birthday party for thousands of supporters shortly after the IMF expressed deep concern over Zimbabwe's deteriorating social and economic conditions.
Zimbabwe: Students Must Not Let Country Down
AllAfrica.com Sat, 24 Feb 2007 1:24 AM PST
DESPITE the country's current economic challenges, Zimbabwe continues to prioritise the education of its citizens with thousands of students being enrolled every year in universities at home and abroad.
Zimbabwe: Zim Escapes Serious Damage From Cyclone
AllAfrica.com Sat, 24 Feb 2007 1:23 AM PST
ZIMBABWE has escaped major damage from the first major cyclone to hit the country in four years.
New York Times Fri, 23 Feb 2007 7:50 PM PST
Teachers ended a three-week strike after President Robert G. Mugabe?s government partly met their demands for a 400 percent pay increase, raising basic salaries to more than $100 a month, still below the poverty line for a family of five. Because Zimbabwe struggles with rampant inflation, now at an annual rate of nearly 1,600 percent, it was unclear how long the new salaries would satisfy union ...
Anger mounts in Zimbabwe as crisis nears
AP via Yahoo! News Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:01 AM PST
Zimbabwe is reaching the end game, witnessing the last, desperate throes of a regime that has destroyed one of Africa's few successful economies, plunged millions of people into grinding poverty and led to the deaths of tens of thousands from malnutrition and lack of medical care.
Zimbabwe, once a breadbasket, now a basket case under Mugabe
Seattle Times Sat, 24 Feb 2007 0:21 AM PST
Zimbabwe is reaching the end game, witnessing the last, desperate throes of a regime that has destroyed one of Africa's few successful economies...
Zimbabwe's Mugabe Curbs Political Activity
NPR Fri, 23 Feb 2007 4:03 PM PST
Zimbabwe sees political unrest, as President Robert Mugabe attempts to postpone the country's presidential election. Meanwhile, thousands of protesters take to the streets after Mugabe refuses to let an opposition party host a public rally. Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks with Farai Chideya.
Zimbabwe's economic crisis a 'deep concern'
News Interactive Sat, 24 Feb 2007 2:00 AM PST
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe has held his 83rd birthday party for thousands of supporters shortly after the IMF expressed deep concern over Zimbabwe's deteriorating social and economic conditions.
Zimbabwe: Students Must Not Let Country Down
AllAfrica.com Sat, 24 Feb 2007 1:24 AM PST
DESPITE the country's current economic challenges, Zimbabwe continues to prioritise the education of its citizens with thousands of students being enrolled every year in universities at home and abroad.
Zimbabwe: Zim Escapes Serious Damage From Cyclone
AllAfrica.com Sat, 24 Feb 2007 1:23 AM PST
ZIMBABWE has escaped major damage from the first major cyclone to hit the country in four years.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Mugabe makes life a misery in Zimbabwe
Source The Australian
Mugabe makes life a misery in Zimbabwe
January 08, 2007
A country is being destroyed by avarice and ambition
ENEMIES of liberty who argue that democracy is not suited to all societies and that US President George W. Bush was wrong in principle as well as in practice in fighting to allow Iraqis to choose their rulers should read RW Johnson's report on Zimbabwe in The Australian today. The story shows what happens when fair elections and open government, as well as the other pillars of a just society, free enterprise and equal access to justice, do not exist. Johnson reports on how a once prosperous African nation is reduced to a wreck, where starvation and brutality are the norm and the state treats ordinary people as its enemy. Millions have fled Zimbabwe, or died from hunger, disease and violence. Life expectancy is barely half what it was 15 years ago, and the economy has shrunk by 40 per cent this century. And it is all the work of dictator Robert Mugabe and his henchmen, who have entrenched their political power and economic authority by beggaring and beating, starving and killing their own people.
As with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Mugabe's Zimbabwe is a warning to the world of what happens when a state is run as a family or factional fiefdom. As in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, in Zimbabwe the state and the dictator's political party are all but amalgamated. Such regimes are not only immoral, they are incompetent in governing for the people, because the needs of the vast mass of ordinary citizens are always ignored. As in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Mugabe has tried to drive the urban poor into the country by bulldozing their shanty towns. Every dictator understands the dangers of large concentrations of desperate people in cities. Like the old Soviet Union under Stalin, Mugabe has taken farmland from ostensible enemies of the regime, in this case white farmers, and handed it over to party loyalists. In the process, as was the Soviet experience, he has all but destroyed the country's rural economy. Not long ago, Zimbabwe was the bread basket of southern Africa. Now its citizens stay and starve or seek bread in South Africa. Similar to Mao's China, Mugabe is big on state control of everything, with plans that destroy the economy. And, as with all states where democracy is blighted and official corruption flourishes, Mugabe ensures he will not be called to account for his evil incompetence. He allows his henchmen to ransack the state. And his regime rorts elections and intimidates opponents. There is yet another dictatorship Mugabe's Zimbabwe is coming to resemble -- Kim Jong-il's starving police state in North Korea.
That Mugabe's dictatorship would be ended by fair elections seems assured. But there is no way he will readily submit to such. Nor is it likely that the UN would ever act in the interests of the Zimbabwean people and remove him. Mugabe enjoys the diplomatic protection of South African President Thabo Mbeki, presumably on the principal that African leaders should stick together. China is happy to fill the aid and investment vacuum left by Western nations. And the prospect of the West removing Mugabe by military action is unlikely given the US debacle in Iraq following the removal of Saddam. Zimbabwe's best hope is that the 82-year-old Mugabe's regime will die with him, or collapse earlier under the weight of its own incompetence. Neither are morally acceptable solutions -- but Zimbabwe's tragedy is being played out at a time when appeasing or ignoring evil is politically popular in many of the countries that have the economic and military power to do something about it.
Mugabe makes life a misery in Zimbabwe
January 08, 2007
A country is being destroyed by avarice and ambition
ENEMIES of liberty who argue that democracy is not suited to all societies and that US President George W. Bush was wrong in principle as well as in practice in fighting to allow Iraqis to choose their rulers should read RW Johnson's report on Zimbabwe in The Australian today. The story shows what happens when fair elections and open government, as well as the other pillars of a just society, free enterprise and equal access to justice, do not exist. Johnson reports on how a once prosperous African nation is reduced to a wreck, where starvation and brutality are the norm and the state treats ordinary people as its enemy. Millions have fled Zimbabwe, or died from hunger, disease and violence. Life expectancy is barely half what it was 15 years ago, and the economy has shrunk by 40 per cent this century. And it is all the work of dictator Robert Mugabe and his henchmen, who have entrenched their political power and economic authority by beggaring and beating, starving and killing their own people.
As with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Mugabe's Zimbabwe is a warning to the world of what happens when a state is run as a family or factional fiefdom. As in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, in Zimbabwe the state and the dictator's political party are all but amalgamated. Such regimes are not only immoral, they are incompetent in governing for the people, because the needs of the vast mass of ordinary citizens are always ignored. As in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Mugabe has tried to drive the urban poor into the country by bulldozing their shanty towns. Every dictator understands the dangers of large concentrations of desperate people in cities. Like the old Soviet Union under Stalin, Mugabe has taken farmland from ostensible enemies of the regime, in this case white farmers, and handed it over to party loyalists. In the process, as was the Soviet experience, he has all but destroyed the country's rural economy. Not long ago, Zimbabwe was the bread basket of southern Africa. Now its citizens stay and starve or seek bread in South Africa. Similar to Mao's China, Mugabe is big on state control of everything, with plans that destroy the economy. And, as with all states where democracy is blighted and official corruption flourishes, Mugabe ensures he will not be called to account for his evil incompetence. He allows his henchmen to ransack the state. And his regime rorts elections and intimidates opponents. There is yet another dictatorship Mugabe's Zimbabwe is coming to resemble -- Kim Jong-il's starving police state in North Korea.
That Mugabe's dictatorship would be ended by fair elections seems assured. But there is no way he will readily submit to such. Nor is it likely that the UN would ever act in the interests of the Zimbabwean people and remove him. Mugabe enjoys the diplomatic protection of South African President Thabo Mbeki, presumably on the principal that African leaders should stick together. China is happy to fill the aid and investment vacuum left by Western nations. And the prospect of the West removing Mugabe by military action is unlikely given the US debacle in Iraq following the removal of Saddam. Zimbabwe's best hope is that the 82-year-old Mugabe's regime will die with him, or collapse earlier under the weight of its own incompetence. Neither are morally acceptable solutions -- but Zimbabwe's tragedy is being played out at a time when appeasing or ignoring evil is politically popular in many of the countries that have the economic and military power to do something about it.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Ashdod - No longer a backwater town
(with quotes from former Zimbabwean - Judy Jacobsen)
No longer a backwater town
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID E. KAPLAN, THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 6, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For most Israelis, Ashdod is hardly on their road map. It's a signpost for others to turn off at - and "turn-off" has been the perception this coastal city has endured for half a century. Yet modern Ashdod is a growing city that boasts state-of-the-art architecture, a burgeoning nightlife scene and successful coexistence among its disparate communities.
In November, Ashdod began year-long celebrations of its jubilee, showcasing a model city that does Israel proud and belies common preconceptions.
Part of Israelis' historical ambivalence was poignantly captured in Amos Oz's 1983 book In the Land of Israel, where it was not the nation's capital but the unlikely city of Ashdod that the author dreamt of paving the way to a peaceful future. A modest dream, devoid of biblical longings and a desire to be at the center stage of history, "humble Ashdod, Israel at its best," recognized Oz. While not quite the "grandiose fulfillment of the Prophets," he wrote, Ashdod is "a city on a human scale… and from her we shall see what will flower."
Twenty-three years later, Oz's insights are all too evident. Ask any local from the mayor to port worker "What makes the Ashdod of today special?" and the answer is invariably "The people!"
"It's a city of tolerance hardly found anywhere else in Israel. Something quite unique," explains Arieh Azoulai, mayor of the city during the 1980s and, until recently, chairman of the Jewish Agency's Immigration and Absorption Committee. Azoulai, who speaks Hebrew, Spanish, French, English and Arabic, exudes the cosmopolitan ambience of his town.
Sitting in Caf Monart outside the magnificent new cultural center, Azoulai, who was born in Fez, Morocco, becomes quite poetic in describing this phenomenon. "At first glance, it's the beach that makes this place special - some 10 kilometers of white majestic coastline."
But for Azoulai, the sea is but a metaphor. "While it pounds the beach with each successive wave, it has really been the wave after wave of immigration that has enriched this place. We have here some 35 communities, and the place gels as a homogeneous living organism."
He points out that Ashdod has the third largest haredi community in Israel, after Jerusalem and Bnei Brak - a fact few people are aware of. "However, they don't high-profile their presence by imposing their beliefs as happens elsewhere in Israel," he notes.
Azoulai graphically portrays the cultural amalgam by listing the types of cuisine available in Ashdod. "There are Indian, Moroccan, French and South American restaurants, but I see them all as simply Ashdod restaurants. We are different, but we are one."
The degree of tolerance expounded by Azoulai was confirmed by Yigal Mizrachi, a Jerusalemite brought in a year ago by Mayor Zvi Zilker to organize the jubilee celebrations. "Can you believe it? In a city with so many haredim, there are over 10 shops where you can buy pork. Now, you may approve or disapprove of this, but the fact is that nobody publicly complains, and people just get on with their lives, respectful and mindful of others. This is not the case with my beloved Jerusalem. This city [Ashdod] is truly an example of cross-cultural coexistence."
Long-time resident Judy Jacobsen, originally from Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe), recounts that when she arrived with her husband Rolf from Bulawayo in 1963, "There were only 13,000 residents. There was just sand, sand and more sand. You had to ensure that you always had enough petrol in your tank to drive to Yavne, the nearest gas station to Ashdod. One hardly heard any Hebrew - it was mainly French and Arabic, as the immigrants who preceded us came from Morocco and Egypt. You had to go to Rehovot to feel you were in Israel. When my daughter was in first grade, I asked her teacher if it was apparent that she came from a home where Hebrew was not spoken. The teacher laughed, saying that there was not a single pupil in the class whose parents spoke Hebrew."
Jacobsen says that only when ELTA (a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries) established a plant in Ashdod did native-born Israelis start arriving in Ashdod in significant numbers. "Their infusion into the cultural mix of Ashdod had a huge impact on transforming an essentially immigrant town into an Israeli city."
The vision of Amos Oz was taking shape.
The rate of population growth is one of the highest in Israel. The city that started with 22 immigrant Moroccan families in 1956 is fast approaching the 230,000 mark. About 38% of the current population arrived within the last decade, primarily from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Latin America and France.
While Oz played down the nexus between the ancient past of Ashdod and its future, hardly a patch of habitable land in Israel today is not biblically bound. Ruins found at Tel Ashdod reveal that Ashdod was built during the 17th century BCE as a Canaanite fortified city. After its destruction, the Philistines settled there and made it one of the five main cities of their kingdom. During the Israel reign, Ashdod became part of the territory of the Judas tribe and is first mentioned in the Bible in the Book of Joshua.
At the beginning of the fourth century BCE, Ashdod fell to Alexander the Great. It typically passed from one set of conquerors to another until the Romans destroyed the city. It took some 2,000 years for Jews to return and rebuild Ashdod, and they arrived in the middle of the night.
Yuval Beaton, assistant curator of the Ashdod Museum of Art, explains: "It was a common tactic in the early days when establishing settlements in desolate areas. They learned from bitter experience that if settlers arrived during the day, they would refuse to disembark from the buses or trucks, so horrified with what they saw. Who could blame them! It was much safer to bring them at night. And this is precisely how 22 Moroccan families came directly from the ship that brought them to Israel to be deposited here on a cold, wintry November night in 1956."
Born and bred in Ashdod, Beaton attended university in New York, where he studied fine art. "I lived in Brooklyn and had a great time, but returned. I love this place," he says.
Members of all 22 original families were present at the opening of the festivities on November 26. It was an emotional occasion as they unveiled for the public one of the original, windowless tin shacks that had served as Ashdod's first dwellings. With no internal divisions, these primitive structures served as a home often for up to eight members of a family. Yet despite the hardships, all 22 families stuck it out, providing the bedrock for the waves of immigrants that were to follow.
Perched on the modern city's central piazza, surrounded and dwarfed by the towering futuresque architecture of the new municipal complex and cultural center, the tiny tin shack conveys a powerful narrative of a journey from primitive past to prosperous future.
Standing at the door of the shack, Mayor Zilker - a city engineer by profession - gazes up at the tall buildings casting giant shadows over the piazza, finally settles his eyes on the humble dwelling and stretches out his arms. "See how far we have come. We started from nothing, on sand dunes! I remember the early council meetings when, arriving at work, I would empty my shoes of sand at the entrance."
Having first served as mayor in 1969, it's been a long time since Zilker has had to empty his shoes. It's been more a case of trying to fill up the town's coffers to meet the growing demands of a burgeoning population. This in the main has been achieved by establishing Ashdod as one of Israel's major industrial cities. "Employment opportunities are not lacking," says Zilker. "The city is home to major companies in the sectors of electronics, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, plastics, metals, paper, wood and furniture."
Other important industries include the Eshkol electrical power station, an oil refinery (one of two in the country) and a coal terminal. Also located in Ashdod is ELTA, where radar equipment, electronic warfare systems, and electronic signals intelligence (ELINT) is now developed.
Ashdod's port is again the biggest in the country, boosted by the completion of the first stage of a major addition: Jubilee Port, renamed Eitan Port after Rafael Eitan, the former IDF chief of staff and government minister who drowned, having been swept off the pier he had helped build. A fighter all his life, Eitan went down "battling the sea and its waves," said former prime minister Ariel Sharon at the inauguration ceremony last year in paying tribute to his comrade who, having left politics, dedicated his time and energy to upgrading Ashdod's port.
"Eitan Port is the first computerized harbor in Israel and will offer a level of technology and service unprecedented in Israel," said Sharon.
The port operates one of the most advanced systems in the world - the terminal operation systems (TOS) that can reduce a ship's waiting time by 70%. "It is a wonderful gift to the city of Ashdod during its jubilee year," said the former prime minister, adding that he was delighted to see "a woman, Iris Stark, today heading the company as chairperson of the directorate of the Ashdod Port Company. It signals a new era."
That Stark holds such a high position traditionally occupied by a male is no less pleasing to Ettie Attias, advisor to the mayor on women's issues. While the Knesset recently mandated that all municipalities must create this position, Mayor Zilker was way ahead of the pack. Attias had been the mayor's advisor on women's issues for a number of years prior to the legislation. "We aspire for our city to be progressive and have legislated that following the next election, all municipal bodies must have a minimum of 30% women on their directorates," says Zilker.
A former chairperson of WIZO Ashdod, as well as serving on the organization's national executive, Attias is out "to empower women.
I want to bring them out of themselves and instill confidence. They have to strive for top positions in the running of our city. If women are to have an impact, they need to be where the decisions are made."
Rather than sitting idly by waiting for this to happen, Attias has been running leadership courses for women. "At the moment we have only three women on a council of 25. Next elections, this will change," she asserts. "I am hoping we will have as many as 10 to 15 woman candidates."
Expected or unexpected, another candidate in the next election will be the indefatigable mayor, who has held the reins of municipal power for a total of 30 years. If some thought that he might step aside, that's not going to happen. "The past is past, I am the future," he says, sending a clear message to his rivals that he is on the campaign trail for reelection next year.
Zilker is in high gear. "Our main objectives are education, public health and tourism. All three issues represent gaping holes - no university, no hospital, nor a proper tourist infrastructure. This will be the agenda in the years ahead."
While more than 30% of the municipal budget is allocated to education, indicating its high priority on the council's agenda, "we are determined within the near future to establish a university," says Zilker.
On the question of public health, while there are medical centers and clinics all over the city, residents requiring hospital services have to travel to neighboring Ashkelon. Again, Zilker is confident that "in the near future, Ashdod will have its first hospital."
Most residents agree that the reason Ashdod does not enjoy a thriving tourist industry is its proximity to Tel Aviv, only 32 kilometers to the north. "It's hard to compete," says long-time resident Jacobsen.
Nevertheless, maintains Zilker, "with our seafront promenade, restaurants, pubs, discotheques, summer festivities, the Mediterranean festival, nautical sports, as well as historical sites and natural reserves, we can become a premier tourist location. No longer do our youth trek to Tel Aviv for nightlife and action. It's all happening here in Ashdod."
Ashdod has more beaches - 10 kilometers of coast - than any other city in Israel. The recent completion of a 550-berth marina and the city's first major hotel is only the first stage in an ambitious plan to make Ashdod a major Mediterranean tourist destination.
Currently on display in the Ashdod Museum of Art is a photographic exhibition entitled "The Making of a City." The selection of photos spanning 50 years depicts a city that evolved and crystallized upon barren sand dunes to became home to various diasporas uprooted from their past. Each group, with its heritage, culture, language and customs, is "living side by side with other groups in harmony, tolerance and cooperation, proud of being Ashdodian. It's a city with its face to the future," says
One wonders what Oz is doing living in Arad.
A Francophile domain
Sharing Mayor Zvi Zilker's optimism for the future of Ashdod is the Jewish community of France. If the 1990s in Ashdod was the "Russian era," then the new millennium is the French era.
"The French are coming," says Arieh Azoulai who, as chairman of the Jewish Agency's immigration and absorption committee, had been instrumental in recent years in promoting and facilitating immigration to Israel from France.
"It's not only a question of anti-Semitism in France. Existentially, the real threat to French Jewry is not anti-Semitism but assimilation, so young French Jews who want to ensure Jewish continuity have set their sights on Israel. So why Ashdod? Well, the French love the sea and will always choose to live along or near the coast. That is why they are flocking mainly to Netanya and Ashdod and, to a lesser extent, Eilat."
While the number of French restaurants in the city testifies to Azoulai's analysis, the most emblematic visual pronouncement of this new phenomenon is the monumental glass pyramid at the entrance to the Ashdod Museum of Art. It is reminiscent of a similar structure at the entrance to the Louvre in Paris. Under the bold Hebrew lettering appears not English but "Centre d'arts Monart."
"I expect that as much as 40% of the city's residents can speak French," says Azoulai, "a factor that will continue to attract Jews from France to Ashdod."
Adding further credence to his hypotheses, Azoulai notes that during the jubilee celebrations, Ashdod was twinned with the city of Bordeaux. High profiling this event, Alain Juppe, the former French premier and mayor of Bordeaux, arrived in Ashdod with the French cultural attach , paving the way to establishing a French Institute to "strengthen the French language and culture," says Azoulai.
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Copyright 1995-2006 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/
No longer a backwater town
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID E. KAPLAN, THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 6, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For most Israelis, Ashdod is hardly on their road map. It's a signpost for others to turn off at - and "turn-off" has been the perception this coastal city has endured for half a century. Yet modern Ashdod is a growing city that boasts state-of-the-art architecture, a burgeoning nightlife scene and successful coexistence among its disparate communities.
In November, Ashdod began year-long celebrations of its jubilee, showcasing a model city that does Israel proud and belies common preconceptions.
Part of Israelis' historical ambivalence was poignantly captured in Amos Oz's 1983 book In the Land of Israel, where it was not the nation's capital but the unlikely city of Ashdod that the author dreamt of paving the way to a peaceful future. A modest dream, devoid of biblical longings and a desire to be at the center stage of history, "humble Ashdod, Israel at its best," recognized Oz. While not quite the "grandiose fulfillment of the Prophets," he wrote, Ashdod is "a city on a human scale… and from her we shall see what will flower."
Twenty-three years later, Oz's insights are all too evident. Ask any local from the mayor to port worker "What makes the Ashdod of today special?" and the answer is invariably "The people!"
"It's a city of tolerance hardly found anywhere else in Israel. Something quite unique," explains Arieh Azoulai, mayor of the city during the 1980s and, until recently, chairman of the Jewish Agency's Immigration and Absorption Committee. Azoulai, who speaks Hebrew, Spanish, French, English and Arabic, exudes the cosmopolitan ambience of his town.
Sitting in Caf Monart outside the magnificent new cultural center, Azoulai, who was born in Fez, Morocco, becomes quite poetic in describing this phenomenon. "At first glance, it's the beach that makes this place special - some 10 kilometers of white majestic coastline."
But for Azoulai, the sea is but a metaphor. "While it pounds the beach with each successive wave, it has really been the wave after wave of immigration that has enriched this place. We have here some 35 communities, and the place gels as a homogeneous living organism."
He points out that Ashdod has the third largest haredi community in Israel, after Jerusalem and Bnei Brak - a fact few people are aware of. "However, they don't high-profile their presence by imposing their beliefs as happens elsewhere in Israel," he notes.
Azoulai graphically portrays the cultural amalgam by listing the types of cuisine available in Ashdod. "There are Indian, Moroccan, French and South American restaurants, but I see them all as simply Ashdod restaurants. We are different, but we are one."
The degree of tolerance expounded by Azoulai was confirmed by Yigal Mizrachi, a Jerusalemite brought in a year ago by Mayor Zvi Zilker to organize the jubilee celebrations. "Can you believe it? In a city with so many haredim, there are over 10 shops where you can buy pork. Now, you may approve or disapprove of this, but the fact is that nobody publicly complains, and people just get on with their lives, respectful and mindful of others. This is not the case with my beloved Jerusalem. This city [Ashdod] is truly an example of cross-cultural coexistence."
Long-time resident Judy Jacobsen, originally from Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe), recounts that when she arrived with her husband Rolf from Bulawayo in 1963, "There were only 13,000 residents. There was just sand, sand and more sand. You had to ensure that you always had enough petrol in your tank to drive to Yavne, the nearest gas station to Ashdod. One hardly heard any Hebrew - it was mainly French and Arabic, as the immigrants who preceded us came from Morocco and Egypt. You had to go to Rehovot to feel you were in Israel. When my daughter was in first grade, I asked her teacher if it was apparent that she came from a home where Hebrew was not spoken. The teacher laughed, saying that there was not a single pupil in the class whose parents spoke Hebrew."
Jacobsen says that only when ELTA (a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries) established a plant in Ashdod did native-born Israelis start arriving in Ashdod in significant numbers. "Their infusion into the cultural mix of Ashdod had a huge impact on transforming an essentially immigrant town into an Israeli city."
The vision of Amos Oz was taking shape.
The rate of population growth is one of the highest in Israel. The city that started with 22 immigrant Moroccan families in 1956 is fast approaching the 230,000 mark. About 38% of the current population arrived within the last decade, primarily from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, Latin America and France.
While Oz played down the nexus between the ancient past of Ashdod and its future, hardly a patch of habitable land in Israel today is not biblically bound. Ruins found at Tel Ashdod reveal that Ashdod was built during the 17th century BCE as a Canaanite fortified city. After its destruction, the Philistines settled there and made it one of the five main cities of their kingdom. During the Israel reign, Ashdod became part of the territory of the Judas tribe and is first mentioned in the Bible in the Book of Joshua.
At the beginning of the fourth century BCE, Ashdod fell to Alexander the Great. It typically passed from one set of conquerors to another until the Romans destroyed the city. It took some 2,000 years for Jews to return and rebuild Ashdod, and they arrived in the middle of the night.
Yuval Beaton, assistant curator of the Ashdod Museum of Art, explains: "It was a common tactic in the early days when establishing settlements in desolate areas. They learned from bitter experience that if settlers arrived during the day, they would refuse to disembark from the buses or trucks, so horrified with what they saw. Who could blame them! It was much safer to bring them at night. And this is precisely how 22 Moroccan families came directly from the ship that brought them to Israel to be deposited here on a cold, wintry November night in 1956."
Born and bred in Ashdod, Beaton attended university in New York, where he studied fine art. "I lived in Brooklyn and had a great time, but returned. I love this place," he says.
Members of all 22 original families were present at the opening of the festivities on November 26. It was an emotional occasion as they unveiled for the public one of the original, windowless tin shacks that had served as Ashdod's first dwellings. With no internal divisions, these primitive structures served as a home often for up to eight members of a family. Yet despite the hardships, all 22 families stuck it out, providing the bedrock for the waves of immigrants that were to follow.
Perched on the modern city's central piazza, surrounded and dwarfed by the towering futuresque architecture of the new municipal complex and cultural center, the tiny tin shack conveys a powerful narrative of a journey from primitive past to prosperous future.
Standing at the door of the shack, Mayor Zilker - a city engineer by profession - gazes up at the tall buildings casting giant shadows over the piazza, finally settles his eyes on the humble dwelling and stretches out his arms. "See how far we have come. We started from nothing, on sand dunes! I remember the early council meetings when, arriving at work, I would empty my shoes of sand at the entrance."
Having first served as mayor in 1969, it's been a long time since Zilker has had to empty his shoes. It's been more a case of trying to fill up the town's coffers to meet the growing demands of a burgeoning population. This in the main has been achieved by establishing Ashdod as one of Israel's major industrial cities. "Employment opportunities are not lacking," says Zilker. "The city is home to major companies in the sectors of electronics, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, plastics, metals, paper, wood and furniture."
Other important industries include the Eshkol electrical power station, an oil refinery (one of two in the country) and a coal terminal. Also located in Ashdod is ELTA, where radar equipment, electronic warfare systems, and electronic signals intelligence (ELINT) is now developed.
Ashdod's port is again the biggest in the country, boosted by the completion of the first stage of a major addition: Jubilee Port, renamed Eitan Port after Rafael Eitan, the former IDF chief of staff and government minister who drowned, having been swept off the pier he had helped build. A fighter all his life, Eitan went down "battling the sea and its waves," said former prime minister Ariel Sharon at the inauguration ceremony last year in paying tribute to his comrade who, having left politics, dedicated his time and energy to upgrading Ashdod's port.
"Eitan Port is the first computerized harbor in Israel and will offer a level of technology and service unprecedented in Israel," said Sharon.
The port operates one of the most advanced systems in the world - the terminal operation systems (TOS) that can reduce a ship's waiting time by 70%. "It is a wonderful gift to the city of Ashdod during its jubilee year," said the former prime minister, adding that he was delighted to see "a woman, Iris Stark, today heading the company as chairperson of the directorate of the Ashdod Port Company. It signals a new era."
That Stark holds such a high position traditionally occupied by a male is no less pleasing to Ettie Attias, advisor to the mayor on women's issues. While the Knesset recently mandated that all municipalities must create this position, Mayor Zilker was way ahead of the pack. Attias had been the mayor's advisor on women's issues for a number of years prior to the legislation. "We aspire for our city to be progressive and have legislated that following the next election, all municipal bodies must have a minimum of 30% women on their directorates," says Zilker.
A former chairperson of WIZO Ashdod, as well as serving on the organization's national executive, Attias is out "to empower women.
I want to bring them out of themselves and instill confidence. They have to strive for top positions in the running of our city. If women are to have an impact, they need to be where the decisions are made."
Rather than sitting idly by waiting for this to happen, Attias has been running leadership courses for women. "At the moment we have only three women on a council of 25. Next elections, this will change," she asserts. "I am hoping we will have as many as 10 to 15 woman candidates."
Expected or unexpected, another candidate in the next election will be the indefatigable mayor, who has held the reins of municipal power for a total of 30 years. If some thought that he might step aside, that's not going to happen. "The past is past, I am the future," he says, sending a clear message to his rivals that he is on the campaign trail for reelection next year.
Zilker is in high gear. "Our main objectives are education, public health and tourism. All three issues represent gaping holes - no university, no hospital, nor a proper tourist infrastructure. This will be the agenda in the years ahead."
While more than 30% of the municipal budget is allocated to education, indicating its high priority on the council's agenda, "we are determined within the near future to establish a university," says Zilker.
On the question of public health, while there are medical centers and clinics all over the city, residents requiring hospital services have to travel to neighboring Ashkelon. Again, Zilker is confident that "in the near future, Ashdod will have its first hospital."
Most residents agree that the reason Ashdod does not enjoy a thriving tourist industry is its proximity to Tel Aviv, only 32 kilometers to the north. "It's hard to compete," says long-time resident Jacobsen.
Nevertheless, maintains Zilker, "with our seafront promenade, restaurants, pubs, discotheques, summer festivities, the Mediterranean festival, nautical sports, as well as historical sites and natural reserves, we can become a premier tourist location. No longer do our youth trek to Tel Aviv for nightlife and action. It's all happening here in Ashdod."
Ashdod has more beaches - 10 kilometers of coast - than any other city in Israel. The recent completion of a 550-berth marina and the city's first major hotel is only the first stage in an ambitious plan to make Ashdod a major Mediterranean tourist destination.
Currently on display in the Ashdod Museum of Art is a photographic exhibition entitled "The Making of a City." The selection of photos spanning 50 years depicts a city that evolved and crystallized upon barren sand dunes to became home to various diasporas uprooted from their past. Each group, with its heritage, culture, language and customs, is "living side by side with other groups in harmony, tolerance and cooperation, proud of being Ashdodian. It's a city with its face to the future," says
One wonders what Oz is doing living in Arad.
A Francophile domain
Sharing Mayor Zvi Zilker's optimism for the future of Ashdod is the Jewish community of France. If the 1990s in Ashdod was the "Russian era," then the new millennium is the French era.
"The French are coming," says Arieh Azoulai who, as chairman of the Jewish Agency's immigration and absorption committee, had been instrumental in recent years in promoting and facilitating immigration to Israel from France.
"It's not only a question of anti-Semitism in France. Existentially, the real threat to French Jewry is not anti-Semitism but assimilation, so young French Jews who want to ensure Jewish continuity have set their sights on Israel. So why Ashdod? Well, the French love the sea and will always choose to live along or near the coast. That is why they are flocking mainly to Netanya and Ashdod and, to a lesser extent, Eilat."
While the number of French restaurants in the city testifies to Azoulai's analysis, the most emblematic visual pronouncement of this new phenomenon is the monumental glass pyramid at the entrance to the Ashdod Museum of Art. It is reminiscent of a similar structure at the entrance to the Louvre in Paris. Under the bold Hebrew lettering appears not English but "Centre d'arts Monart."
"I expect that as much as 40% of the city's residents can speak French," says Azoulai, "a factor that will continue to attract Jews from France to Ashdod."
Adding further credence to his hypotheses, Azoulai notes that during the jubilee celebrations, Ashdod was twinned with the city of Bordeaux. High profiling this event, Alain Juppe, the former French premier and mayor of Bordeaux, arrived in Ashdod with the French cultural attach , paving the way to establishing a French Institute to "strengthen the French language and culture," says Azoulai.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1995-2006 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/
Sunday, October 08, 2006
VOA News - New Zimbabwe Law Allows for Eviction of Remaining White Farmers
New Zimbabwe Law Allows for Eviction of Remaining White Farmers
By Peta Thornycroft
Johannesburg
07 October 2006
Thornycroft report - Download 372k
Listen to Thornycroft report
Zimbabwe's parliament has passed a new land law that allows eviction of remaining white farmers. This is the latest chapter in a six-year controversial land-redistribution program.
Only a few hundred of more than 4,000 white farmers remain on their land in Zimbabwe. Under the land redistribution program announced by President Robert Mugabe in 2000, commercial farms were seized, ostensibly for the resettlement of landless blacks.
For six years, hundreds of white Zimbabwean farmers have been to court to try to avoid losing their farms, the businesses on their land and their homes.
Under a 2005 constitutional amendment, ownership of all white-owned land reverted to the state. However, the government did not have the power to evict farmers from state land they occupied, without lengthy legal battles.
Now, under the new law, white farmers have 90 days from the date President Mugabe rubber stamps the law to leave their homes and businesses, without recourse to the courts.
However, not all in the ruling ZANU-PF administration want the last white farmers to leave. The governor of the central bank, Gideon Gono, has been lending those still on their land money to grow crops.
The two vice presidents, Joyce Mujuru and Joseph Msika, have repeatedly said recently that they want productive white farmers to remain.
However, Lands Minister Didymus Mutasa told VOA last week that only he controls what happens to land, and he has made it clear to western diplomats in recent months he wants all white farmers off Zimbabwe's land.
Before the land-reform program, Zimbabwe was not only able to feed itself, but was a net exporter of food to the region, and commercial agriculture was the largest foreign currency earner and the largest employer.
Now, Zimbabwe is bankrupt. It depends on food imports, and, last week, the United Nations World Food Program said it had run out of money to continue to feed hundreds-of-thousands of people in need.
By Peta Thornycroft
Johannesburg
07 October 2006
Thornycroft report - Download 372k
Listen to Thornycroft report
Zimbabwe's parliament has passed a new land law that allows eviction of remaining white farmers. This is the latest chapter in a six-year controversial land-redistribution program.
Only a few hundred of more than 4,000 white farmers remain on their land in Zimbabwe. Under the land redistribution program announced by President Robert Mugabe in 2000, commercial farms were seized, ostensibly for the resettlement of landless blacks.
For six years, hundreds of white Zimbabwean farmers have been to court to try to avoid losing their farms, the businesses on their land and their homes.
Under a 2005 constitutional amendment, ownership of all white-owned land reverted to the state. However, the government did not have the power to evict farmers from state land they occupied, without lengthy legal battles.
Now, under the new law, white farmers have 90 days from the date President Mugabe rubber stamps the law to leave their homes and businesses, without recourse to the courts.
However, not all in the ruling ZANU-PF administration want the last white farmers to leave. The governor of the central bank, Gideon Gono, has been lending those still on their land money to grow crops.
The two vice presidents, Joyce Mujuru and Joseph Msika, have repeatedly said recently that they want productive white farmers to remain.
However, Lands Minister Didymus Mutasa told VOA last week that only he controls what happens to land, and he has made it clear to western diplomats in recent months he wants all white farmers off Zimbabwe's land.
Before the land-reform program, Zimbabwe was not only able to feed itself, but was a net exporter of food to the region, and commercial agriculture was the largest foreign currency earner and the largest employer.
Now, Zimbabwe is bankrupt. It depends on food imports, and, last week, the United Nations World Food Program said it had run out of money to continue to feed hundreds-of-thousands of people in need.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Chaos in a small country
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chaos in a small country
By Arnold Beichman
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published October 3, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We envision an Africa where peace is known by all, where freedom is shared by all, where opportunity is expanding for all, and most importantly, where responsibility is embraced by all. Because we stand together with Africa, America today is helping more people across the continent to build lives of hope and dignity than ever before in history."
These are the words of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaking Sept. 27 at a meeting of the Africa Society. What she envisions will never come to pass in Africa while dictators like the 82-year-old Robert Mugabe hold the reins of power in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is a country in southern Africa, in area slightly larger than Montana. Its people are brutalized by one of the worst dictatorships in Africa, if not in the world. Mr. Mugabe has been in power more than a quarter-century, thanks to rigged elections. In other words, there is no rule of law in Zimbabwe.
Because it is a small country, Zimbabwe falls below the international community's radar screen. And because it is small, it receives little attention in the media and in international forums even though it suffers an annual inflation rate of 1,200 percent, which spells misery for its population of 12.7 million. Next year will be even worse, says the International Monetary Fund, predicting an inflation rate of 4,000 percent. Equally telling, Canada's Fraser Institute has created an Economic Freedom of the World Index, which measures how a country's policies support property rights, competition and personal choice. The lowest on the list of 130 countries (Hong Kong, Singapore and Chile head the list) is -- right -- Zimbabwe.
The Human Rights Forum in Zimbabwe has bravely spoken up: "Torture in Zimbabwe is both widespread and systemic, demanding both a national and international response." Mr. Mugabe's response to these accusations has been to accuse the U.S. and Britain of plotting to overthrow him.
As is inevitable in a dictatorship that has produced an economic disaster, public protest is not tolerated. According to on-the-scene reports, police and soldiers battered trade unionists during a protest march Sept. 13 in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. The brutal treatment got worse when the marchers were herded into a Harare police station.
"We were told to get into cells in pairs," said Wellington Chibebe, secretary-general of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Trade Unions (CZTU), speaking from a hospital bed, thanks to beatings by Mr. Mugabe's police. "They started beating us up all over the body with batons and a knobkerrie. [A short club with one knobbed end.]"
Mr. Mugabe has set up his own web page -- http://mugabe.netfirms.com/main.htm -- with this opening statement deriding democratic elections:
"Here I am on Election Day (yawn). I mean, what's the point? Just to keep up pretenses for the foreign observers?
I think not. The next election is going to be ONLY Zanu-PF. No MDC, no foreigners and no boring rallys.[sic]"
The Mugabe regime has paid no attention to widespread international protests -- the British Trades Union Congress, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the Congress of South African Unions, among others. And why should Mr. Mugabe care what anybody says? As in the fable of the timorous mice, who's going to bell the imperious cat?
Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is a columnist for The Washington Times.
Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Copyright The Washington Times
Chaos in a small country
By Arnold Beichman
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published October 3, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We envision an Africa where peace is known by all, where freedom is shared by all, where opportunity is expanding for all, and most importantly, where responsibility is embraced by all. Because we stand together with Africa, America today is helping more people across the continent to build lives of hope and dignity than ever before in history."
These are the words of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaking Sept. 27 at a meeting of the Africa Society. What she envisions will never come to pass in Africa while dictators like the 82-year-old Robert Mugabe hold the reins of power in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is a country in southern Africa, in area slightly larger than Montana. Its people are brutalized by one of the worst dictatorships in Africa, if not in the world. Mr. Mugabe has been in power more than a quarter-century, thanks to rigged elections. In other words, there is no rule of law in Zimbabwe.
Because it is a small country, Zimbabwe falls below the international community's radar screen. And because it is small, it receives little attention in the media and in international forums even though it suffers an annual inflation rate of 1,200 percent, which spells misery for its population of 12.7 million. Next year will be even worse, says the International Monetary Fund, predicting an inflation rate of 4,000 percent. Equally telling, Canada's Fraser Institute has created an Economic Freedom of the World Index, which measures how a country's policies support property rights, competition and personal choice. The lowest on the list of 130 countries (Hong Kong, Singapore and Chile head the list) is -- right -- Zimbabwe.
The Human Rights Forum in Zimbabwe has bravely spoken up: "Torture in Zimbabwe is both widespread and systemic, demanding both a national and international response." Mr. Mugabe's response to these accusations has been to accuse the U.S. and Britain of plotting to overthrow him.
As is inevitable in a dictatorship that has produced an economic disaster, public protest is not tolerated. According to on-the-scene reports, police and soldiers battered trade unionists during a protest march Sept. 13 in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. The brutal treatment got worse when the marchers were herded into a Harare police station.
"We were told to get into cells in pairs," said Wellington Chibebe, secretary-general of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Trade Unions (CZTU), speaking from a hospital bed, thanks to beatings by Mr. Mugabe's police. "They started beating us up all over the body with batons and a knobkerrie. [A short club with one knobbed end.]"
Mr. Mugabe has set up his own web page -- http://mugabe.netfirms.com/main.htm -- with this opening statement deriding democratic elections:
"Here I am on Election Day (yawn). I mean, what's the point? Just to keep up pretenses for the foreign observers?
I think not. The next election is going to be ONLY Zanu-PF. No MDC, no foreigners and no boring rallys.[sic]"
The Mugabe regime has paid no attention to widespread international protests -- the British Trades Union Congress, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the Congress of South African Unions, among others. And why should Mr. Mugabe care what anybody says? As in the fable of the timorous mice, who's going to bell the imperious cat?
Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is a columnist for The Washington Times.
Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Return to the article
Want to use this article? Click here for options!
Copyright The Washington Times
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Zimbabweans Bear Brunt of Economic Meltdown
more of the same miserable story from Zim....
Zimbabweans Bear Brunt of Economic Meltdown
Institute for War & Peace Reporting (London)
COLUMN
June 9, 2006
Posted to the web June 13, 2006
By Benedict Unendoro
Harare
If an uprising begins in Zimbabwe any time soon it might well be dubbed "the Lemonist Revolution".
So important has the lemon now become that it is a part of every family's shopping basket. People visiting neighbouring South Africa return with plastic bags loaded with the yellow-skinned citrus.
Fresh milk, when available, has become unaffordable for most. The same goes for sugar. At breakfast, to enhance the taste of their morning cup of tea, locals now use lemon instead of milk and sugar. They need it in their porridge too, for the same reason.
"Tea tastes good with lemon," said Margaret Gweshe, a housewife living in Chitungwiza, 28 kilometres from Harare. "But that's not why we have lemon tea every day. We would prefer the old days when we had milk we could afford."
Prices of essential commodities have shot up, with inflation reaching 1043 per cent in May. "People now only have money for the very basics," said Gweshe as she cradles a two-year-old child showing the early signs of malnutrition. "Maize meal is our staple, so all the money has to be directed towards it before we can think of buying anything else."
For breakfast she gives the baby maize porridge with lemon in it while she makes do with a cup of tea and a sweet potato from her garden. To preserve maize rations there is no midday lunch. "Maputi is all we will have in the afternoon," she said. Maputi are popped maize, very different from popcorn familiar to film-goers. The latter is made from special corn, while the former are just ordinary maize kernels roasted until they pop.
"For supper we always have sadza [a thick maize porridge] with vegetables boiled in salt. There is no cooking oil. We can't afford tomatoes and onions. Having supper is an ordeal rather than a pleasure," she said.
Zimbabwe's economic meltdown is now virtually complete and ordinary Zimbabweans are bearing the brunt of it.
The price of a litre of petrol increased from 200,000 to 300,000 Zimbabwe dollars at the end of the first week of June. Obviously no foreigner can comprehend, at a glance, what that means.
So bear with me for a short seminar on a country holding two world records - the highest inflation rate in the world and the fastest shrinking economy.
The real value of one US dollar at the black market rate in a country where the formal economy has collapsed is 310,000 Zimbabwe dollars.
President Robert Mugabe's has pegged the official exchange rate at 102,000 Zimbabwe dollars to one US dollar, but US greenbacks are exchanged at this rate only in exceptional, unavoidable circumstances.
To illustrate how far we have fallen, one Zimbabwe dollar was worth more than one American dollar at independence in 1980.
Eighty per cent of all Zimbabweans now live in abject poverty on the equivalent of less than one US dollar a day.
Every rise in the price of fuel has an immediate effect on everything else. Commuter bus fares rise as soon as the price of fuel rises. The prices of basic commodities also rise because grocers have to pay more to bring the commodities to their shops.
Zimbabwe is the only country in the world whose highest denomination bank note cannot buy a loaf of bread. Less than a week after the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe introduced a new 100,000 Zimbabwe dollar bank note at the beginning of June, the price of a loaf of bread shot up from 85,000 to 132,000 Zimbabwe dollars. Last Christmas, we were paying "only" 45,000 a loaf.
A lot of things have become so ridiculous in Zimbabwe that they would be hilariously funny if they were not so deadly serious and causing so many of us to die unnaturally early. Another world record we hold is for the lowest life expectancy for our women. According to the World Health Organisation, the average Zimbabwean woman does not live now beyond the age of 34 compared with 60 years at independence.
The word "trillion" has been added to our basic vocabulary, because that is the monetary figure government departments and businesses work in.
But a recent snap survey showed that only one in ten professionals know how many zeros there are in a trillion.
The Reserve Bank has introduced "bearer cheques" because it has run out of foreign exchange to import the kind of high quality paper necessary for printing standard bank notes. The bearer cheques are printed on ordinary low quality paper, with no security features, and they expire after a given period. The last "quality" bank note printed in this country was for 1,000 Zimbabwe dollars, which these days does not buy you even a single matchstick.
For a single purchase of twenty litres of petrol, one needs 6 million Zimbabwe dollars or 300 twenty thousand dollar bearer cheques. Petrol attendants use money counters for this and as the cheques purr in the machine the poor quality paper sends lots of dust into the attendant's face. They have to wear masks because the dust causes terrible coughing.
The dust pollution is made worse because "some of our customers carry their great wads of bearer cheques in the most unsavoury of containers", one attendant told IWPR at a service station in the Harare suburb of Hatfield.
In the villages, the new money puzzles the elderly. "Why do they give us this new note when it cannot buy anything," asked an old man at funeral vigil in Chivi, 320 km south of Harare. He told IWPR that in his day, "when money was still money", one could buy a pair of shoes using the biggest denomination note. "Now this 100,000 dollar bill buys nothing, but they bring it to us anyway," he said.
The 100,000 Zimbabwe dollar bill has been dubbed the "greenback" by local wits because of its colour. But, unlike a single US dollar, one of these new notes is useless by itself. To buy a single 40-watt lightbulb you need a dozen "greenbacks".
Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono said on the eve of the launch of the 100,000 Zimbabwe dollar bearer cheque, "It will help reduce the annoyance of carrying loads and loads of money around and make shopping easier." Well, Gono, who lives in a palatial home perhaps second in size to President Mugabe's, is way out of touch with reality. We ordinary Zimbabweans no longer use wallets. They are too small. The country's money is devaluing so fast that you have to lug around plastic bags full of "bricks" of notes if you are going to a small grocery shop. To buy anything bigger, you need a suitcase.
For most low-income urban dwellers whose salaries range from a low of five million to an average of ten million Zimbabwe dollars a month, life has simply become unbearable.
Margaret Gweshe's husband earns ten million Zimbabwe dollars and works near the city centre. He needs 200,000 a day to travel to and from work and the total per month is about four million. Rental accommodation in most working class suburbs ranges between 3 million and 3.5million a month for a single room.
The Gweshes' monthly ten million Zimbabwe dollars is gobbled up just by transport and accommodation. They rent two rooms. Therefore there is no money for groceries, school fees and school uniforms, whose prices are soaring in line with runaway inflation. School shoes now cost 3 million a pair at a shoe shop considered to be one of the cheapest.
"A person earning 10 million is not able to come to work, pay school fees and accommodation. That's what it means," said Fadzai Kaseke who lives in the sprawling shantytown of Epworth just outside Harare. "That person cannot afford to get sick. Imagine if a serious illness falls in the family. The person will be in serious trouble."
Most families are surviving on one meal a day. Things that most people used to take for granted, such as milk, margarine, bread, sugar, meat, cooking oil and tea, have become luxuries. Beef, once a staple along with maize, now costs 1 million Zimbabwe dollars a kilogramme in a supermarket.
Zimbabweans joke grimly that they are "poor millionaires". Like Gladys, a domestic worker who earns more than 3 million a month. That is a salary she could only dream of a few years ago when maids' monthly wages were set at 80,000. But these days her millions do not stretch to a regular morsel of meat. So she eats dried grasshoppers.
"We are getting to the point where people can't take anymore," said Lovemore Madhuku, chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly, a major lobby group for political reform."Poverty and suffering are growing by the day. It's just a matter of time before inflation sparks civil disobedience."
Benedict Unendoro is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabweans Bear Brunt of Economic Meltdown
Institute for War & Peace Reporting (London)
COLUMN
June 9, 2006
Posted to the web June 13, 2006
By Benedict Unendoro
Harare
If an uprising begins in Zimbabwe any time soon it might well be dubbed "the Lemonist Revolution".
So important has the lemon now become that it is a part of every family's shopping basket. People visiting neighbouring South Africa return with plastic bags loaded with the yellow-skinned citrus.
Fresh milk, when available, has become unaffordable for most. The same goes for sugar. At breakfast, to enhance the taste of their morning cup of tea, locals now use lemon instead of milk and sugar. They need it in their porridge too, for the same reason.
"Tea tastes good with lemon," said Margaret Gweshe, a housewife living in Chitungwiza, 28 kilometres from Harare. "But that's not why we have lemon tea every day. We would prefer the old days when we had milk we could afford."
Prices of essential commodities have shot up, with inflation reaching 1043 per cent in May. "People now only have money for the very basics," said Gweshe as she cradles a two-year-old child showing the early signs of malnutrition. "Maize meal is our staple, so all the money has to be directed towards it before we can think of buying anything else."
For breakfast she gives the baby maize porridge with lemon in it while she makes do with a cup of tea and a sweet potato from her garden. To preserve maize rations there is no midday lunch. "Maputi is all we will have in the afternoon," she said. Maputi are popped maize, very different from popcorn familiar to film-goers. The latter is made from special corn, while the former are just ordinary maize kernels roasted until they pop.
"For supper we always have sadza [a thick maize porridge] with vegetables boiled in salt. There is no cooking oil. We can't afford tomatoes and onions. Having supper is an ordeal rather than a pleasure," she said.
Zimbabwe's economic meltdown is now virtually complete and ordinary Zimbabweans are bearing the brunt of it.
The price of a litre of petrol increased from 200,000 to 300,000 Zimbabwe dollars at the end of the first week of June. Obviously no foreigner can comprehend, at a glance, what that means.
So bear with me for a short seminar on a country holding two world records - the highest inflation rate in the world and the fastest shrinking economy.
The real value of one US dollar at the black market rate in a country where the formal economy has collapsed is 310,000 Zimbabwe dollars.
President Robert Mugabe's has pegged the official exchange rate at 102,000 Zimbabwe dollars to one US dollar, but US greenbacks are exchanged at this rate only in exceptional, unavoidable circumstances.
To illustrate how far we have fallen, one Zimbabwe dollar was worth more than one American dollar at independence in 1980.
Eighty per cent of all Zimbabweans now live in abject poverty on the equivalent of less than one US dollar a day.
Every rise in the price of fuel has an immediate effect on everything else. Commuter bus fares rise as soon as the price of fuel rises. The prices of basic commodities also rise because grocers have to pay more to bring the commodities to their shops.
Zimbabwe is the only country in the world whose highest denomination bank note cannot buy a loaf of bread. Less than a week after the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe introduced a new 100,000 Zimbabwe dollar bank note at the beginning of June, the price of a loaf of bread shot up from 85,000 to 132,000 Zimbabwe dollars. Last Christmas, we were paying "only" 45,000 a loaf.
A lot of things have become so ridiculous in Zimbabwe that they would be hilariously funny if they were not so deadly serious and causing so many of us to die unnaturally early. Another world record we hold is for the lowest life expectancy for our women. According to the World Health Organisation, the average Zimbabwean woman does not live now beyond the age of 34 compared with 60 years at independence.
The word "trillion" has been added to our basic vocabulary, because that is the monetary figure government departments and businesses work in.
But a recent snap survey showed that only one in ten professionals know how many zeros there are in a trillion.
The Reserve Bank has introduced "bearer cheques" because it has run out of foreign exchange to import the kind of high quality paper necessary for printing standard bank notes. The bearer cheques are printed on ordinary low quality paper, with no security features, and they expire after a given period. The last "quality" bank note printed in this country was for 1,000 Zimbabwe dollars, which these days does not buy you even a single matchstick.
For a single purchase of twenty litres of petrol, one needs 6 million Zimbabwe dollars or 300 twenty thousand dollar bearer cheques. Petrol attendants use money counters for this and as the cheques purr in the machine the poor quality paper sends lots of dust into the attendant's face. They have to wear masks because the dust causes terrible coughing.
The dust pollution is made worse because "some of our customers carry their great wads of bearer cheques in the most unsavoury of containers", one attendant told IWPR at a service station in the Harare suburb of Hatfield.
In the villages, the new money puzzles the elderly. "Why do they give us this new note when it cannot buy anything," asked an old man at funeral vigil in Chivi, 320 km south of Harare. He told IWPR that in his day, "when money was still money", one could buy a pair of shoes using the biggest denomination note. "Now this 100,000 dollar bill buys nothing, but they bring it to us anyway," he said.
The 100,000 Zimbabwe dollar bill has been dubbed the "greenback" by local wits because of its colour. But, unlike a single US dollar, one of these new notes is useless by itself. To buy a single 40-watt lightbulb you need a dozen "greenbacks".
Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono said on the eve of the launch of the 100,000 Zimbabwe dollar bearer cheque, "It will help reduce the annoyance of carrying loads and loads of money around and make shopping easier." Well, Gono, who lives in a palatial home perhaps second in size to President Mugabe's, is way out of touch with reality. We ordinary Zimbabweans no longer use wallets. They are too small. The country's money is devaluing so fast that you have to lug around plastic bags full of "bricks" of notes if you are going to a small grocery shop. To buy anything bigger, you need a suitcase.
For most low-income urban dwellers whose salaries range from a low of five million to an average of ten million Zimbabwe dollars a month, life has simply become unbearable.
Margaret Gweshe's husband earns ten million Zimbabwe dollars and works near the city centre. He needs 200,000 a day to travel to and from work and the total per month is about four million. Rental accommodation in most working class suburbs ranges between 3 million and 3.5million a month for a single room.
The Gweshes' monthly ten million Zimbabwe dollars is gobbled up just by transport and accommodation. They rent two rooms. Therefore there is no money for groceries, school fees and school uniforms, whose prices are soaring in line with runaway inflation. School shoes now cost 3 million a pair at a shoe shop considered to be one of the cheapest.
"A person earning 10 million is not able to come to work, pay school fees and accommodation. That's what it means," said Fadzai Kaseke who lives in the sprawling shantytown of Epworth just outside Harare. "That person cannot afford to get sick. Imagine if a serious illness falls in the family. The person will be in serious trouble."
Most families are surviving on one meal a day. Things that most people used to take for granted, such as milk, margarine, bread, sugar, meat, cooking oil and tea, have become luxuries. Beef, once a staple along with maize, now costs 1 million Zimbabwe dollars a kilogramme in a supermarket.
Zimbabweans joke grimly that they are "poor millionaires". Like Gladys, a domestic worker who earns more than 3 million a month. That is a salary she could only dream of a few years ago when maids' monthly wages were set at 80,000. But these days her millions do not stretch to a regular morsel of meat. So she eats dried grasshoppers.
"We are getting to the point where people can't take anymore," said Lovemore Madhuku, chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly, a major lobby group for political reform."Poverty and suffering are growing by the day. It's just a matter of time before inflation sparks civil disobedience."
Benedict Unendoro is the pseudonym of an IWPR journalist in Zimbabwe.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Listen to John Robertson on inflation in Zimbabwe
World
Worried About Inflation? Try Zimbabwe's 1,000 Percent
All Things Considered, May 17, 2006 · Melissa Block talks with Zimbabwean economist John Robertson about the massive inflation in real prices caused by the devaluation of government currency. Anecdotes in recent news reports put prices for goods such as bread and orange juice at as much as 500,000 Zimbabwe dollars -- or five U.S. dollars.
Click here to listen via NPR
Worried About Inflation? Try Zimbabwe's 1,000 Percent
All Things Considered, May 17, 2006 · Melissa Block talks with Zimbabwean economist John Robertson about the massive inflation in real prices caused by the devaluation of government currency. Anecdotes in recent news reports put prices for goods such as bread and orange juice at as much as 500,000 Zimbabwe dollars -- or five U.S. dollars.
Click here to listen via NPR
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