BBC
Struggle of torture victim
|
A Zimbabwean victim of
torture | BBC News Online
recounts the experience of a woman who, after suffering gang rape and torture in
Zimbabwe and fearing for her life, was initially refused asylum by the UK
government.
For the Cardiff Law Centre asylum team, tales like those of Anna (not her
real name) are sadly not unique.
Until recently, Anna was living a normal, family life in her native country,
with her husband and young daughter.
Her husband was quite a senior figure involved with the government in
Zimbabwe, which meant the family was fairly well-off.
But then Anna was accused of being involved with the opposition Movement for
Democratic Change and her life took an horrific turn.
Sarah Sugden, immigration supervisor for the law centre, recounted how Anna
came to be a client.
 |
 There were obvious signs she had been tortured and the secretary of
state decided, no, we are not going to grant asylum in this case 
|
"There's a group called the green bombers, or Zanu-PF [the ruling party], and
they go around terrorising MDC members because they don't want the opposition
around," she said.
"She was accused of involvement and, although she wasn't, her husband left
her because he couldn't be associated with such things.
"He ran off and left her all alone with the child.
"She was attacked numerous times, kidnapped, gang-raped by Zanu-PF members,
went through the most horrific tortures you can imagine.
|
Asylum seekers in Wales
Wales total: 2,200
1,200 in Cardiff
700 in Swansea
200 in Newport
51 in Wrexham (before Caia park riots)
|
"They took her to abattoirs and submerged her in vats of ice and meat.
"They'd beat her, they stripped her naked and walked her though the town
naked, and young boys would be touching her.
"In the end, she had no choice but to flee the country because she knew the
next time, that was going to be it."
Psychiatric reports
Anna fled to England and then came to Wales. She could not afford to bring
her daughter and was forced to leave the child with her sister.
"She went through the usual asylum process and got refused, which seemed
quite outrageous," said Ms Sugden.
"We had medical reports and psychiatric reports stating it was quite obvious
she was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.
|
Supervisor Sarah Sugden and case worker Yasin Ekmen
|
"There were obvious signs she had been tortured and the secretary of state
decided, no, we are not going to grant asylum in this case."
The centre appealed against the decision, but the nature of the case made it
quite complicated.
"When she first came here, she didn't want to admit she has been raped,
because in Africa, it's a sign of social degradation," Ms Sugden explained.
"If you've been raped and you are a woman, you have to go through a tribal
cleansing ceremony, which is quite horrible.
"Women will want to avoid this so they won't admit they have been raped.
"Our client was very lucky as she didn't contract Aids or HIV, which is quite
common from the rapes in Zimbabwe."
Because Anna had not mentioned rape in her asylum claim initially, when she
finally brought it up, the assessors said it was not credible that she would
have kept quiet about it.
"We put forward a very good argument that that is not actually the case," Ms
Sugden said.
On the edge
Anna's appeal was adjourned no fewer than six times before it was finally
heard.
"By that time she had been worn down to virtually nothing. She was in a
terrible state. She was very much on the edge.
"I'd had letters from her saying she couldn't live anymore, that she was
going to take her own life.
"The guilt she feels for leaving her daughter behind is quite horrendous on
top of everything else that's happened to her."
Anna's appeal was successful - Ms Sugden described it as a "fortunate case".
"A lot of clients, they don't get a good outcome - it's quite tragic," she
said.
But Anna's struggle is not over yet.
She has found out that her husband is now going through the courts in
Zimbabwe to get custody of their daughter from her sister and, because of his
connections, is likely to win.
The centre is now trying through the Red Cross to bring the girl to Wales to
be with her mother.
|
Sunday Times (SA)
Mugabe, Tsvangirai open way for
talksThursday July 24, 2003 07:23 - (SA)
Zimbabwean President
Robert Mugabe and his Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC) rival Morgan
Tsvangirai have taken a huge stride towards resuming
talks to resolve their
country' s political and economic crisis.
In an unprecedented gesture of
reconciliation, the two leaders extended each
other the olive branch, calling
for co-operation and dialogue to end the
crisis.
The apparent thawing
in relations between the two leaders and their parties
would vindicate
President Thabo Mbeki's insistence, made recently to US
President George
Bush, that behind the scenes talks were taking place.
The prospect of
meaningful talks starting soon appears to have been
bolstered by the MDC's
announcement yesterday that it was upgrading its
negotiation team ahead of
resuming talks with the ruling Zanu (PF).
Three new members are to be
added to the team, which will be led by MDC
secretary-general Welshman
Ncube.
Tsvangirai said in Harare yesterday the MDC had decided to invest
all its
energies in the search for a permanent solution to the Zimbabwean
crisis.
"We have expanded our negotiating team, and agreed on the route
to guide the
team when dialogue resumes.
"We are ready to support and
participate in all efforts designed to chart a
peaceful course towards the
resolution of the crisis in governance in
Zimbabwe."
Ncube led the
previous round of talks which were called off by Zanu (PF)
last year. The
names of the new MDC delegates have not yet been announced.
Mugabe told a
luncheon, hosted by the local government ministry to mark the
opening of
parliament on Tuesday, he was happy that opposition MPs,
including MDC leader
Tsvangirai, who is not a legislator, were present
during his address to
parliament.
MDC MPs have in the past boycotted Mugabe's parliamentary
speeches, claiming
that he stole last year's March election.
In a
conciliatory tone, Mugabe said he hoped the two parties would be able
to work
together despite their differences.
"I am glad that today there was that
realisation that parliament must
hitherto be an honourable institution to
which we belong," Mugabe said.
Tsvangirai said his party would do
everything it could to ensure
negotiations resumed.
"Our national
executive tasked the leadership to do all it can to clear the
air for a
peaceful political engagement.
"We decided to invest all our energies in
search for a permanent and lasting
solution to the Zimbabwean
crisis."
The Zimbabwean official opposition is still pressing ahead with
its court
petition to have the results of the 2002 presidential election
overturned.
The MDC's petition will be heard in the high court on
November 3.
However, David Coltart, MDC secretary for legal affairs, said
yesterday that
the party might be prepared to suspend the court petition
should talks
resume. With Sarah Hudleston
Prospect Magazine
An African lament
June
2003
Liberal whites are emigrating from the African countries
they
call home. This can only mean further decline
RW
Johnson
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills.
The equator
runs across these highlands," Karen Blixen begins Out of Africa.
"The
Mountain of Ngong stretches in a long ridge from north to south, and
is
crowned with four noble peaks." For Karen—and other whites who came to
live
here—the key was the altitude of 6,000 feet and the cool air. "Up in
this
high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness
of
heart. In the highlands you woke in the morning and thought: here I
am,
where I ought to be."
As I write these lines, I too look out
at those four peaks of Ngong
for I am on the outer fringe of Nairobi, in
Karen (named after Ms Blixen) on
the next property to hers; indeed, I visited
her house today. It is well
preserved, thanks largely to the Danish
government, which bought the
property and gave it to the people of Kenya at
independence, and its
beautiful grounds—a 6,000-acre coffee plantation in her
day—have the cricket
pitch smell of new-mown grass. It's a lovely place; her
furniture still as
it was, photos of the smiling, attractive Karen and her
numerous (and
equally smiling) black staff. But it's as well to remember that
despite her
confident statement, "Here I am, where I ought to be," Karen
Blixen left
Africa in 1931 and in her remaining 31 years never set foot on
the continent
again. It seems slightly odd to be celebrating her book and her
life as a
key piece of Africana. A nearby shop prominently displays a picture
of Meryl
Streep during the filming of "Out of Africa". It is as if Karen
Blixen's
real achievement was that, long after her death, Robert Redford and
Ms
Streep were in a film about her.
As you drive around Karen,
the name boards at the gates tell their own
story—Harney, Griffiths, Koch,
Bulloch, Mbwa Kali, Pelizzioli, Dobie, Fryer,
Ballantyne Evans, Cross—but the
houses are invisible, for the properties
here all have several acres and long
drives, populated with tall trees and
thick multi-coloured bushes. To motor
up the drive of the house I'm staying
in is like entering heaven; as you turn
off the road everywhere ahead is
blue, purple, red and orange flowers, great
waving bamboos, and the almost
narcotic odour of the bushes overwhelms
you.
But there is more than a touch of sadness even here. "Lots of
people
are leaving," I'm told, a fact borne out by the forest of "For Sale"
signs.
"Not just whites and Asians, but many black professionals. Some of
the
blacks go to South Africa but otherwise they go to the same places as
the
others, the US, Canada, Britain and so forth. They've just given up
on
Kenya." You can see why they might. The arrival in power of the
reforming
Kibaki government has been the most heartening thing to happen in
decades,
but the problems are such—and the government's naivete so
obvious—that it is
hard to believe it can quickly reverse the banditry and
vigilantism, the
ubiquitous power cuts, potholes, vanishing services,
sky-high prices, the
Aids orphans in the streets, the babies for sale you
read about in the "East
African Standard" and all the rest of
it.
I've spent a good deal of the last three years in Zimbabwe and
the
feeling of déjà vu is strong. But not complete: after all, the
Zimbabwe
crisis is about the death frenzy of the liberation culture, of
Mugabe
pulling down the pillars of the building rather than be survived by
his old
enemies, the white farmers. Far worse, Mugabe is deliberately trying
to
starve out the half and more of Zimbabweans who supported the
opposition
against him. Nothing remotely like that is going on in Kenya to
explain the
same despairing emigration. The only thing in common, and perhaps
the only
thing that matters, is that both countries have for too long endured
an
African elite in power which knew no bounds of law, patriotism or even
of
rationality in its enjoyment of power and its kleptomania.
I
think of a white Zimbabwean couple I know, their Harare house a
beautiful
refuge I cannot pass without a surge of warmth. As a young lawyer,
Morris
abandoned his practice in the Cape after a client was re-classified
from
white to coloured. Morris set himself to fight this ruling but the
client,
overwhelmed by the collapse of his marriage, the dispatch of his
children to
inferior schools and the need to relocate to a slum, hung
himself. Morris and
his wife Sandra, atheist Jews both, had found the
incident Hitlerist and had
decamped to the more liberal world of Southern
Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe then
was). Morris became a leading lawyer; Sandra
devoted herself to human rights
work and, later, to helping Aids victims.
In the end, as Mugabe
destroyed the country, I helped them pack for
Sydney. The house, although
beautiful, was, of course, unsellable. Life in
Sydney would be much poorer,
horribly reduced in fact, but at least
predictable—there would be electricity
that worked, shops with food in them,
the certainty of doctors and dentists
being around and even the prospect
that children and grandchildren might join
them there one day. Australia was
a country where the pillars would not fall
down. That, rather than any sense
of bitterness, was what they talked about
as they packed to leave the
country they loved, which they had intended never
to leave. I remember, one
evening after helping them pack, lying in a bedroom
full of boxes,
wondering: perhaps all whites who stay in Africa long enough
will leave as
refugees.
Some of these migrations are a terrible
mistake. Academics in their
50s take early retirement, sell their houses in
Durban or Johannesburg for
pitiful amounts in hard currency, and abandon
comfortable if anxious lives
to embark hopefully for Toronto or Auckland,
applying in vain for jobs as
schoolteachers, night-shift copy editors or what
have you while they pour
away their tiny capital on high bedsit rents. One of
the better philosophers
I knew in South Africa ended up, without the
assistance of Zen, as a
motorcycle maintenance man in Wisconsin. Lives full
of meaning become dingy
and disjointed.
Too many whites have
behaved badly in Africa for their emigration to
arouse much sympathy. In any
case, it is beside the point, which is simply
that Africa's crisis deepens by
the year. If that crisis is ever to bottom
out, if recovery is ever to
happen, Africa will need all the hard-working,
humane professional people it
can find—countries which drive away people
like Morris and Sandra are
committing suicide.
Many of the professionals who leave Africa
today are Africans or
Asians but often, still, they're white. Many black
professionals were
brought on by whites like Morris and Sandra; theirs was
the innovating
liberal impulse, the first drive, the original model. It is
this, rather
than their skin colour, which makes their leaving so significant
and so sad.
But there is a racial angle too. If you ask young
whites why they
leave South Africa they often speak of affirmative action, a
reply which
fewer Asians and no African would give. Affirmative action in
favour of
downtrodden minorities in the US or Britain is so ordinary that it
often
goes unnoticed that affirmative action in favour of a huge majority
is
discrimination against a better-educated minority—a different
thing.
Of course, there have been pockets of whites in pockets of
time who
have felt they were utterly rooted here, could live nowhere
else:
pre-eminently the Boers, but one should not forget that Albert Camus
and
over a million other whites once felt equally rooted in Algeria. Today
they
are all gone and Afrikaners now emigrate from South Africa as easily
as
English-speakers.
It had always been hoped that the coming of
democracy would see a
return of the South African diaspora, for the country
had leaked talent
throughout the apartheid period. In the event, not one
tenth of the white
émigrés returned. I was one of the few white returnees of
the diaspora.
Many, even of those who did return, did not stay long. Everyone
welcomed
democracy but none could welcome the hugely higher crime rate,
the
anti-white, anti-Asian and anti-coloured discrimination in the job
market
and the speed with which Mandela's rhetoric of national reconciliation
gave
way to Mbeki's black nationalism.
Young whites flooded
abroad in numbers—there are said to be some
300,000 in London alone—and the
exodus continues. It is mainly the older age
groups who stay, which means
that natural mortality will produce a huge
shrinkage in the white population
in the decade or two ahead. To attend any
theatre or orchestral concert in
South Africa is to view a sea of grey and
white heads in a still largely
white audience, allowing one to predict with
some certainty the collapse of
those institutions of high culture which have
survived thus far. In the
universities, people are being appointed to
lectureships, chairs or even
vice-chancellorships who, on merit, would never
even have reached shortlists
before. My own home town of Durban boasts two
universities. The vice
chancellor of one is a man who recently boasted of
how he would rub himself
all over with lion fat every morning the better to
arm himself against his
adversaries. The other is a man who was expelled for
exam cheating at the
institution he now heads.
There is a terrible, ineffable sadness to
this: not only the collapse
of standards and cultural institutions, nor even
the far larger sense that
for all its 350-year length South Africa has
suffered a failed colonisation.
Far worse is the certainty that the euphoric
birth of the "new South Africa"
can hardly survive the ebbing of this tide:
how to make a success of the
country if orchestras, theatres, museums,
newspapers, libraries and
universities collapse or suffer a catastrophic
lowering of standards? The
government operates on the assumption that it can
create an adequate new
intelligentsia to run all these institutions simply by
administrative fiat.
All it is achieving is an ever more rapid devalorisation
of everything it
touches. There are times when, to borrow the title of one of
JM Coetzee's
books, the sense of "waiting for the barbarians" is
overwhelming.
Which, indeed, brings one to Coetzee, South Africa's
greatest literary
son and Nobel Laureate-in-prospect. His own take on the new
political
correctness and the death-in-life it implied was laid bare in
Disgrace. The
anti-hero starts, like Coetzee himself, as a Cape Town-based
lecturer in
English literature. The man has a regular relationship with a
coloured
prostitute which seems fair enough to him: he gives her money, she
gives him
sex—until he sees her, harassed, with her young family. Then he
drifts into
an affair with a young student. Again, it seems fair enough, a
voluntary
liaison on both sides. But then his number is called: he has, like
South
African whites down the ages, been making apparently equal arrangements
with
people who are not only intrinsically weaker but, in the case of
the
student, are left in his care. He is told that the only way out is
to
confess, abase himself utterly. He refuses; he makes no other stand,
he
simply will not abase himself. He is cast into outer darkness, into
complete
disgrace.
Tellingly, the anti-hero is engaged in a
high-culture project,
anchored within a sophisticated, Eurocentric world of
letters. Most of his
waking hours are preoccupied with this project, but it
comes to nothing.
Like all such projects, on African soil it is out of place,
it fails. He
seeks out his daughter on a farmstead in the eastern Cape. She
is gang-raped
by passing Africans but decides to carry on with the pregnancy
that results,
refuses to complain, says it is the price of staying on if you
are white. He
is horrified but all he can do is give comfort in trivial,
dead-end ways to
lonely women or, in another telling image, to dead dogs
whose carcasses need
re-arranging so they can pass smoothly into the
incinerator. If you are
white, no positive, active role is left to you.
Either you accommodate
yourself to the unreasonable or you play out your life
in some futile back
alley. You are doomed to this by the disgraceful history
of your kind. Maybe
it's fair, maybe it's not, but it is the way things
are.
At first the moral dissonance in "Disgrace" consists merely in
the
fact that the lecturer's sex-for-money deal with the prostitute isn't
really
fair; then in his affair with the student which is, ironically,
treated as
more serious. But the novel derives its punch from the far
greater
dissonance of his daughter's acquiescence in her own gang-rape.
"Disgrace"
won Coetzee the Booker for a second time and many other awards. It
sold well
in South Africa but its theme made Coetzee a non-person in polite
society.
It was ignored by South Africa's book-prize givers, who preferred
third-rate
but politically correct works.
Which is where the
matter might have rested, were it not for the fact
that the young Thabo
Mbeki, who mixed with the Marxist literary crowd at
Sussex University in the
1960s, had learnt how well a good literary
quotation could set off a speech.
This habit he employs in virtually every
speech as president, earning himself
a reputation for intellectualism in ANC
circles where such flourishes are
otherwise unheard of. Moreover, it had
been decided in 2000 that the ANC
would bring the errant liberal press to
heel by having the human rights
commission hold inquisitorial hearings into
"racism in the media." The
luckless ANC Minister, Jeff Radebe, was chosen to
present the ANC's diatribe
against "subliminal racism"—and out poured a
vitriolic denunciation of
"Disgrace", transparently authored by Mbeki
himself: indeed, one newspaper
even managed to trace the document back to
Mbeki's own computer. As the Aids
debate has revealed, Mbeki feels a
particular fury over the image (which he
feels to be immanent in many
discussions of Aids) of black males as sexually
irresponsible
"disease-carriers," and the book's depiction of a gang rape by
black men had
predictably set him roaring.
"Disgrace" was thus
savaged by the ruling party as the epitome of
white racism and pretty clearly
by the president himself. Coetzee, who has
always avoided public statements,
said nothing but it was not very
surprising when, a few months later, news of
his emigration slipped out.
Typically, Coetzee refused to explain, pointing
out that all emigrations
were "intimate" affairs: sometimes one only
understood their true
significance years later. It is a good index of how
fearful and
ideologically bullied the South African intelligentsia has become
that no
single word of protest or even regret was uttered at this treatment
of the
country's greatest writer. Last year, I pointed out this sequence of
events
in a column I write for a Johannesburg newspaper. The result was
a
predictably furious response from a presidential spokesman denying
Mbeki's
authorship of the original denunciation of Coetzee and claiming that
Coetzee
himself had said he wasn't leaving for the reasons I had adduced.
Both
assertions were untrue: Coetzee had refused to give any explanation;
and
Mbeki, as head of the ANC, was clearly responsible for its statements
on
such key subjects as press freedom. This second statement too was
replete
with literary flourishes—this time about Mary Shelley and
Frankenstein. It
too had probably been authored by Mbeki and then given to a
"spokesman" to
publish.
Much as I admire "Disgrace", its message
is surely wrong. Given that
the doctrine of collective guilt is nonsense, it
follows that whites in
Africa should only feel guilty if they have
individually deserved to do so.
Nor do I think that the only thing left for
people like me is to rearrange
dead dogs so they can go neatly into
incinerators. Whites have lived in
Africa since Roman times. Never more than
a tiny minority, they have
extraordinary achievements-as well as great
crimes—to their name. If Africa
is to rescue itself from its current crisis
it will need all the help it can
get, certainly including help from
whites.
All this must have seemed very obvious in Karen Blixen's
day. What
happened in between was the great convulsion of Mau Mau, the ascent
and now
the collapse of African nationalism. Even Kenyans refer disparagingly
to the
group which took over in the 1960s as "the nationalists," for
nationalism
turned out mainly to be a cover for theft. First Kenyatta and
then Moi used
their office to acquire enormous wealth, as did most of their
ministers.
Their example inevitably percolated down through every avenue of
life. The
result has been the economic, environmental and moral exhaustion of
the
country.
It has been the same story elsewhere in Africa. The
nationalist
determination to get rid of Asians and whites is a key part of
this
irrational convulsion. What makes it irrational is that these
are
nationalists devoid of patriotism. If Kenyatta or Moi had really wanted
to
build Kenya up they would not have encouraged the pervasive culture
of
corruption. Moi is now reputedly the tenth richest man in the world
but
Kenya's hospitals, schools and physical infrastructure lie in
ruins:
everywhere the national patrimony has been plundered. Similarly,
Mugabe has
cut Zimbabwe's GDP by 30 per cent in three years and is starving
half his
countrymen to death, actions justified in the name of the same
strange
"nationalism" which has no regard for the national
interest.
It is the same with Mbeki. If he were genuinely concerned
with South
Africa' s national interests he would not be destroying the
universities or
driving hundreds of thousands of the best and brightest
abroad. Nor would he
insist on acclaiming the genocidal Mugabe as a
"progressive." Such African
nationalists, although they may defend their
actions in the universalist
terms of justice and development, are acting out
psycho-dramas of revenge
and self-aggrandisement rooted more in the damaged
colonial ego Fanon
describes than in any rational consideration of national
needs. VS Naipaul's
"A Bend in the River" said it all long ago.
Many of the whites and Asians who stay on in Africa do so because
they
believe that this vast, irrational convulsion must pass—and pass in
their
own lifetime. But many have already lost this bet. Morris and Sandra
sat it
out through the 1980s and 1990s in Zimbabwe believing the lunacy must
lessen
or that the opposition would give the country a fresh start. The
bitterest
thing for those who leave Africa now is that they have reason to
envy those
who left in the 1970s or 1980s—people they excoriated at the time
as
fainthearts but who, because they gave up hope sooner, have used their
time
to build comfortable lives elsewhere rather than, as it now
appears,
"wasting" that time working for a future which refused to arrive.
The logic,
it might seem, is for all whites, Asians and those of mixed race
to quit
Africa. But such an outcome would not stop the irrational convulsion:
the
vast majority of Mugabe's victims are black, just as almost all the
victims
of Mbeki's Aids policies are black. If all Asians and whites left,
even
larger numbers of African professionals would leave too, precipitating
a
further economic collapse and robbing the continent not just of any
shared,
non-racial future but of pretty well any future at all.
For those of us committed to staying put there are many frustrations,
above
all that we are not allowed to contribute what we would like to give.
But
even if those who thought the irrationalism would pass quicker than it
has
have been proved wrong, they were still right that pass it must. Africa
is,
in any case, bigger than anyone's personal disappointment. It is
always
beautiful, never boring. To wake up looking down over Table Bay, or
over the
sub-tropical vegetation of Durban to the huge rollers of the Indian
ocean,
or, indeed, at the four hills of Ngong is compensation enough for
anyone
with a soul to lose.
RW Johnson, a former South
African Rhodes scholar, was fellow in
politics at Magdalen College, Oxford
for 26 years before he resigned to
return to South Africa in 1995
Business Report
Mozambique outlaws meat imports from
Zimbabwe
July 24, 2003
By Reuters
Maputo -
Mozambique had banned meat and animal imports from Zimbabwe,
where there had
been an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, a government
official said this
week.
Zimbabwe said last week its main beef export zone had been
hit by
foot-and-mouth disease, dealing a blow to chances of a resumption of
meat
exports to the European Union and other markets after an outbreak of
the
disease in 2001.
Mozambique, which shares a lengthy border
with Zimbabwe, said on
Tuesday its ban on meat and livestock imports would
remain in place until
the disease had been eradicated
. "We had no
choice," the senior official said.
Mozambican officials had no
immediate figures on how much meat was
imported from Zimbabwe annually, but
the country is not one of Harare's main
export markets. The ban will,
nevertheless, affect large swathes of central
Mozambique, where cattle remain
rare after herds were slaughtered during the
country's 16-year civil
war.
Industry officials say Zimbabwe's beef exports have declined
by more
than 90 percent since 1997
FinGaz
Fuel deal collapses
Hama Saburi Deputy
Editor-in-Chief
7/24/2003 8:33:00 AM (GMT +2)
A US$360
million ($296.6 billion) fuel procurement deal cobbled up
this month by the
Petroleum Marketers Association (PMA) as a last-ditch
attempt to help
Zimbabwe out of its three-year crippling fuel crisis has hit
a brick wall
after banks rejected the exchange rate to be applied for them
to bankroll the
deal.
The still-born deal, which would have required monthly
foreign
currency allocations of US$30 million, came unstuck after
financial
institutions, which were expected to provide the scarce foreign
currency,
refused to buy into the arrangement unless the central bank
accepted to
review the country’s exchange rate regime.
Impeccable fuel industry sources privy to the ill-fated arrangement
disclosed
this week that the deal, which could have been concluded by now,
ran into
difficulties in the last stages of protracted negotiations
following
disagreements over the exchange rate to be applied.
The haggling
over the exchange rate came to a head after bankers
remained adamant that the
Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), which controls the
country’s financial
levers, should increase the price of the greenback from
the current Z$824 to
around $2 200 to make the deal profitable.
Tough-talk from banks
meant that the deal had been put in the
deep-freeze, at least for now, the
sources said.
They however, indicated that despite the glaring
differences,
negotiations were set to resume today between banks and fuel
industry
players.
The proposal by the banks to devalue the local
unit, which is still
trying to find a bottom against the greenback, would
have the net effect of
raising the pump price of petrol from $450 per litre
to $1 022 with that of
diesel shooting up from $200 to $948, industry sources
said. This could
spark a fresh wave of sensitive price hikes.
The central bank, the sources said, was however understandably ducking
the
issue knowing fully well that it would put it on a collision course
with the
government, which was likely to shoot down any proposals to devalue
the
dollar.
Despite excessive pressure, President Robert Mugabe has
publicly
stated that devaluation of the local unit was not an option for
his
government. In fact, the 79-year-old leader has in the past hit out
at
attempts to weaken the troubled currency through "the back
door."
The RBZ’s dilemma was compounded by the fact that if it gave
in to the
demands by banks it would also come under immense pressure to
make
concessions to exporters who have been vociferously pressing for
the
devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar which they feel is
over-valued.
Charles Chikaura, the acting RBZ boss, was said to be
in a meeting
when contacted for comment yesterday.
Bankers
Association of Zimbabwe president Washington Matsaira told The
Financial
Gazette yesterday that his vice-president, Jerry Tsodzai, was
handing the
issue. Tsodzai could not be contacted for comment as he was said
to be out of
the country.
"There is no way we can finance fuel at uneconomic
prices. The price
has to be right for us to extend both the foreign currency
and the Zimbabwe
dollar facilities. The RBZ will come down hard on us if we
proceed with the
deal without its blessings. Look, most banks have been
penalised of late for
trading at exchange rates higher than the official
one," said one banker.
Banks have since been requested to indicate
the amount of foreign
currency and Zimbabwe dollars they could source as well
conditions applying
to the facilities.
"To fund the purchase of
this forex (foreign exchange), at the
existing exchange rates, credit
facilities of about Z$30 billion per month
are required. While it was agreed
before that the fuel companies may
approach banks on an individual basis, we
feel that the difference in
funding structures for banks will lead to the
fuel having different cost
structures and ultimately different pricing
structures for the final
product. This is the situation the PMA is trying to
avoid.
"We therefore, suggest syndicating the credit facilities so
as to
closely co-ordinate the Zimbabwe dollar funding of this programme,"
read the
letter circulated to banks.
Under the arrangement, the
fuel industry would operate a yet-to-be
established consortium that would
procure, distribute and sell fuel to
participating oil companies which would
be required to pay up-front for
incoming fuel.
Splits have
however emerged within the PMA with some members wanting
to invoice fuel in
United States dollar terms.
The government has also made it clear
that it would not accept the
"dollarisation" of the economy, referring to the
use of another country’s
currency as a legal purchasing tender.
In a document sent to Energy and Power Development Minister Amos
Midzi, the
PMA expressed concern at the current fuel procurement system.
It
said: "The current totally chaotic, disorganised and highly
dangerous
practice of private importation, not withstanding the unacceptable
charges,
is unsustainable and can go no way to satisfy the needs of the
entire nation,
which is trying desperately to normalise its modus operandi."
The
association said the oil pipeline from Beira, Mozambique should
operate on a
24-hour basis to sustain the 75 percent carrying capacity that
adequately
covers Zimbabwe’s supply requirements.
It is estimated that 33
million litres of petrol and 44 million litres
of diesel would have to come
through Beira, while Beit Bridge border post
would be a conduit for 11
million litres of petrol and 15 million litres of
diesel.
"Without an upgrade to said pipeline, throughput is limited and of
necessity
the balance must be overland by a mixture of rail and road through
Beit
Bridge," it said.
Zimbabwe is going through a critical fuel crisis
blamed on critical
shortages of foreign currency emanating from poor economic
management and
falling exports, among others.
Corruption at the
debt-laden National Oil Company of Zimbabwe where
some officials have since
been arraigned for pushing the envelope too far,
has also played havoc with
the fuel supply situation in the country.
FinGaz
National interests take precedence: MDC
Brian
Mangwende Chief Reporter
7/24/2003 8:45:26 AM (GMT +2)
THE
opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) stunned
sympathisers when its
legislators attended the opening of the fourth session
of the fifth
parliament on Tuesday addressed by President Robert Mugabe,
with the MDC
president, Morgan Tsvangirai, sitting in the Speaker’s gallery.
The
MDC legislators had always boycotted Mugabe’s official address to
parliament,
arguing they did not recognise him as the legitimate head of
state and
government.
The latest move by the MDC parliamentarians and its
leader, which
marked some measure of recognition over Muga-be’s legitimacy as
an incumbent
head of state, could spill over into a withdrawal of
Tsvangirai’s High Court
challenge against Mugabe’s election, critics
said.
A statement by the MDC leader indicated this week that the
MDC was
"ready to support and participate in all efforts designed to chart
a
peaceful course towards the resolution of the crisis of governance
in
Zimbabwe".
Mugabe has already said the MDC had to recognise
him as the legitimate
head of state first, and to withdraw its High Court
order challenging his
election in March last year, before he can dialogue
with the MDC leadership
over a resolution to the country’s present economic
crisis.
The latest developments seemed to confirm South African
President
Thabo Mbeki’s remarks during US President George W. Bush’s visit to
Africa,
that the ruling party Zanu PF and the MDC were engaged in talks to
find a
lasting solution to the country’s political and economic
crisis.
In a statement soon after Mugabe’s speech, Tsvangirai said
his
presence at the official opening of parliament was decided upon by the
party
’s national executive at a meeting last Saturday.
The
executive had made a resolution "to invest all our energies in the
search for
a permanent and lasting solution to the Zimbabwean crisis".
"We
expanded our negotiating team and agreed on the route to guide the
team when
dialogue resumes," said Tsvangirai.
Some sources indicated that the
MDC had caved in to pressure from
regional leaders and some sections of the
South African press which had
accused Tsvangirai of being a major obstacle to
the resumption of collapsed
talks between the two rival parties.
Despite public avowals by the MDC leadership that the opposition
lawmakers
will not recognise Mugabe and would boycott his speech, many
people were more
surprised to realise that Tsvangirai had chosen to listen
to Mugabe’s speech
from Parliament Building, rather than from his television
set at
home.
Supported by the MDC’s National Executive, traditionally seen
as a
hard-line organ of the opposition party, the latest development has been
met
with mixed reactions from MDC supporters and sympathi-sers, who say it
was
an act of betrayal.
Others said it was about time the MDC
leadership tucked their tails
between their legs for the benefit of the
nation.
"I am absolutely shocked at that decision," Lovemore
Madhuku, a
constitutional law expert and political analyst,
said.
"Effectively all this amounts to the fact that the MDC has
recognised
Mugabe as the head of state contrary to their previous arguments
and initial
reasons for boycotting parliament.
"It’s an
acceptance on their part. It’s capitulation. On one hand they
say Mugabe is
an illegitimate leader while on the other they say let’s go
out there and
listen to him. They should make their position clear and stop
swinging back
and forth," said Madhuku.
In the past, MDC legislators boycotted
Muga-be’s speech and its
subsequent debate in Parliament, claiming he
stole
FinGaz
Innovation key to banking success
Nelson Banya
Staff Reporter
7/24/2003 8:42:53 AM (GMT +2)
AMID the
unfolding economic crisis that has decimated the once robust
Zimbabwean
economy, financial institutions are using innovation to triumph
over
adversity.
Although critics are skeptical about the sustainability
of the
phenomenal growth enjoyed by the sector, there is no doubt that
its
liberalisation in 1991 has brought far more benefits than downside
effects.
The entry of more banks, in a market once dominated by
Standard
Chartered Bank, Barclays Bank and Stanbic Bank, has heightened the
level of
competition.
It has also widening product offerings in
an increasingly hostile
environment, in which financial institutions have to
cope with an economy in
progressive recession.
Financials
institutions are becoming more customer-driven than before.
They have
diversified their product portfolios.
Touted as one of the few
African countries with a sophisticated
banking system, Zimbabwe has not
lagged behind in introducing new banking
product such as telephone banking,
bancassurance and instore banking among
other things.
Trust
Holdings Limited, now in its eighth year of operation, is one
such
institution that has been riding on the wave of success.
Trust’s
rapid growth and development signifies the power of creativity
or innovation
that anchors the success enjoyed by the financial sector
today.
The bank, which made its debut as the tenth acceptance house in 1996,
is
indeed the sum of all its parts.
Christopher Goro- monzi, one of
the founding directors of Trust has
been an integral part of the group’s
dream.
Goromonzi, who is the executive director of the merchant
banking
division, speaks so passionately of the role innovation has played
in
creating the group’s burgeoning balance sheet.
"More credit
is due to the banks that have made money out of
creativity, which has ensured
real sustained growth.
"I know for sure that Trust will continue
delivering strong growth for
our shareholders because we are people-driven
and not product-driven so we
have people with skills to scour for
opportunities and create relevant
products for the market," Goromonzi
said.
Goromonzi, who started his banking career at Standard
Chartered as a
graduate trainee in 1987, said there was a discernible break
from the
traditional banking philosophy to innovative flexibility without
necessarily
increasing exposure to risk.
"Clients do not
necessarily need money — overdrafts or acceptances,
but solutions to their
raw material requirements and that is the new
philosophy that has led to the
development of products tailor-made to suit
diverse needs.
"For
instance, traditional lending is done on the back of a borrower’s
balance
sheet, but we hold securities, which will be ours so in the event of
a client
going under, traditional banks would have to sell buildings or some
such
business."
Goromonzi boasts of 15-years banking experience. He
has
cross-sectional experience in the financial sector, having started off
at
Standard Chartered before moving to the Zimbabwe Development Bank
(ZDB),
that veritable cradle of local banking talent, where he was a
project
analyst.
He then moved on to the Venture Capital Company
of Zimbabwe (VCCZ)
where he was one of the pioneers in 1992 and had a
hands-on management
experience and up to 36 firms in his portfolio. Goromonzi
left the VCCZ to
become one of the founding directors of Trust.
He said: "I was always looking for new challenges and I remember that
when we
started off we had a $14 million cheque and empty offices. The
company
letterhead was handwritten!"
It was at the venture capital company
that Goromonzi was to pick a
penchant for financing start-ups as a means of
creating new wealth.
"It is with satisfaction that I note that some
of the firms we
financed at VCCZ have survived the ravages of time and listed
on the
Zimbabwe Stock Exchange. This is why I think the banking sector
should
complement venture capital companies to create new wealth and,
ultimately,
new clients for the sector.
"I would like to go back
to venture capital some day, as it is really
an engine for growth and creates
new capacity," Goromonzi said.
Apart from venture capital and
project finance, Goromonzi is also
passionate about the need for research and
product development, saying the
dearth of these pillars of growth was partly
to blame for some of the
problems companies were facing, yet scant resources
were channelled that
way.
Asked about his position on the
interest rate debate that is fast
gaining momentum along with the flying
rates, Goromonzi, who is an ardent
soccer follower, said the rates were just
one aspect of the micro-economic
scenario that needed to be addressed as a
whole.
"I do realise the need for rates to be low to facilitate
production,
but there is also need to encourage savings through realistic
interest
rates, but that is just one aspect and we need a broader look in
order to
solve our problems.
"This has been the major undoing in
terms of implementing World Bank
prescriptions resulting in the widespread
belief that they do not work, yet
they could have worked had it not been for
selective implementation."
FinGaz
Probe into gold scam launched
Staff
Reporter
7/24/2003 8:35:36 AM (GMT +2)
A BOARD of inquiry
has been set up to investigate allegations of
misconduct at the Gold Mining
and Mineral Development Trust (GMMDT) amid
fears that millions of dollars
could have been lost through illegal gold
sales.
To facilitate
the investigations, the trust has suspended its mineral
development manager,
Peter Mutsinye.
Sources said the inquiry — the first to be
instituted at the young
organisation established in November 2001 — has
tainted the image of GMMDT.
GMMDT was formed by the Reserve Bank of
Zimbabwe (RBZ) at a cost of
$500 million to boost gold production, which
suffered a severe knock because
of poor international prices and adverse
operating conditions in Zimbabwe.
The trust was also tasked to come
up with ways of curbing leaks within
the gold mining sector.
Nhlanhla Masuku, GMMDT chairman, confirmed that the inquiry was
underway but
declined to disclose the basis of the investigations.
"I have just
given them (the board of inquiry) terms to investigate,
unhindered, and
interview anybody they want to establish issues of corporate
governance," he
said.
Sources told The Financial Gazette this week that they
were
allegations of underhand transactions involving the buying and selling
of
the precious metal.
It is suspected that they were cases
where gold was bought from
small-scale miners, who cannot sell the mineral
directly to the RBZ, through
its subsidiary — Fidelity Printers.
While the miners were paid for the gold, it is suspected that the
commodity
was leaked out of the official system without getting to
Fidelity
Printers.
Gold buyers are required by law to purchase
the metal at the current
price of $15 000 per gram and dispose it of at the
RBZ.
The illegal trade of gold and other mineral has continued
despite
tight restrictions, worsening the shortage of foreign currency
facing
Zimbabwe.
Meanwhile, Engineer Charles Chipato, the chief
executive officer of
the trust has resigned.
The former
secretary of the then Mines, Environment and Tourism
Development Ministry,
left the trust a few weeks ago before the
establishment of the board of
inquiry.
Chipato would however, remain a trustee.
Masuku confirmed Chipato’s departure, but referred all questions to
the
49-year old engineer, who could not be reached for comment at the time
of
going to press.
Before joining the trust, Chipato worked as a civil
servant from 1983,
rising through the ranks to the position of Mines
secretary in 1997. He
retired in 2000.
FinGaz
MDC drinking from poisoned chalice?
Dumisani
Ndlela News Editor
7/24/2003 8:44:21 AM (GMT +2)
A VIOLENT
political divide as the one currently obtaining in Zimbabwe
is unsustainable.
It hurts the economy, which is feeling the pinch, and, at
worst, the
country’s citizens, who bear the brunt of the sharpest edge of
the
knife.
In Zimbabwe, which went through a deeply divisive
presidential
election in March 2002, political violence has resulted in
hundreds of party
supporters, from both divides, losing their lives in
political battles.
This explains why Zimbabweans breathed a
collective sigh of relief at
what is widely seen as increasing rapprochement
between ZANU PF and the MDC.
But as the opposition Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC) moves
within a whisker of talks with the ruling ZANU
PF party, critics warned the
opposition party was now "drinking from a
poisoned chalice", calling instead
for ZANU PF to relinquish power and allow
the country’s destiny to be
decided by the people in a fresh
election.
But others said an absence of a radical strategy to deal
with the
ruling party left the MDC with no option but to go for a
negotiated
settlement.
In any case, pro-talks analysts said,
ZANU PF was not under local
siege — there is no real action by Zimbabweans
and the MDC to force the
party out of power.
But those against
the idea of talks said the MDC, by offering itself
for talks with ZANU PF,
was assuming that the current crisis in the country
was a militarised one
requiring a transitional government.
The ruling party, they argued,
had run out of time to work towards
extending its tenure in office — unless
the MDC obliged to a government of
national unity or a coalition
arrangement.
They said by engaging the ruling party, the MDC was
allowing itself to
be entangled in a problem it is not party to and in the
process exposing
itself to political pressure and manipulation.
ZANU PF had to simply step down, or call for a snap general election
if it
felt it still had any claims to legitimacy, they said.
The country
is currently facing an unprecedented political, social and
economic crisis
that has posed a far greater threat to its citizens than any
menace that has
ravaged the country in its history.
FinGaz
US$500m foreign dividends locked up in Zim
Staff Reporter
7/24/2003 8:42:03 AM (GMT +2)
AN estimated
US$ 500 million ($412 billion at the ruling exchange
rate) worth of dividends
remain unrepatriated as the foreign currency crunch
continues to bite deeper
into the capacity of local companies to remit
earnings to foreign
investors.
Economic analysts said non-remittance of dividends
discourages foreign
investment, which has virtually dried up.
Foreign investors on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange are leaving for the
exits
while a number of foreign-owned conglomerates are already relocating
their
investments to "friendly destinations."
"The accumulation of
arrears discourages foreign investment as
corporates struggle to pay
dividends to foreign investors.
"The inability to remit dividends,
coupled with the government’s
defaulting on its international obligations,
only worsens Zim- babwe’s
ability to attract meaningful investment," one
economic analyst said.
Declining exports, lack of
balance-of-payments support and the
festering political crisis have
dovetailed into the worst economic crisis
ever to visit the southern African
country.
Exports declined by 40 percent to US$1.5 billion last
year, from the
peak of 1996, while only $1.9 billion in international grants
had
materialised from an expected $9.8 billion.
External
arrears, which stood at US$800 million at the beginning of
last year, now
exceed US$1.5 billion.
"The capital account has recorded huge
deficits, which means we are
stuck with foreign currency shortages as long as
we maintain unrealistic
exchange policies and do not inspire confidence in
multilateral donor
institutions," an analyst with a local credit insurance
firm said.
Net outflows on the capital account amounted to US$347
million
($285.93 billion) in 2002.
The shortage of foreign
currency has impacted on the country’s vital
imports, leading to a protracted
fuel crisis, power outages and a drastic
reduction in production, sending the
economy further into decline.
FinGaz
Fuel companies jostle for deals
Dumisani Ndlela
News Editor
7/24/2003 8:37:55 AM (GMT +2)
OIL companies
are scurrying to stitch-up multi-billion dollar fuel
import deals with
millions of litres of fuel already reportedly at the port
of Beira in
Mozambique in anticipation of the widely expected deregulation
of the fuel
industry.
Industry sources said the sector was buoyant about the
opening of the
sector to private players, which was expected to be announced
by Energy and
Power Development Minister, Amos Midzi this week.
Government sources said President Robert Mugabe’s Cabinet approved
the
deregulation of the sector and a dual pricing system under which
the
National Oil Company of Zimbabwe (NOCZIM) would sell fuel at
below-market
prices.
New players would sell at prices determined
by market forces.
Midzi is said to have delayed announcing the
deregulation, insisting
that oil companies should prove first that they had
supplies that could come
into the country once the sector is opened
up.
Petroleum Marketers Association of Zimbabwe chairman,
Masimba
Kambarami, refused to confirm the reports, but said oil companies
were to
meet bankers today to receive feedback on how they could mobilise
foreign
currency for oil procurement.
"After that meeting,
that’s when the real big stuff is going to
happen," said
Kambarami.
COMOIL Private Limited, an indigenous fuel company owned
by Migdale
Holdings Limited, has already put up a US$4 million oil
procurement facility
financed by three banking institutions under a rolling
programme.
Under that deal, COMOIL is said to have received
supplies amounting to
21 million litres of assorted petroleum products,
acquired from Independent
Petroleum Group (IPG) of Kuwait. The fuel was
off-loaded at the Beira
harbour this week.
A COMOIL marketing
executive, Fanuel Kangondo, confirmed the deal, but
refused to give
details.
COMOIL has struck a deal with NOCZIM to use its pipeline
to pump its
fuel supplies into the country.
Details of the
arrangement were not immediately available, but sources
said COMOIL, the
first privately owned company to enter into such an
arrangement with Noczim,
would be charged per litre of fuel pumped into the
country.
Sources said 5 000 million litres of diesel were also expected to be
fed into
Mobil Mozambique’s tanks at the Beira corridor next week.
The ship
carrying the fuel will dock the harbour on August 1, an
official with Mobil
Mozambique told The Financial Gazette on the telephone
from Maputo
yesterday.
Mobil’s fuel consignment would be moved into the country
over land,
sources said.
It was not clear if Mobil Zimbabwe
would take up the entire diesel
consignment destined for
Zimbabwe.
Diesel is one of the key inputs in industry and
agriculture used
mainly to drive heavy industrial machines and
vehicles.
Local Mobil Zimbabwe officials were cagey when contacted
for comment
over the issue, but sources indicated that the company had huge
orders from
clients for direct foreign imports on their behalf.
Some of the orders had been outstanding for "quite some time",
they
said.
"The fuel is already paid for by clients who simply
asked Mobil to buy
on their behalf because they had the foreign currency," a
source at Mobil
said, but refused to give figures.
Other
multinational oil companies — BP Zimbabwe, Caltex Oil Zimbabwe
and Total
Zimbabwe — are said to have already begun enjoying the limited
benefits of
the impending deregulation through direct foreign imports (DFI)
for clients
with their own foreign currency to buy fuel. But they were said
to be
skulking for a bigger share of the retail market.
Zimbabwe has for
the last three years experienced acute fuel shortages
that have disrupted
economic activtites.
Arrangements that have been put in place
before, enabling the country
to get fuel supplies from Libya in exchange for
food commodities, crumbled
after Zimbabwe failed to meet its obligations
under the deal.
Noczim’s poor international credit rating has
resulted in its failure
to secure off-shore credit line for offshore fuel
procurement.
FinGaz
Comment
We deserve better!
7/24/2003
8:46:31 AM (GMT +2)
OUR chickens are really flocking home to roost
at the worst possible
time. The host of man-made problems besetting Zimbabwe
has produced
poison-tipped arrows aimed, Cupid style, right at the heart of
the country’s
economy. Zimbabweans are grappling with probably their worst
economic and
social hardships ever.
Once touted as that rare
bright spot in the gloom of the dark
independent Africa, Zimbabwe has sadly
been reduced to an economic basket
case. The initial euphoria at independence
has now but died and lapsed into
scepticism.
Ours is a very
uncertain economic outlook. Among a plethora of ills,
we are currently
suffering the consequences of rising run-away inflation
against a back-cloth
of unprecedented falling industrial production — what
economists would call
stagflation.
Industry is laden with gloom and jobs are being shed
on a daily basis
as the deteriorating economic situation has touched off a
rising tide of
company closures. Professionals trained with the taxpayer’s
money are
leaving in droves with conservative figures putting their number at
half a
million.
The devastating and swift depreciation of the
Zimbabwe dollar against
the world’s premier currencies which has become a
scapegoat for discontent
over sensitive basic commodity price hikes continues
unabated and standards
of living are plummeting as long-suffering Zimbabweans
continue to endure
social depravation. The health delivery system has
collapsed — the list is
endless.
International confidence in
Zimbabwe has since evaporated. Donor
fatigue has set in. Nervous foreign
investors have pressed the panic button
for fear of being wrong-footed and
have already taken flight to safety and
political risk has put paid to a
number of projects with the promoters
looking elsewhere.
We also
have this long-running diplomatic deadlock with, much as we
might not want to
admit it, some of the most influential countries of the
world in the form of
the United States of America and the United Kingdom — a
stand-off from which
only Zimbabwe, as surely as the sun rises from the east
and sets in the west,
will emerge bruised.
Zimbabweans are indeed gnashing their teeth. A
sad and emotion-filled
atmosphere prevails for the situation is nothing short
of dire. The majority
of the population of this once prosperous nation live a
hand-to-mouth
existence — living each day as it comes, hardly knowing where
their next
meal will come from. They loathe upheaval but they are crying out
loud for
the betterment of their lives. The country’s leadership hears but
there is
scant evidence that it is listening! And the most disturbing aspect
of this
whole situation is that those presently running our economy are
clearly at
sea as to the strategic direction or path to be trodden at this
cross-roads.
Nothing underscores this fact more than that Zimbabwe
could once again
fail to produce enough food to feed itself come the next
agricultural season
due to a widely expected shortage of agricultural inputs.
The same problem
has already adversely hit the production of the winter crop
simply because
there were no contingent plans in place to make provision for
these inputs.
We are no crystal ball gazers but if there is no drought, what
will we blame
this on?
It would seem like, with all due respect,
our leaders lack the
imagination, depth and vision required for a radical
surgery to revive the
enfeebled economy. All they seem to be able to tell us
is that they have
formed this or that committee, (which committees are
emblematic of
everything wrong with our system), appointed the co-ordinator
of the
co-ordinating committee of this and that, and holding this or
that
conference to discuss the way forward.
Discussing what?
Fire prevention when the economy is already burning!
Please give us a break
for we deserve better than this.
FinGaz
Letters
What’s the difference?
7/24/2003 8:52:57 AM (GMT +2)
EDITOR — I would like to ask all the
advocates of a government of
national unity to explain the difference between
a one-party state and a
country run by a government of national
unity?
Will a new party created between the two parties not just
become ZA
MUD? The dictator of the new party will still be "invincible", so
where does
this leave ordinary citizens looking for freedom from oppression
and good
governance?
We want to be able to choose our own
government through free and fair
elections. A short transitional government
is all we will accept.
President Mbeki is an advocate of a
government of national unity
because he too is trying to absorb all
independent voices in his country to
perpetuate the ANC into a one-party
state. He too, like Mugabe, is not
mature enough to tolerate criticism from
an opposition party.
A McCormick,
Harare.
FinGaz
. . . and now to the notebook
7/24/2003
8:48:28 AM (GMT +2)
Criminal expert
The state media is
throwing us into confusion about its position on
Lovemore Madhuku, the
chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly
(NCA).
One day,
Herald’s Madhuku correspondent, Lovemore Mataire, dismisses
the University of
Zimbabwe lecturer as a convicted criminal capable of doing
nothing but only
causing havoc. The next day, Madhuku is an expert
pontificating on
constitutional matters on ZBC. What should we know about
this Madhuku
man?
It is the same guy who gives the police and army sleepless
nights and
costs the Air Force of Zimbabwe millions in expensive fuel as it
keeps all
its choppers hovering over Harare every time he calls for street
protests to
pressurise the Greatest Uncle to put constitutional reform on his
agenda.
Remember the Great Uncle dismissing the NCA as
only
Madhuku-Madhuku-Madhuku-Madhuku and no other person? And the next day,
the
Great Uncle’s personal media quote the same Madhuku as an expert. There
is
some confusion here.
Still on Madhuku, what is the truth
about a vote of confidence passed
against him and other senior members of the
NCA?
The document CZ got hold of on the alleged coup in the NCA did
not
look like something that needed serious attention and we hope it is not
the
same document that ZBC and the Herald pegged their stories
on.
The document, not on letterhead and not signed, but coming
from
"political parties, civic society groups in the NCA, women’s
groups,
churches and academics" did not look like anything from a civilised
African.
It talked of a "demorcatic constituion", "Dr Madhku"
and
"inocompetent".
We hope it is not true that some academics
were involved.
CZ was amused from reading the document that one of
the charges
against Madhuku and company was the "failure to mobilise
financial support
for the organisation from international donor agencies."
Talk of donor
syndrome.
Some people will not do anything unless
there are donors to sponsor
them. At the rate at which things that have to be
donor driven continue to
increase, very soon some of us may be seeking donors
to sponsor our frequent
visits to the loo!
However, CZ agrees
entirely with one of the allegations raised by the
idiots in point three of
their dubious grievance document; the point on
adultery.
There
is so much happening in the organisation, but even worse things
are happening
in ZANU PF and MDC. Please don’t quote me!
Fire power
demo
At the weekend, our
notorious Zimbabwe National Army
decided to show off some of the tired
contents of its armoury. We wonder if
this exhibition had anything to do
with the Great Uncle’s threats to the
Americans and the British at the
weekend because that threat can only impress
those villagers whom they used
to terrorise during the war of liberation, not
the Americans we know.
But who eats firepower demos? Zimbabweans
don’t care about how many
bullets, grenades or fighter jets their army has
because they are
pre-occupied with basic survival.
Knowing what
their well trained army is richly capable of doing, they
get all the
collywobbles in the world when these people start showing off
which weapons
they have at their disposal to support the Great Uncle who
continues to stick
to power with the tenacity of a Savanna tick.
People in St Mary’s,
Budiriro, DZ, Sakubva, Amaveni, you name it, know
what ZNA really stands
for.
They are more of human rights violators than human rights
protectors.
Zimbabweans feel more secure in the absence of this type of army
that is
there only for no one but itself.
It is not the
Americans or the British who are the greatest threat to
ordinary Zimbabweans,
but this army and its commander-in-chief, the Great
Uncle.
Bad
PR?
The honourable
members of the fourth estate are angry
to hell and back. They are
angry that some companies are now getting stricter
about who should attend
their functions, because "traditionally" journalists
don’t need invitations
to "cover" these functions.
By virtue of
holding a press card with Dr Tafataona Pasipaipa Mahoso’s
signature, they
have free access to any function in the country, be it
public or private,
they argue. It’s simply because they are journalists.
Period!
Last week two companies, which insisted that only people with invites
were
going to attend their functions, particularly angered them. For
the
uninitiated, a lot of food and drink is served at these functions, and
this
explains the great interest.
One of the companies sent out
keys along with invites and whoever did
not have a key could not open the
locked entrance to the function. And this
extremely angered most colleagues
who had, in their accustomed wisdom,
decided to invite themselves to the
private event.
As if that was not enough, the following day,
another company decided
to throw a cocktail party for the media and sent out
some invites . The
esteemed members of the fourth estate phoned and invited
each other without
the knowledge of the sponsors only to be shocked to the
hilt when they
realised that entry was strictly by invitation no matter which
media house
one came from.
To say they were angry is an
understatement because they had turned up
in their droves — the way villagers
used to turn up for ZANU PF rallies in
the 1980s — only to be left salivating
in gluttonous lust outside the
function that had so much food and
drink.
"You don’t treat journalists like this. This is very bad
PR," fumed a
colleague. For the sake of avoiding violent argument, CZ agreed
that this
was really very bad PR, although he did not agree at
all.
Apart from bona fide journalists who simply decide to
invite
themselves, there is this serious problem of people masquerading
as
journalists. This is the most noisome lot to deal with.
To
start with, there is this group from the Mass Communications
department at
the Harare Poly, who because they are studying journalism,
consider
themselves equally entitled to invite themselves to any function
where
prospects of food and drink being served are bright.
These
students, and sometimes together with their colleagues from
CCOSA, not only
invite themselves but also go on to invite anyone who would
care to go with
them, and this explains the huge population that assemble at
hotels hours
before most functions start.
Ask anyone who has attended the
Environmental Reporter of the Quarter
awards.
As if inviting
themselves is not bad enough, these students would
order so many drinks that
even if they would be given the whole night to
guzzle them away, they will
still not finish them.
This is not only confined to non-practicing
"journalists", as CZ also
knows one news editor who is really good at this
game. But most colleagues
understand why.
This is maybe the
reason why these companies, most of which are
reeling under the present
economic hardships, are getting tough with us.
CZ prays that
whoever will plan a do in the future will not forget to
include him on the
invites.
cznotebook@yahoo.co.uk
FinGaz
ZANU PF/MDC talks might save the nation
7/24/2003 9:01:26 AM (GMT +2)
"Don’t walk in front of me, I may not
follow. Don’t walk behind me, I
may not lead. Walk beside me and be my
friend." — Albert Camus.
Nowadays it is being said frequently, but
all the same it should
continue being said again and again, until it happens.
From the look of
things, it may be our country’s sole redeeming
feature.
The writing, in bold letters, is on the wall on the need
for dialogue
between ZANU PF and the MDC. Time and tide wait for no
man, so they
have to hurry up to the negotiating table lest they delay
until so
much more has been lost and so little left.
The
problems, the disruptions, the setbacks, the pitfalls and the
stumbling
blocks the nation is facing need urgent attention before they go
beyond
repair.
No one is better placed for such a task more than the two
opposing
parties. For the country to reawaken, reclaim and recapture some
of
its most glorious and happiest days in history, they need to undo
the
damage done by their cheap and nasty politics.
The
responsibility is theirs. All theirs. Only theirs. Taking the
country off the
rails, the conflict has raged for years with growing
rapidity, soon it will
be 2005 and if things continue unsolved Zimbabwe will
for sure mourn a lost
half-decade.
The benefits of understanding each other are without
number. The mere
sitting down of ZANU PF and the MDC will provide a ray of
comfort to so many
people in these trying times.
The
international community can start taking us seriously as we would
have shown
that even on our own, without any troika-Commonwealth or African,
we can
resolve our differences peacefully as Zimbabweans.
It may also be
the first step for investors to turn their heads
towards this country. Ready
and waiting, a semblance of law and order may
reactivate their interest.
Dialogue may also send a clear message,
especially to the rural areas, to the
purveyors of violence who take
advantage of every election to cause mayhem,
that the night is long gone and
the day is at hand to build and not destroy
so that ‘freedom rings from
every village and hamlet.’
On the
other hand, the costs of not embracing dialogue are obvious
and attract
harsh and heavy penalties.
With a country forever sliding to rake
and ruin, a time may come when
no one will find shelter from the economic
chaos and instability.
Dialogue will also end up as a face saving
measure for President
Robert Mugabe who, because of his rule that has dashed
people’s hopes,
buried their ambitions and darkened their future risks bowing
out of
politics with
his tail between the legs.
There
is no disputing that the last years of his rule are a betrayal,
if not a
violation of the people’s trust. In all this it must be remembered
that
dialogue only works if people
face up to reality.
And the
reality is that the country is stricken
with uncertainties such as
conflict-ridden and sapped upheavals. The
country is cash-strapped, infested
with corruption and the masses are
wallowing in poverty.
In
short, the country is riddled with dilemma.
But dialogue may rectify
this if those who go into it do so when they
are results oriented. And the
results must be in the national interest and
not in any party’s
interest.
The national interest is best saved if the ruling party
realises that
the talks are not for it to re-charge its batteries or buy
time.
It must also realise that democracy, like charity begins at
home. That
self-realisation will ensure that it engages in talks with
an open
mind and good intentions.
As for the MDC, ‘it must not
fear to negotiate or negotiate out of
fear’. It must also not take the talks
as a road map to State House but as
an important task to save the
country.
If they behave that way they would have helped diffuse a
national
time-bomb and as a result will sure have their names entered into
the
register of men and women who saved a nation in its hours of greatest
need.
- Clemence Manyukwe is a journalism student
FinGaz
Corruption levels sink to all-time low
Staff
Reporter
7/24/2003 9:24:45 AM (GMT +2)
ZIMBABWE has been
classified as one of the most corrupt countries in
the world, slumping from
45th place in 2000 to 71st position in a
Transparency International
Corruption Perception Index released this week.
A Transparency
International Zimbabwe programme officer, Mary Ncube,
said Zimbabwe’s
corruption rating had been worsened by the country’s
continued economic
meltdown, rising poverty and unemployment.
But the major blame for
the country’s increasing corruption record,
she said, stood out as corrupt
systems and policies that were benefiting a
few individuals while the rest of
the country’s population bore the brunt of
the economic woes.
Zimbabwe is currently going through its worst economic crisis,
characterised
by acute food shortages, foreign currency and From C9
fuel
shortages that have disrupted the normal functioning of all
economic
activities. Basic food commodities, whose prices have shot up by
over 500
percent during the year, are in short supply and only available on
the black
market.
Inflation has been breaking record highs, with the
year-on-year rate
touching 364.5 percent for June.
Ncube said a
recent survey conducted by Transparency International had
indicated that over
80 percent of Zimbabweans believed corruption had
worsened their plight in
the face of mounting shortages and economic woes.
She said the
local chapter of transparency International was
advocating for the
establishment of an anti-corruption commission to help
stem the worsening
economic cancer.
Already, a Bill on the formation of the commission
awaits
parliamentary approval. It is expected that the Bill could pass during
the
fourth session of the House, which opened this week.
FinGaz
Tobacco producers throw weight behind contract
farming
7/24/2003 9:08:40 AM (GMT +2)
TOBACCO
producers, riled by difficulties encountered in accessing
loans, have thrown
their weight behind contract farming saying it is the
only way that could
restore viability in an industry critical to Zimbabwe’s
foreign currency
requirements.
It was felt at the Air Cured Tobacco Association
(ACTA) annual
congress that the auction and the direct purchasing marketing
systems were
no longer competitive to the farmer because of high input
costs.
Under the two systems, farmers carry all the production
risks, which
has become unsustainable in view of the harsh economic
environment.
Given the prevailing high interest rates ranging
between 80 percent
and 100 percent, farmers cannot afford to shoulder all the
financing costs.
"With contract farming, the contractor will bear
all costs and risks.
Inputs will be provided by the contractor and all the
farmers would provide
is the land, knowledge and skills only," said the
Farmers Development Trust
(FDT) executive director, Lovegot
Tendengu.
About 80 million to 85 million kgs of tobacco are
expected to be
delivered to the auction floors this year, a 50 percent
decline from the
crop that went through the floors last year.
The decline in output is blamed on the chaotic land reform and
the
drought.
ACTA president, John Rimmer said the government
should immediately
review the exchange rate to make tobacco prices more
competitive.
The Zimbabwe dollar, which is officially trading at
$824 against the
United States dollar is said to be overvalued.
Devaluation would result in farmers earning more in Zimbabwe dollar
terms.
Farmers require prices that enable them to meet spiraling costs
of
production.
"Small farmers are now opting for crops that are
easy and more
lucrative because the inputs are being bought on the parallel
market and the
prices are not at par with the exchange rate on the crop,"
said the ACTA
president.
Representatives in the flue-cured,
air-cured and oriental tobacco
sector have also formed the Tobacco Industry
Advisory Council to co-ordinate
their efforts.
— Staff
Reporter
FinGaz
Tobacco farmers need $72 billion for inputs
Staff Reporter
7/24/2003 9:08:03 AM (GMT +2)
TOBACCO
farmers require $72 billion within the next three weeks to
purchase inputs
for this farming season or risk harvesting a failed crop,
farmers’
representative said.
Farmers Development Trust (FDT) executive
director, Lovegot Tendengu
told The Financial Gazette that major tobacco
players had sounded the
government on the huge financial burden to facilitate
the procurement of
inputs such as seed and fertiliser.
Farmers
are this week expected to meet government representatives for
a response to
their appeal.
He said: "We have told Cabinet that tobacco farmers
urgently require
$72 billion because we have three weeks of window period to
produce tobacco
or else we will have no crop this year."
The
golden leaf, which is the country’s single largest foreign
currency earner,
could, for the third year running suffer a decline in
output because of late
planting and the shortage of inputs.
Farmers will also have
problems in accessing inputs after fertiliser
prices increased two-fold in
less than two months this year.
Tendengu said the government had
also expressed concern over the
proliferation of tobacco associations, which
it said were undermining
efforts to centralise the distribution of the little
resources available.
The government, reeling under a cash crisis at
home and abroad, is
under fire from local farmers for failing to provide
adequate funding for
the agricultural sector.
The central bank
recently failed to give farmers US$20 million needed
to procure inputs for
this year’s farming season. The tobacco season should
have commenced with the
preparation of seedbeds now, but most farmers are
reluctant to borrow from
banks because of the prevailing high interest
rates.
Tendengu
said the government should fast track the transformation of
the Agriculture
Bank of Zimbabwe into the Land Bank to ensure the
centralisation of farmers’
funding requirements.
Most farmers are not happy with the current
discrepancies in funding
requirements they meet when accessing loans from
different banks.
FinGaz
AU after Maputo: what next?
7/24/2003
8:56:39 AM (GMT +2)
IN September 1999, more than 40 heads of state
and government gathered
in the Libyan town of Sirte to chart the way forward
for Africa in the new
millennium.
This special session of the
OAU, called and sponsored by the
flamboyant leader of the Socialist Republic
of the Arab Libyan Jamahiriya,
Colonel Muammer Gaddafi, undoubtedly set the
tone for the founding of the
seemingly promising African Union (AU), which
wrapped up its biennial summit
in Maputo a couple of weeks ago.
Although African leaders settled for the less ambitious AU, modelled
on the
European Union style, Gaddafi himself still smarting from
decades-long US-led
international sanctions envisaged a radical
establishment — in his own words
he wanted to see the "United States of
Africa" being formed.
Successive meetings and summits however saw approval of a series of
key legal
texts, which eventually culminated in the formation of the AU in
Pretoria two
years ago. Wither OAU and enter the AU.
It is the hope of the AU
leadership that the new dispensation which
already boasts of a Commission
will soon have other structures in the form
of the Peace and Security
Council, African Parliament, Court of Justice
inter-alia.
While
African leaders should be hailed for realising that they are
lagging behind
the other continents in terms of development, it should
nevertheless click in
their minds that the AU may not have a smart sailing
towards its noble goals
of wealth creation, freedom from conflicts and
continued exploitation of its
resources.
This is partly because of a century-long history of
colonisation
characterised by a reckless exploitation of its
resources.
Now in her infant stage of liberation, the continent has
found her
individuals burdened by an array of socio-economic problems ranging
from a
debt trap to a plethora of civil wars.
Even as the AU
wrapped up its business in Maputo, Bujumbura (the
capital of Burundi) was
under intense shelling from Hutu rebels. Burundi,
where several mediators
tried to bring sanity including the octogenarian
statesman, Nelson Mandela,
has seen more than 300 000 lives perishing in a
decade-long conflict between
the Hutus and Tutsis.
As Africa continues celebrating the birth of
a new socio-economic and
political paradigm in the form of the AU, raging
conflicts in Mauritania,
the DRC, Sudan etc still continue unabated. The AIDS
scourge, with Southern
Africa in the spotlight, remains enemy number
one.
Some forces that are at play and may work against the
AU’s
expectations are as follows:
- Africa, on its own
represents perhaps the largest number of
countries spanning across a diverse
racial and tribal divide. This may pose
serious consequences when moments of
consensus are at stake.
- One of the major impacts of
imperialism on Africa was to leave the
continent divided along colonially
inspired lines in the form of Anglophone,
Francophone and Lusophone states.
The result of this divide has left African
states with various forms of
allegiance to their colonial former masters.
For example, Britain
can boast of having its own friends in Africa by
virtue of the Commonwealth
while on the other hand, France and its perennial
French Africa summit is a
force to reckon with.
- With globalisation taking its toll, the
continent may have left it a
little late to realise these dreams. The huge
natural endowments Africa
rests on are increasingly at the mercy of
Transnational Corporations (TNCs)
who come in the form of the so-called
technological transfer and all sorts
of arguable interventions. Ironically,
African countries themselves are
currently engaged in fierce competition
through luring foreign direct
investment, whose source is non other than the
Trans Atlantic zone.
- African economies are so different in
their levels of economic
development. They range from vast economic
powerhouses such as South Africa
and Nigeria to tiny sovereign states such as
mountainous Lesotho. With an
entity of the AU stature, obviously issues of
sovereignty and equality of
nations would have to be addressed.
One should also be able to see how a supposedly independent Africa
would
operate in the current global environment without compromising its
ideals.
Many analysts have rightly pointed out Africa’s indebtedness as the
biggest
constraint to achievement of its goals.
The visit by American
President George Bush to Africa at a time when
this summit was being held is
so critical a coincidence.
That President Bush is pushing for the
senate to authorise US$15
billion for Africa’s fight against HIV/AIDS is a
clear indication of how the
AU ‘s path towards autonomy will be interfered
with. Such aid often comes
with a lot of ties, mainly issues of governance
and human rights, which
unfortunately is key to America’s relations with the
rest of the world.
Various economic blueprints have also been put
in place, supposedly to
stimulate developments in the beleaguered continent.
Economic frameworks
such as the US’ Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)
and the recently
launched New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development
(NEPAD) based on
the so-called "peer review" concept also speak volumes on
Africa’s drive
towards autonomy and eventual realisation of its noble
goals.
What Africa seeks to emulate, the EU, is in fact closely
knit and with
a membership of hardly 20. Yet some key policy differences have
often
emerged especially on the road towards a single currency. Even at
this
advanced stage of integration, differences between the Eurocrats
and
Eurosceptics remain a noticeable feature in the integration
process.
However, Africa should not lose hope. The creation of the
AU should at
least serve as an indicator of the bond that binds both Africans
in Africa
and in the diaspora. It indeed is a useful entity if it succeeds in
coming
up with structures that have potential to mediate in its perennial
conflicts
and at least create a viable environment for both investment and
respect to
humanity.
A real practical solution to Africa’s
problems however lies in the
consolidation of regional groupings like the
Economic Community of West
African States, the Southern African Developmemt
Community or the Community
of East African States.
Perhaps a
good indicator of the effectiveness of solutions at regional
level is the
1997 reversal of a constitutional crisis and the restoration of
democracy in
Lesotho after the intervention of the leaders of South Africa,
Botswana and
Zimbabwe. The intervention of the Nigerian-led West African
force in Sierra
Leone and also the role of SADC allied forces in the DRC
crisis five years
ago suffices to explain the concept.
To date, we even have a SADC
AIDS protocol, which needs to be
effectively implemented.
On
evaluating the impact of this summit, one is even forced to say
that the most
important outcome is that Africa is gender sensitive judging
by the
requirement that its Commission should be run by a balanced number of
male
and female commissioners. The other impact is the appointment of
President
Mugabe as one of the five vice chairmen to President Chissano
of
Mozambique.
Meanwhile, last week’s coup de etat in the West
African state of Sao
Tome becomes a test case for the AU’s response to the
rising number of
African crises. Failure to positively respond will rather
demonstrate that
the AU is just but the change of a name from the OAU, better
known for its
conferences, summits and solidarity statements. This, however
is not to
marginalise the OAU’s role in facilitating the continent’s
liberation from
colonial rule.
- Lovemore Kadenge is the
president Zimbabwe Economics Society
Daily News
Mugabe cleared Tsvangirai invite
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe is said to have sanctioned opposition
Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s attendance
at the official
opening of Parliament on Tuesday, a move that commentators
yesterday said
could mark the thawing of relations between Zimbabwe’s main
political
parties.
Sources told the Daily News that Mugabe okayed
Tsvangirai’s invitation
two hours before he was due to officially open the
fourth session of the
fifth Parliament.
Tsvangirai was
accommodated at the last minute in the Speaker’s
Gallery, where only special
guests with personal invitations from Parliament
Speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa
have seats reserved for them.
Mnangagwa personally invites and vets
the guests who sit in the
Speaker’s Gallery.
The sources
said when the MDC resolved at a meeting on Monday night
that its
parliamentarians would attend the opening of Parliament, it was
decided that
Tsvangirai should be present as well.
MDC secretary-general
Welshman Ncube, in the company of the party’s
deputy chief whip in
Parliament, Thokozani Khupe, approached Clerk of
Parliament Austin Zvoma on
Tuesday morning seeking an invitation card for
Tsvangirai to attend the
opening.
The sources said Zvoma directed the opposition party
officials to
Mnangagwa, who is said to have first sought “binding” guarantees
from the
MDC leaders that there would be no disruption or walkouts during
Mugabe’s
address before processing their request.
MDC
legislators have in the past boycotted Mugabe’s speeches, saying
he won last
year’s presidential election using unorthodox means. The
opposition party is
challenging Mugabe’s re-election in the courts.
The sources
said Mnangagwa, after receiving assurances that there
would be no
disruptions, phoned the Office of the President alerting it of
the
development and seeking clearance to grant Tsvangirai an invitation to
attend
the session.
The sources said Mugabe’s office gave its approval
for the invitation
at 10 am on Tuesday.
Invitation cards
were then sent to Tsvangirai, his wife Susan and MDC
national chairman Isaac
Matongo.
Mnangagwa last night confirmed that he had processed
Tsvangirai’s
invitation after being assured by Ncube and MDC vice-president
Gibson
Sibanda that opposition party legislators would sit through
Mugabe’s
address.
He told the Daily News: “I processed
Tsvangirai’s invitation after
getting assurance from the MDC leadership in
the House that there would not
be any disruption and
walkouts.”
He would, however, not respond to reports that
Mugabe was consulted
before an invitation was extended to
Tsvangirai.
He said the presence of the MDC parliamentarians
and Tsvangirai in the
House was welcome, adding that he hoped it was “the
beginning of greater
things to come”.
Mnangagwa said: “It
was a full House and there were no disruptions.
This is how things should
have been from day one. We should be able to
differ with each other while we
are on the same table. I hope this is the
beginning of greater things to come
and that this spirit will continue.”
Ncube, while refusing to
comment on the circumstances surrounding
Tsvangirai’s invitation, yesterday
said his party’s decision to attend the
opening of Parliament was a
demonstration that the MDC was committed to
ending the political deadlock in
Zimbabwe for the “good of the country”.
He added: “We restate
our position that we are ready to work to create
conditions to have dialogue
to break the impasse andour actions clearly
demonstrate that position. The
ball is now in ZANU PF’s court.”
Political analysts yesterday
said Mugabe’s decision to sanction
Tsvangirai’s invitation could indicate
that the ruling party and the MDC
were ready to break the ice and end a
stand-off that has significantly added
to the country’s
crisis.
Eldred Masunungure, a respected political analyst at
the University of
Zimbabwe, said: “All the developments which have taken
place in the past two
days signify a preliminary breakthrough in the search
for an internal
solution to the political stalemate in Zimbabwe. One can
clearly see a
thawing of relations between the two political
parties.
“By granting Tsvangirai the opportunity to attend
Parliament, Mugabe
in essence indicated that he is ready to open the door to
the MDC and its
leader. It is now even possible that we can have a situation
where these two
leaders will have a meeting because a beginning has been
made.” He added:
“Tsvangirai’s actions demonstrate that he is ready to rise
above partisan
interests for national good.” But Justice Minister Patrick
Chinamasa, the
leader of the ZANU PF delegation involved in talks that
stalled last year,
was more cautious. He told the Daily News: “I think that
the signs to create
an environment conducive for dialogue are there. Time
will tell whether
these are political gimmicks. “The MDC gesture was good. It
was a good start
towards mutual confidence-building. There is a perception in
ZANU PF that
the MDC has been a front for foreign interests and once we don’t
see it
(that the MDC is a front), we can start dialogue. If this dialogue
is
rushed, nothing will come out.’’ By Sydney Masamvu Assistant Editor
Daily News
NRZ starts buying new locomotives, wagons
THE National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) yesterday said it had
started buying
new equipment, including 10 locomotives and wagons, with the
$1 billion given
to the national rail carrier by the government after a
train accident earlier
this year that killed 50 near Dete in Matabeleland
North
province.
NRZ corporate affairs manager, Misheck Matanhire,
said the parastatal
had begun purchasing vital equipment following the spate
of train accidents
in the country.
“The government disbursed
$1 billion to the NRZ which is meant to
cover a number of projects, including
the installation of a signalling
system on the North Line and the
rehabilitation of some 10 locomotives and
wagons,” he said.
“The money will allow the NRZ to embark on various projects and
finance part
of the projects. The organisation has already initiated the
procurement
process for some materials required to start the projects.”
Matanhire did not say why the parastatal had delayed in utilising the
funds,
given to parastatal after the Dete train disaster in April.
NRZ
officials said following the accidents involving commuter trains,
the company
last week began an investigation into the safety of the
18-kilometre rail
track stretching from Harare’s main station to Marimba.
The
officials said a comprehensive report on the investigations will
be completed
today.
Thirty-three people were injured when a commuter train
derailed near
the Rugare siding last week. The NRZ last week said it was
abandoning its
auto-track control system and reverting to manual controlling
after the
derailment of the commuter train which was allegedly caused
by
malfunctioning of the auto control system.
Under the
manual system, NRZ personnel will have to be adjusting the
rail track, each
time a train has to pass.
The parastatal also introduced a
manual monitoring system of the track
and the position of concrete and
slippers on a daily basis to ensure that
entire system was working
properly.
According to a senior NRZ manager in Harare last
Thursday, several
technicians and engineers from their operations department
toured the main
line and resolved to replace the ballast, the slippers and
introduce the
manual tabular controlling system against the automatic
one.
Matanhire said the Zimbabwe Republic Police and NRZ
security personnel
have intensified their patrols in the areas affected by
vandalism and thefts
of signalling equipment.
Staff
Reporter
