New Zimbabwe
By Lebo
Nkatazo
Last updated: 01/13/2007 12:21:31
ZIMBABWE'S President Robert
Mugabe claims he has no fears of possible
prosecution when he finally leaves
office, he told Canadian journalists.
The Zimbabwean strongman who
celebrates 83 years next month also defended
Operation Murambatsvina -- a
widely-condemned government clean-up operation
of slums and unplanned urban
housing which the United Nations says left 700
000 people
homeless.
Asked by a journalist from the Canadian television station OMNI
if he was
reluctant to retire for fear of being dragged to the International
Criminal
Court, Mugabe said: "No, I have no fear of any kind, not at all. I
don't see
any outsider coming here to arrest us, what for?
"It would
amount to interference in our domestic affairs, and this is what
we have
resisted all along."
Transcripts of the interview were released
Thursday.
Mugabe is blamed for authorising the killing of over 20 000
civilians in the
south-western parts of the country between 1982 and 1987
during an army-led
campaign code-named Gukurahundi.
The atrocities,
documented by several human rights groups, were carrried out
by a
specially-trained unit called the 5 Brigade. The training of the unit
was
overseen by officers from North Korea under an agreement with President
Mugabe.
Opposition groups say Mugabe is reluctant to quit, fearing
that he could be
hauled before the International Criminal Court for crimes
against humanity.
Said Mugabe: "The West is subjective in its definition
(of human rights),
and we feel they should be objective about it.
"If
they don't like a particular leader, the best way of getting to him is
to
find him guilty of violating human rights. And this is what is happening.
Once you have that kind of psyche, that kind of mentality, then there is no
objectivity about it. In the final analysis, no justice along the way. And
so we do not accept the way they interpret the whole system or philosophy of
human rights."
He said during Operation Murambastina, less than 100
000 people were
affected. The United Nations has put the figure of the
displaced at over 700
000.
Mugabe said some people had been making
money out of the slums.
He added: "So we destroyed the slums here, slums
and shacks. In anticipation
of us putting up new buildings for the people .
others whom we knew were
making money out of the slums we say no, you cant's
run a business of that
nature."
Mugabe has been in power since
Zimbabwe won independence from Britain in
1980. His term expires in 2008 and
he has expressed a willingness to quit,
but his Zanu PF party has unveiled
plans to extend his term to 2010 as part
of a plan of synchronising
presidential and parliamentary elections.
The move is set to be
challenged by Mugabe's opponents in the opposition and
his internal critics
within Zanu PF.
progressiveU.org
Zimbabwean "Junior Doctors" (in
reality about the only medical advisors left
in the country) have been on
strike now for a week. Yesterday, all nurses at
the state owned hospitals
joined in (According to the AngolaPress). So what
are the doctors demanding?
They want a wage increase to 5 million ZWD a
month from their current salary
of 56 thousand ZWD. Now this sounds like a
lot, due to being an 8,928%
increase. In fact at the official exchange rate
of 250 ZWD per US dollar, it
would amount to about $20,000 a month in US
dollars, an hourly rate of $250
US dollars since the doctors work (on
average) 80 hours a
week.
Yet the real story, and one that gets shuffled under the
rug, is that the
official exchange rate is now, and always has been a fairy
tale. On August
21st 2006, the Central Bank of Zimbabwe removed three zeroes
from the
currency, creating a new group of bank notes (called in Zimbabwe
bearer
cheques, and not recognized internationally as a currency of value,
and
traded in informal markets at much more than the government's claimed
value). The bank also devalued the exchange rate to the US dollar from
100,000 old to 250 new. Confused? Good, the Central Bank of Zimbabwe
undertook this effort under the ruse to simplify the life of the public, but
the reality was that they were trying to hide how bad things are in the
country, which currently has an inflation rate of 1,280% per year. The
national budget for 2007 totaled 21 trillion ZWD.
So how bad
is it? Most of the hospitals these junior doctors are working in
have no
electricity, due to frequent power cuts. Water comes out of the taps
a murky
brown color. Even the most basic pain medications are unavailable.
In fact,
if a doctor really expects to be able to save the lives of their
patients,
they will likely have to spend a million or two ZWD from their own
pockets
to get the medications, and pay for the gas in ambulances. So
basically at
their current rate of pay they are powerless to do anything but
watch the
majority of those who come to the hospitals die. Because of this,
it really
is no surprise that most doctors, nurses, and other medical
professionals
have fled the country in search of greener pastures, leaving
only these
Junior Doctors, many of whom are very recent graduates of
government owned
medical schools which underrepresented the current economic
crisis, and its
effects on the health care sector.
Also, the current Exchange Rate of
the ZWD internationally is around 3,000
per US dollar, meaning that these
doctors are requesting about $5.20 an
hour, and after the costs of patient
medications $3.13 an hour. Knowing full
well that their counterparts who
have fled to Britain, North America, and
Australia are quite easily making
five times their meager demands, they
dream of a salary which will allow
them to help their patients. They also
dream that the government of their
country which is well known for its
brutality to all who oppose it, and its
apathy towards the suffering
population, will deal with these demands
rationally and humanely. The latter
is likely the less realistic
dream.
http://africantears.netfirms.com/thisweek.shtml
Saturday 13th January 2006
Dear Family
and Friends,
I write this letter to remember the lives of seven young men and
in the hope
that Zimbabwe never forgets what eight years of political
upheaval and
economic collapse have led us to - and why.
It began on
Christmas Eve when three men aged 23, 30 and 37 died of hunger
and
exhaustion in Inyathi. The men were arrested after being caught digging
for
precious minerals. The men were then forced by Police to fill up
trenches
for six days. Thulani, Matthew and Gift are reported to have died
of hunger
and exhaustion at the end of six days of extreme labour. A Police
spokesman
refused to comment on these deaths but said: "We make them fill up
the
trenches because they are the ones responsible for the mess."
Four days
later three men died in Filabusi. Aged 28, 33 and 37 these men
died
underground when they tried to evade Police and a disused mine shaft
collapsed on them. Reports say that Police had thrown tear gas into the mine
shaft to try and flush Daniel, Matron and Sipho out into the open. Denying
responsibility for the tragedy, a Police spokesman said: " our police
officers were not responsible for causing the deaths. The panners died while
dangerously trying to evade arrest."
On the 11th of January another
unarmed young man died in Shuruguwi. He was
shot while running away from
Police. In a shocking, crude and insensitive
report on State controlled ZBC
television on Friday night, the media tried
to explain why police left their
victim untended after the shooting. Eliot,
shot in the thigh, bled to death
at the Mutereki River while Police
apparently went looking for a vehicle. To
add insult to a most offensive
report, the word deceased was mis-spelled on
the screen. No respect, even in
death.
These seven men are the ones
we know about. They have become caught up in a
massive Police operation
called Operation Chikorokoza Chapera (No Illegal
panning) Local press
reports say that 22 554 illegal miners and dealers have
been arrested since
November. Apparently 7000 diamonds, 80 emeralds and 3.5
kgs of gold have
been seized by police in these last two months.
These numbers are
absolutely staggering but they must not stand alone.
Unemployment is well
over 70% and inflation is the highest in the world at
1281%. For eight years
almost nothing has been done about gold panning and
small scale mining by
the authorities and now the situation has got totally
out of control. So out
of control that young men who are sons, brothers,
fathers and husbands are
dying. Does the punishment fit the crime?
First they came for the
farmers.
Then they came for the opposition.
Then they came for the
judges.
Then they came for the journalists.
Then they came for the poor
and the vendors.
Now they have come for the miners.
The deaths of
seven young men are recognized, as is their struggle for
survival.
Until
next week, thanks for reading, love cathy
Eeeish !
Saturday 6th January
2007
Dear Family and Friends,
Sitting in a glass on my desk are five
Flame Lilies. The water they are
standing in was milky and murky and had a
brown sediment when it came out of
the tap this week. The flowers are
exquisite with frilled, scarlet petals
edged in yellow and spear shaped
leaves tipped with thin curling tendrils.
Flame Lilies are synonymous with
Christmas and New Year in Zimbabwe and this
year they are almost the only
thing bringing colour and cheer to our
deteriorating situation.
This
New Year most Zimbabweans are not saying Happy New Year they are
instead
shaking their heads and asking : how much longer, is there any hope?
Just a
week into 2007 and everyone is reeling at the massive price increases
of
everything. Despite all the government pronouncements and promises of an
"economic turnaround," Father Christmas did not deliver this elusive gift.
Before Christmas a loaf of bread was 295 dollars, now it is 850 dollars -
the bakers say its still not enough to cover their costs and more rises are
imminent.. (Add three zeroes to get the real price!) Petrol, which continues
to be mostly non existent, has apparently increased from 2200 to 3000
dollars a litre and transport costs are said to have gone up by 60%. Since
the government announced new price controls and began arresting businessmen
before Christmas, almost all basic essentials have disappeared from the
shelves. It is now virtually impossible to find sugar, flour, milk,
margarine, cooking oil or maize meal in supermarkets. In one large
wholesaler this week there were three great long aisles just filled from
floor to ceiling with salt. Fine salt, coarse salt, bulk salt - you name it,
there it was, just salt. All the oil, flour, sugar and maize meal normally
stacked there, had completely disappeared - turned to salt.
I stood
next to a young teenage girl looking at the school writing exercise
books
piled on one shelf. When children go back to school in a few days time
they
have to provide their own writing books. Most senior school children
need 15
exercise books and they are now just over 1000 dollars each. The
girl next
to me picked up a pack of ten books, turned it over, looked at me,
shook her
head and said 'eeeish' - and put the books back on the shelf. 'I
don't have
enough' she whispered and walked away.
It is tragic to see bright young
teenagers struggling to stay in school like
this. They know that if they
can't, it won't be long before they are forced
into vegetable vending,
begging and prostitution because there are very few
jobs for qualified
people and no jobs for school drop outs.
School fees for this girl were
three thousand dollars last term in a rural
government school. This term her
fees are fifteen thousand dollars. That
cost is the tip of the iceberg. Her
exercise books will cost another fifteen
thousand dollars and the plain soft
black tennis shoes she can get away with
wearing are fourteen thousand
dollars.
This first week of 2007 it is hard to see how the systems can
hold together
for very much longer. Water is close to collapse, electricity
workers are
striking for 1000% pay rises and junior doctors have been
striking for over
a fortnight. I close with a quote from a letter from a
friend which is
appropriate for us all at the start of the EIGHTH year of
Zimbabwe's
decline: "Will we be able to look our children in the eye one day
in the
future and say truthfully 'we did our best' for Zimbabwe?" I hope
so.
Until next week, thanks for reading, love cathy.
SABC
January 13,
2007, 18:15
Jonathan Moyo, an independent MP and former Zimbabwean
information minister,
is set to open a can of worms as he seeks to table a
highly sensitive bill
in parliament on atrocities perpetrated by government
25 years ago.
Over 20 000 civilians in Matabeleland are believed to have
been killed by
the army as government sought to weaken the support base of
the opposition
Zimbabwe African People's Union led by the late nationalist
Joshua Nkomo.
Matabeleland, some 500km south of Harare, bore the brunt of
a genocide
popularly known as Gukurahundi, meaning wipe out the trash.
Twenty-five
years later, Moyo intends to convince parliament that justice
must prevail
and those responsible have to face the music.
"You do
not deal with a dark period by sweeping it under the carpet. We are
talking
about a responsible legal remedy to a deep seated problem, there
should be
no sacred cows," said Moyo.
Government thinks Moyo will fail
Moyo,
whose bill is also seeking compensation for victims and the
establishment of
a museum, says he was mandated by his constituency to
pursue the contentious
issue.
"I represent a constituency which was affected and during the
campaign this
was a top priority for the people there. They want a
legislator who will
take this to parliament and find a responsible
solution," said Moyo.
However, government does not think Moyo will
succeed. It believes the matter
was resolved following the unity accord
signed by Robert Mugabe, the
Zimbabwean president, and Nkomo, the late
deputy president in 1987.
"Whichever way the debate will go, emotions are
likely to run high as
legislators seek consensus on the darkest episode of
post independent
Zimbabwe," said Paul Mangwana, the Zimbabwean information
minister.
Zim Standard
BY WALTER
MARWIZI
REPORTS of more corrupt practices and looting have
surfaced at the
National Social Security Authority (NSSA).
Sources told The Standard that NSSA had become a free-for-all looting
ground
for some officials who took advantage of the absence of a substantive
management.
Out of the six directors who run the institution,
with assets worth
$274 billlion countrywide, only two are
substantive.
Alarmed at the scale of looting, NSSA workers on 19
December sent
petitions to the Ministry of the Public Service, Labour and
Social Welfare
and the NSSA board, asking them to look into what they termed
"rampant
corruption and nepotism" blighting the parastatal.
They said public funds were at stake from named corrupt officials and
detailed instances where officials had abused NSSA's finances and
fuel.
The Standard was reliably informed one director was forced to
resign
after it emerged that he was a consultant of a company that won a
lucrative
US$6.5 million tender to computerise the parastatal. The exercise
is yet to
be completed, over a year after NSSA paid three companies,
Integra, PCS and
Vision the equivalent in local currency.
Jonathan Rushwaya, who was the director of Information and Technology,
packed his bags at NSSA headquarters after his dealings with Vision were
exposed.
Amod Takawira, the acting NSSA general manager,
confirmed that
Rushwaya failed to declare his interest in the company when
it became part
of the three companies that secured the mega
contract.
Rushwaya could not be reached for comment
yesterday.
Though Rushwaya left, workers say there is need for an
independent
probe into the matter because the case involved other senior
officials.
While NSSA pays out pensions as little as $12 900 a month, senior
managers
have access to high value loans which attract a paltry 5% interest
rate
spread over a long period.
For example, senior managers
are entitled to car loans after
completing three months on probation. A year
later, they are eligible for
housing loans.
One of the managers
was given a $2 billion loan (old currency), yet he
did not qualify to get
the amount, workers alleged.
Managers are also allowed to buy their
vehicles after every five years
at book value, which tends to be a
negligible amount in these days of
hyperinflation.
Takawira,
who has been acting GM since 2000, said he did not
understand why people
complained about NSSA.
He said NSSA paid a lot of money to
pensioners considering that they
had contributed very little to the
organisation.
"Members who earn less than $130 000 a month pay only
3% of their
salary to NSSA. Those who earn more than $130 000 only pay 3% of
that
amount. They don't pay more even if they earn much higher salaries.
These
contributions are insignificant, yet NSSA pays them over $12 000 if
they
retire today. Their contributions are too little," said
Takawira.
He insisted that NSSA was the best-paying pension scheme
in the
country.
Takawira said people who complained about
NSSA's pensions were
ignorant of how pension systems operated.
He defended the granting of high value loans to senior managers on the
grounds that the parastatal wanted to retain them.
"Any worker
at NSSA who does not have a loan has served less than two
years. Managers
access car loans on confirmation and for a house a year
later."
He said he needed the best brains to manage NSSA's investment. "Why
should I
get inferior people? We are not doing anything unusual. Our
policies are
replicas of the government. They are approved policies."
He said he
sometimes authorised loans to workers, who may not have
repaid their initial
loans if he thought the matter was deserving.
On the issue of cars
being sold after every five years to managers,
Takawira said: "Imagine
driving a 1995 323 from Harare to Nyamapanda.Every
company has a replacement
policy and at NSSA we also have one. Kwenyu
kuStandard hamudaro
here?"
While Standard reported last week that NSSA had bought 53
vehicles,
Takawira said the actual number was 70.
"There was a
build-up. We did not buy in 2000, 2001, 2002 until last
year -there is
nothing unusual about it."
Mike Bimha, the vice-chairman of the new
NSSA board, said yesterday
they were not aware of the allegations of
corruption levelled at senior
officials. He said their newly-appointed board
would meet on 29 January. He
was not sure if the matter would be brought up,
as no-one had as yet made
such a report to them.
NSSA has over
two million members who contribute every month.
Zim Standard
BY VALENTINE
MAPONGA
TWO senior managers at Edna Madzongwe's farm,
determined to evict a
54-year-old woman from the property, inserted iodised
salt into her private
parts in a bizarre case of indecent
assault.
The farm managers at the President of the Senate's Itape
Farm in
Chegutu, Benjamin Gwanzura and John Mugandanga, both 26, are
languishing in
remand prison after being arrested for the assault on
Pamhidzai Gwanzura.
Gwanzura and Mugandanga are being charged with
aggravated indecent
assault.
The two recently appeared before
Chegutu Magistrate Tinashe Ndokera
and were denied bail. They will appear
again in court on 24 January.
For the State, the public prosecutor
Blackson Matemba alleges that on
4 October 2006, Gwanzura and Mugandanga
indecently assaulted Pamhidzai
Gwanzura, who is not employed but resides at
the same farm, by inserting
iodised salt into her private parts with their
forefingers.
"The two accused proceeded to Pamhidzai Gwanzura's
house and advised
that she should vacate the farm. Having discovered that
the complainant was
resisting, Gwanzura and Mugandanga dragged her away from
her yard and booted
her twice on the legs," Matemba said.
He
alleges that Gwanzura held the complainant's legs, forcing them
apart to
expose her private parts.
"The accused then took salt from their
pockets and took turns to put
it into the complainant's vagina," said
Matemba.
The State alleges the two men then assaulted the
complainant with
sticks all over her body.
During the assault
Pamhidzai Gwanzura lost her wallet, containing $150
000 in cash. She later
made a report at Chegutu police station, after which
the two men were
arrested.
A medical examination was conducted at Chegutu hospital,
whose report
was expected to be produced in court as an
exhibit.
Madzongwe confirmed the two were her employees but said
was not aware
of the charge they were facing.
"I am not aware
of the charge you are talking about. If it's true that
is what happened I am
really sorry because I am also a woman," said
Madzongwe.
Although the woman and one of the men bear the same surname, the court
records says they are not related.
Ednah Madzongwe herself is a
Gwanzura by birth.
Zim Standard
BY WALTER
MARWIZI
EDGAR Tekere's autobiography, A Lifetime of Struggle,
released last
week, contains intimate details of how President Robert Mugabe
nearly
ditched his popular first wife, Sally.
Tekere does not
only talk of Mugabe's secret love, which is likely to
set tongues wagging,
but also about the intimate details of his own failed
relationships.
Edited by Ibbo Mandaza and published by Sapes
Books, the book is a
must-read for anyone interested in the struggle for
independence, the love
life of a man who has remained to many an enigma,
both as a politician and
as a human being, raised as a Catholic, yet known
to have conducted himself
in a most unCatholic way during his
marriage.
Tekere says that Mugabe's relationship with his late wife
was not as
warm and cordial as many people thought it was before the arrival
of Grace
Mugabe in their lives. Tekere says Mugabe double-crossed Sally and
had good
moments with another Zimbabwe woman, arranged for him by colleagues
in the
struggle who did not want him drafted into the leadership without a
wife.
The late George Silundika and Moton Malianga approached a
young lady,
Abigail Kurangwa who agreed to marry Mugabe and eventually fell
in love with
him. Mugabe appeared to reciprocate, and his family liked
Abigail; so all
seemed to proceed smoothly.
The arranged
marriage however failed to materialise.
When Sally heard about
Mugabe's impending marriage to Abigail, she
hurried to Southern Rhodesia and
quickly married her beloved Bob.
Tekere admits that the way Abigail
was treated was to affect his
relationship with Sally.
"Sally
and I never became friends, and I never liked her. But I
acknowledge that my
ill-feeling towards her was coloured by the way poor
Abigail had been
used."
Tekere claims that even on the night before their famous
journey into
Mozambique with the assistance of Chief Rekai Tangwena in March
1975, Mugabe
spent the night with Abigail.
Tekere himself had
had memorable moments at the Mbare flat of his
girlfriend, Anne Ruvimbo
Mujeni, who was later to become his wife.
As Tekere got into the
car that would take them to the border with
Mozambique to reinforce the war
effort, Tekere, who was in Kambuzuma
recalls: "saw a small figure slowly
climbing the security fence at the rear
of the garage. It was Robert Mugabe.
He was coming from the home of Abigail
Kurangwa."
The former
Zanu PF Secretary General says while in Mozambique, Mugabe
told him that his
marriage to Sally was over.
"In fact, it had ended before we left
Zimbabwe," he said.
And one day when Sally arrived in Quelimane,
Mugabe turned down an
offer for a Mercedes Benz to go and fetch his wife who
had arrived to join
him. The offer came from a Mozambican Governor,
identified only as
Bonifacio.
"Mugabe wanted nothing to do with
this, until eventually I persuaded
him to meet her. She arrived in time for
lunch, after which I left the two
together, and there was reconciliation,"
Tekere recounts.
He says: "Mugabe's family was extremely
displeased, as they disliked
Sally and they thought I had brought about the
reconciliation."
The veteran nationalist, who broke away from Zanu
PF to form the
Zimbabwe Unity Movement in 1989, says he suspects that it was
Sally who
influenced Mugabe to hate him. He says Sally knew that he had been
involved
in arranging a wife for Mugabe and never forgave him for
that.
Tekere says though Mugabe and his wife managed to settle
their
differences, another problem emerged in their lives.
An
angry Mugabe is reported to have told Tekere one day in Mozambique:
"Take
this man away from my house! He gets drunk, walks half-naked down the
corridor, in the presence of my wife."
Tekere says he defused
the situation by equipping a three-bedroom
house very fast for the late
Vice-President Simon Muzenda.
However, Tekere who is highly
critical of Mugabe, says he doesn't
blame Mugabe for an adulterous
relationship with Grace. He said Mugabe
wanted children.
Tekere
claims Mugabe explained to him on his visits to the State House
that his
bedroom had "collapsed" as a result of Sally's illness.
Tekere's
book, which carries an introduction by Mandaza, sheds new
light on many
events in the blood-spattered history of Zanu PF, before and
after
independence. Tekere clears Mugabe of any wrongdoing in the
controversial
death of Josiah Magama Tongogara, the military head of the
Zanla guerilla
forces..
He also talks about how he and others shot a white man
shortly after
independence and the subsequent trial.
Zim Standard
By
Kholwani Nyathi
THE decision by the government to allow people
from the Nswazwi
community in Plumtree to return to their native Botswana,
decades after they
escaped civil strife, has spurred a number of communities
to trace their
ancestry to Zimbabwe's more economically prosperous
neighbours.
The Standard can reveal that several people have
approached prominent
historians seeking assistance to help them with
information that could help
to prepare claims for restoration of their
citizenship in countries such as
South Africa and Botswana. All of these
people appear to be motivated by the
desire to escape the effects of a
crumbling economy.
Since the year 2000, millions of Zimbabweans
have taken advantage of
all available routes including border jumping and
political asylum claims to
escape the seven-year economic crisis blamed on
poor government policies to
seek refuge in other countries.
In
November last year, government repatriated 430 descendants of a
Kalanga
group that escaped a tribal conflict in the then British
Protectorate of
Buchuanaland (now Botswana) in 1947.
The group was led by chief
John Madawu Nswazwi who died in the 1960s
after settling in Mangwe District
and his remains were reburied in Botswana
in 2002 paving the way for the
relocations.
Thousands of people in Matabeleland South including
those from outside
the Nswazwi community tried to take advantage of the
process to secure
Botswana citizenship but failed to beat the strict vetting
exercise.
However, it appears the government opened the floodgates
for similar
claims by giving in to the group's demands at a time when the
country's
future looks bleak.
A prominent historian based in
Bulawayo Phathisa Nyathi says he has
been approached by a number of people
especially from Matabeleland seeking
information about the movement of their
ancestors from countries such as
South Africa and Botswana to bolster their
demands for relocations.
Groups that have since come out in the
open demanding repatriation to
Botswana following the Nswazwi relocations
include the Talaote and Ngwato of
Mangwe District in Matabeleland South who
claim their ancestors escaped
civil strife in the neighbouring country in
1897.
"I have seen a number of people carrying out research at our
library
here (Bulawayo City Council) trying to prove that their ancestors
came from
South Africa or Botswana so that they can claim citizenship in
those
countries," said Nyathi.
"Others have approached me
seeking assistance. I think the reasons are
more of economic push factors
than anything else."
Nyathi said most of the communities in Mangwe
and Bulilima districts
still maintained their Botswana identity and were
likely to follow the
example set by the Nswazwi group.
He
identified other communities as the Birwa found mainly in Gwanda
near the
border with Botswana.
Nyathi said although the groups had been
diluted by inter-marriages
within the predominantly Kalanga areas,
chieftainships and names of places
still had a Botswana
influence.
Other groups also include the Khumalos who are the
descendants of King
Mzilikazi who have maintained close links with the Zulus
in KwaZulu Natal in
South Africa where they escaped Tshaka's
reign.
Maxwell Majahana Moyo, a researcher based in Bulawayo, also
wrote
recently that the Talaote and the Ngwato were expecting similar
treatment
from government as that of the Nswazwi with their requests for
repatriations.
"The return of the Nswazwi people has set a
precedent which all groups
wishing to go back will point to.
"There is nothing out of the ordinary if Botswana refugees want to go
back
after 100 years of stay in the country.
"It is only just to allow
these Talaote and Ngwato of Raditladi and
Mphoeng group to go back if they
wish to," Moyo wrote recently in an article
published in The
Chronicle.
Nyathi said the demands for repatriation had less to do
with a desire
by the communities to return to their ancestral lands but were
fuelled by
economic difficulties in the country.
Most of those
relocated to Botswana were born and educated in Zimbabwe
and also included
civil servants who resigned from their jobs.
It is estimated that
about three million Zimbabweans are now living
abroad after escaping the
economic and political problems.
Thousands were granted political
asylum in countries such as Canada,
the United Kingdom, Australia, New
Zealand and the United States.
Professionals also continue to trek
to overseas and neighbouring
countries in search of greener
pastures.
Botswana and South Africa deport an average of 500 000
illegal
immigrants from Zimbabwe every year.
When the
government agreed to let the Nswazwi community return to
Botswana, the
number of applications overwhelmed the officials but the final
list of
returnees was whittled down to 430.
A significant portion of
Zimbabwe's population are descendants of
Malawian, Zambian and Mozambican
migrant labourers.
Although, it remains the second largest Southern
African economy
outside South Africa, living standards in Zimbabwe have
plummeted to levels
below most countries in the region.
The
pressure to escape Zimbabwe has been increasing every year to an
extent that
thousands risk their lives by swimming across the crocodile
infested Limpopo
River to get to South Africa.
Botswana is also erecting a
multi-billion dollar electric fence along
its border with its northern
neighbour to keep away illegal immigrants it
blames for soaring crime
statistics.
Zim Standard
By Caiphas
Chimhete
ECONOMICALLY-challenged bereaved families in Harare,
counted among the
majority in the capital, now resort to burying their dead
in shallow graves,
illegally, to evade paying the high burial costs charged
by the Harare City
Council as poverty takes its toll among the people, The
Standard has
established.
With over 80 percent of the employed
living below the poverty datum
line (PDL), most Zimbabweans are scrounging
for survival and giving a decent
burial to loved ones has become more of a
luxury than a time-honoured
respected tradition.
The Consumer
Council of Zimbabwe (CCZ) says a family of six now
requires about $350 000 a
month to live a decent life.
But that amount is beyond the reach of
the ordinary worker, who on
average gets about $60 000 a month.
Investigations by this newspaper in the past few weeks indicated that
poverty-stricken families in Harare - unable to pay high burial costs - have
resorted to burying their loved ones under cover of darkness.
It costs about $57 000 to bury an adult at Warren Park cemetery and
$17 500
at Granville cemetery. Other cemeteries are controlled by the Harare
City
Council.
Illegal burials are most frequent at Hopley Farm and Snake
Park, where
the impoverished victims of the government-sponsored Operation
Murambatsvina
are staying.
Most them lost their properties and
their livelihoods when government
razed their homes in May 2005, leaving
them destitute. As a result, levels
of poverty among them have
worsened.
Illegal burials have been reported in Mabvuku, Tafara and
Epworth.
Government officials at Hopley Farm confirmed the illegal
burial
around the farm and in the nearby Granville cemetery, which is owned
the
council.
"We have reported a number of these cases to the
police but the people
continue the practice because they cannot afford the
burial fees. They need
government assistance," said one government official
at Hopley Farm,
requesting anonymity.
The official cited the
recent case of Takawira Muchapondwa who died at
Hopley and was secretly
buried at the children's section at Granville
cemetery during the night. The
matter was reported at Waterfalls Police
Station.
Last month, a
premature baby was secretly buried within the vicinity
at Zone 3 at
Hopley.
"In both cases, the relatives indicated they could not
afford the
council's burial fees," said the official.
The
social welfare officer at Hopley, Ezekiel Mpande, declined to
comment,
saying he was on leave.
"Phone the ministry because I am on leave
the whole of this month,"
said Mpande.
The Minister of Public
Service, Labour and Social Welfare Nicholas
Goche could not be reached for
comment.
Waterfalls police last week confirmed the illegal burials,
adding that
investigations were underway to locate relatives of the
deceased, who was
buried secretly recently at Granville cemetery with the
collusion of
gravediggers.
"We received a report from the city
council and the body was exhumed,"
said a police officer. "The body is
currently in the mortuary as
investigations continue. But for further
details, contact the police
spokesperson"
Police chief
spokesperson Wayne Bvudzijena could not be reached for
comment.
Harare City Council spokesperson, Percy Toriro, confirmed that secret
burials did take place in the city but he was not aware of any recent
case.
"I will contact the relevant people dealing with such issues
and then
come back to you," he said.
Early last year, an
illegal graveyard was discovered at Snake Park,
along the Bulawayo road and
another one with 30 graves has been found at
Hopley and Blackfordby farms,
some of the first farms to be invaded by the
war veterans in 2000.
Zim Standard
By Nqobani
Ndlovu
BULAWAYO - All operations at the Gwanda town council
were brought to a
virtual standstill on Wednesday after workers downed tools
to press for a
salary increment and improved working
conditions.
About 180 council employees, previously on a go-slow
for over a week,
embarked on a full-blownstrike to push for a 350 percent
pay hike back-dated
to last August.
Last year they dragged the
council to the Labour Court after it turned
down their demand for a pay
rise.
But the council appealed against the ruling which favoured
the
workers.
The Standard learnt that most of the workers
earned less than $40 000,
which they want to be increased to cushion them
against punishing
hyperinflation.
According to the Consumer
Council of Zimbabwe, a family of six
requires about $351 000 to survive a
month. Most of the country's workers
are in the $40 000-$60 000 pay
bracket.
Acting Mayor, Petros Mukwena confirmed the strike but
referred The
Standard to the Town Clerk, Gilbert Mlilo for official
comment.
Mlilo confirmed that workers had downed tools. "They went
on strike
but they are back at work following talks with the
council."
But Mlilo could not say the exact percentage the council
offered the
workers, adding: "All that is confidential information. We do
not discuss
salary issues over the phone."
But sources
indicated the council threatened a witch-hunt to flush out
the strike ring
leaders who could face dismissal. The Town Clerk denied such
a
plot.
The beginning of this year has been characterised by strikes
in
different sectors of the economy as workers press for more pay and better
working conditions.
Most organisations have said they would be
unable to boost their
workers' pay due to the disastrous state of the
economy.
The anti-Senate faction of the Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC)
has warned of spontaneous full-scale national demonstrations by
the
underpaid, overworked and ill-tempered workers against the government,
which
they blame for the economic crisis.
In a statement the
party spokesman Nelson Chamisa said his faction
supported the workers'
freedom to engage in collective job action and to
express their discontent
over the state of the economy.
But in a State of the Nation address
last year, President Robert
Mugabe insisted the economy was on the
mend.
On the strength of that claim, he has demanded that his party
extend
his term of office to 2010, two years after it was due to end in
2008.
Zim Standard
BY OUR
STAFF
MASVINGO - A man, pointing at a picture of President
Robert Mugabe
during a TV news bulletin in a bar in Masvingo, said if the
president died,
then the Zimbabwe crisis would end.
Selestin
Jengeta, a teacher, spent three days in lice-infested police
cells after he
was arrested over the remarks last month.
In a separarte incident,
Gibson Murinye and Collen Mwachikopa were
arrested for singing a song in
which they alleged the president was
impotent.
The arrests
signal an increase in cases of citizens being locked up
for allegedly
insulting or undermining the authority of the President in
Masvingo
Province.
Late last year, a teacher was arrested after she remarked
that
"Hitler" was ruling Zimbabwe. Her case is still pending.
Jengeta was hauled before Masvingo provincial Magistrate, Timeon
Makunde,
accused of undermining or insulting the President as defined by a
chapter of
the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform Act).
Prosecutor Rodrick
Chipembere told the court that on 17 December,
Jengeta, drinking beer in the
company of friends at Phoenix, a bar owned by
the police in Masvingo,
insulted Mugabe during ZBC's News Hour.
Chipembere said Jengeta
pointed at Mugabe's image on the screen and
said that he wished him dead, as
that would end the crisis in the country.
Jengeta is alleged to
have said: "Dai munhu uyu anga afa zvinhu
zvaiita nani." (If this man died,
things would be better.) The court heard
that a barmaid asked him who he was
referring to, and Jengeta pointed again
to the screen, before saying
"Mugabe".
He was immediately arrested by police officers who were
drinking in
the bar.
Jengeta was remanded out of custody to 20
February.
Murinye and Mwachikopa were dragged before the same
magistrate after
they were arrested for singing a song allegedly insulting
the president.
Simba Mokapa, for the State, told the court that the
duo, allegedly
drunk at Chivi growth point, were arrested after they broke
into a song
popular at Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)
rallies.
Court records show that the two, singing in Shona, were
saying:
"Bhobho hauna mwana, tora vana vaPamire udzorere kudzinza ravo,
Mugabe
chibva hatikendenge chero wakabata pfuti." (Bob, you have no child;
take
Pamire's children and return them to their roots. Mugabe, leave office
now;
we don't care if you are armed with a gun.)
The two were
arrested and taken to Chivi Police Station. They were
later transferred to
Masvingo Police Station where they were detained for
three
days.
Tongai Matutu represented Murinye and Mwachikopa who were
remanded to
27 February.
Last year a teacher at Mucheke high
school was locked up for three
days after she likened Mugabe's rule to the
Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.
Zim Standard
BY OUR
STAFF
BULAWAYO - Bulawayo City Council has struck a barter deal
with Toyota
Zimbabwe where it will receive 11 state-of-the-art ambulances in
exchange
for land.
The deal is designed to revive the council's
fire and ambulance
services, severely crippled by a shortage of foreign
currency to buy spares
for an ageing ambulance fleet.
The
Mayor, Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube, recently said most of their
ambulances were
grounded, with most of them now obsolete, reducing
tremendously the
council's capacity to react to emergencies.
According to a recent
report of its finance and development committee,
the council agreed to give
Toyota Zimbabwe 1 294 hectares near the Zimbabwe
International Trade Fair
Grounds as payment for the ambulances.
The land was valued at $324,
1 million as of December. The council's
condition is that Toyota Zimbabwe
should at least build a property valued at
$1,6 billion on the
land.
The equipment would be made up of one command ambulance (Land
Cruiser), three advanced life support ambulances (Quantum) and seven
intermediate life support ambulances (Quantum).
The company
will take possession of the land once all formalities have
been concluded
and an appropriate agreement signed.
"The delivery of ambulances
should be done as soon as possible with
the company being responsible for
shipping, clearing and paying all dues to
the relevant organisations," the
council said.
The local authority, like many others in Zimbabwe,
has been struggling
to provide essential services to residents as a result
of the country's
general economic meltdown.
The provision of
ambulances services has been one of the major
challenges as the purchase of
equipment requires a huge foreign currency
component, which is in short
supply.
In the past, the council has aggressively appealed for
financial aid
from the corporate world to help it keep afloat. Toyota
officials were not
immediately available for comment.
Zim Standard
BY VALENTINE
MAPONGA
NEW registration fees imposed by the Media and
Information Commission
(MIC) on the local media could force a number of
community newspapers out of
business.
Publishers, editors and
journalists complained to The Standard the
$600 000 registration fee for a
local mass media service was "too much" for
most community newspapers which
operate on shoestring budgets.
The fees have been imposed by the
MIC, which is headed by former
journalism lecturer Tafataona
Mahoso.
Co-publisher of The Weekend Gazette, a community newspaper
based in
Kwekwe, Ephraim Efrem, said they faced an uncertain future as a
result of
the new fees.
"We have failed to raise the money," he
said. "I don't know where they
expect us to get the money from. They should
have a different fee for us
community papers," he said.
Zimbabwe Union of Journalists president Matthew Takaona said most
community
newspapers faced closure.
"For these papers, the situation is
already extremely desperate and
there is no way they will be able to raise
that kind of money," said
Takaona.
He said the MIC should have
staggered the fees for struggling
publications.
"More
journalists are going to operate without accreditation, not
because they
don't want to, but they cannot afford to pay. The situation is
going to be
very bad for the industry."
He warned the closure of newspapers
could spawn more Internet-based
publications and pirate radio stations,
which would be difficult to
regulate.
Media Institute of
Southern Africa (MISA) research and information
officer, Nyasha Nyakunu,
said the industry should be more worried about
AIPPA (Access to Information
and Protection to Privacy Act) since it was
never meant to make life easier
for Zimbabwean journalists.
"It is in that context that the fees
are now having to be increased;
it's all designed to make life difficult for
newspapers," said Nyakunu.
He said that Zimbabwean journalists and
publishers were being forced
to contribute towards their own subjugation
because registered journalists
would still get arrested and harassed while
on duty.
Under the new punitive fee structure, local journalists
working for a
foreign media organisation are required to pay an application
fee of US$200
and an additional accreditation fee of US$1 000.
Application for a temporary accreditation for a foreign journalist now
costs
US$100 while full accreditation costs US$500. Application for
permission to
operate a representative office of foreign mass media service
or news agency
attracts an application fee of US$2 000. An additional US$10
000 fee would
be needed in order to secure permission to operate in
Zimbabwe.
A Zimbabwean journalist working for a local media house would have to
pay
$10 000 application fee and $15 000 accreditation fee, while a local
freelance journalist will pay an application fee of $15 000 and an
accreditation fee of $20 000.
Journalists who failed to
register before the expiry date of 31
December deadline face a late fee of
$10 000 for each day they remain
unlicensed.
Mahoso could not
be reached for comment last week.
Zim Standard
BY OUR STAFF
BULAWAYO - An altercation between mourners and police was averted on
Wednesday at the funeral of a Bulawayo man shot by a policeman as he
celebrated the New Year.
Police denied responsibility for
Artwell Magagada's death, claiming
the officer, yet to be identified
publicly, was off duty when he shot the
young man who had just knocked off
from work at Chicken Inn.
Police only provided a bus to ferry
mourners to West Park cemetery.
Police officers who attended the funeral
were in civilian clothes, perhaps
to escape the wrath of angry
mourners.
The mourners sang "ndimi makauraya munhu uyu watiri
kuviga", (you
killed the man we are burying today), as they charged towards
the police
bus, but were restrained by the deceased's
relatives.
The highly emotional mourners said the police had
refused to settle
Magagada's hospital and funeral expenses.
Magagada died after spending four days on a life support system at the
Mater
Dei Hospital following the shooting incident outside a popular food
court in
the city.
Caleb Magagada, Artwell's father said: "The police did
not provide us
with any financial assistance during the funeral wake, saying
the officer
was off duty and cannot accept responsibility for his
actions."
Artwell's brother, Charles added: "An apology alone
cannot suffice.
Why then are they not arresting him for shooting my brother
since he is a
killer? After all this, we are taking the issue to
court."
Canisia Satiya, a non-constituency Member of the House of
Assembly,
speaking at the burial, deplored the killing saying: "The police
officer
should have fired at least three warning shots."
Police
spokesperson Oliver Mandipaka said they were still
investigating the
shooting, refusing further comment. He said full details
would be available
on completion of their investigations.
The bullet that hit Magagada
was still lodged in his head at the time
of his death. He had just been
employed by Chicken Inn after successfully
completing his
internship.
The deceased was in the company of other workmates at
the time of the
shooting incident near the fast food outlet.
Zim Standard
By
Nqobani Ndlovu
SIBONGILE Dube is conscious of her failing
health as she approaches a
now popular street corner where attractive flyers
invite Bulawayo residents
to test their stress levels.
"I have
been suffering from migraines for the past two months and I
suspect it's
because of the problems I am going through," Dube said while
waiting for her
turn to be tested.
She is at one of the centres run by the Hubbard
Dianetics Foundation
which conducts free tests for stress levels and therapy
for those found to
be "stressed-up."
Zimbabweans are grappling
with declining living standards and massive
unemployment levels blamed on
the seven-year economic recession, spawned by
the land
invasions.
Suicide levels have also been going up with reports of
people taking
their own lives coming out in the media more
frequently.
The start of the new year saw prices of basic
commodities shooting up,
while inflation went ballistic to 1 281 percent
from
1 099 percent.
The situation has seen hundreds of
people flocking to Hubbard
Dianetics Foundation near the Bulawayo Centre
shopping mall to get free
daily therapy for stress.
According
to the regional director of the foundation, Admire Chipere,
stress levels
are determined instantly.
"We test stress with the e-meter machine
and the response from the
public is overwhelming. The e-meter machine tests
the human mind and
spirit," said Chipere last week.
He said
Hubbard Dianetics Foundation was an international life
improvement centre
with head offices in Florida, USA.
Among some of the tests the
organisation conducts, said Chipere, are
anxiety and depression
levels.
People found with high levels of stress are invited to
watch a
40-minute "stress reliever" film about dianetics, which the
foundation says
is "a visual guidebook to the mind".
"I feel
better now because before I watched the film I could no longer
think
straight," said Mavis Muleya, as she emerged from the foundation's
small
theatre room last week.
The organisation, The Standard learnt, uses
L Ron Hubbard Literature
published by New Era Publications, International
Aps, to test residents for
any stress.
One of the books is
titled Dianetics - the Modern Science of the Mind
and Dianetics - The power
of the mind on the body.
The book claims that Hubbard is "one of
the most acclaimed and widely
read authors who has managed to make millions
around the world live happier
lives".
Hubbard was the founder
of the Church of Scientology, whose adherents
include the actors John
Travolta and Tom Cruise.
But in a survey in the city, some
residents felt that the Hubbard
Dianetics Foundation centre was another
entrepreneurial effort to take
advantage of the difficult economic situation
in the country.
They said people conducting the stress tests were
after making money
to survive the harsh economic climate as they sold
literature by Hubbard.
Godwin Mpofu said: "There is nothing to test
as people are stressed
over the ever-rising costs of commodities, fees and
everything. This is all
an attempt to make money since everyone is now an
entrepreneur."
Zim Standard
BY VALENTINE
MAPONGA
HARARE police have arrested the former acting chief
executive officer
of ZUPCO, Godfrey Mawarura in connection with the death of
his wife, whose
body was discovered at Harare Hospital Mortuary on
Friday.
A close relative of the former ZUPCO boss said the wife,
Loveness
Makoni-Mawarura went missing on 28 December 2006.
The
relative said they had searched for her everywhere, and had turned
for help
to faith healers. "The last person to see her was her husband
because they
were together the night she disappeared. He (Mawarura) even
called us,
informing us that he could not locate his wife around midnight,
the same day
she disappeared," said one close relative in Chitungwiza's Unit K.
Zim Standard
BY
NDAMU SANDU
IN Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot,
Vladimir and
Estragon are told to wait for someone they haven't met and are
not sure when
that person is coming.
Tired of waiting, Estragon
tells his friend they should go but
Vladimir insists they should wait for
Godot until he comes.
The majority of Zimbabweans are Vladimirs and
Estragons still waiting
to enjoy the benefits of the National Economic
Development Priority
Programme (NEDPP) nine months after the economic
blueprint was launched as a
stop-gap measure to halt the free-falling
economy.
Launched in April last year, the NEDPP promised
Zimbabweans an El
Dorado: US$2.5 billion in either cash or investments
within 90 days; it
promised a better Zimbabwe within six to nine
months.
National Security minister Didymus Mutasa told journalists
that farm
disruptions would end because the people engaged in them did not
have the
interest of the government at heart.
Unveiling the
model, Economic Development Minister Rugare Gumbo, said
the NEDPP revolved
around its specific objectives which were designed to
reduce inflation, the
stabilisation of the currency, ensuring food security,
increasing output and
productivity and generation of foreign exchange.
To ensure the
success of the model, Zimbabweans were told that various
task forces would
be formulated to implement programmes and strategies. The
task forces formed
would focus on agriculture co-ordination, input supply
and food security;
domestic and international resources mobilisation; human
skills
identification, deployment and retention; "Look East" promotion and
implementation of programmes; import substitution and value addition;
foreign exchange mobilisation and utilisation; and Small and Medium
Enterprise promotion and distressed companies rehabilitation.
But the NEDPP promoters sat seething with frustration in their offices
for
the better part of last year as prospects of a turnaround disappeared
like a
mirage by August.
The nine-month grace period is lapses next
Thursday and the government
coffers do not reflect anything near that US$2.5
billion haul.
Central bank chief Gideon Gono's forays into Russia
are still to yield
results, despite promises that the oligarchs would
descend on Zimbabwe with
loads of Roubles in investments.
Farm
disruptions are continuing unabated with contradictions from the
government
officials the order of the day. Vice-President Joice Mujuru said
last year
the government was winding up the land reform programme.
Mutasa was
sang from a different hymn sheet: land reform was an
ongoing process. The
partnership between the government and the private
sector is waning fast,
following the arrests of business leaders last year.
As if that was not
enough, a Pricing and Incomes Bill that calls for a
five-year imprisonment
and cessation of business by violators is under
consideration, threatening
to further widen the rift between the government
and business.
Political differences were to creep into the body of the NEDPP,
particularly
with the unresolved succession debate, where people looked for
clues as how
the model could be used to enhance political gains.
Annual
inflation, at 1 281% as at December is heading northwards and
is forecast to
breach the 2000% mark by June.
Economic analyst John Robertson
described NEDPP as a complete failure.
"It was a statement of
intention but there were no plans to achieve
those intentions," Robertson
told Standardbusiness.
"It was a description on what (promoters)
wanted but not a description
on how they would achieve that."
Since independence Zimbabwe has been crafting economic blueprints to
steer
the economy out of murky waters of uncertainty and stagnation. The
Transitional National Development Plan (1986-90), according priority to
poverty reduction, was launched, with the idea that the government would
spend money towards increased social sector development, expansion of rural
infrastructure and redressing social and economic inequality, including land
reform. The programme was dumped in the 1990 for the Bretton Woods-inspired
Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) which undertook to reform
public enterprises and the civil service.
ESAP promised to
reduce central government deficit from 10% of GDP to
5% by the fiscal year
1994-95. The Zimbabwe Programme for Economic and
Social Transformation
(ZIMPREST), touted as a home-grown programme, was
launched in February 1998
to stem inflation from over 20% at the start of
the programme to single
digit level by the year 2000. It also promised
continuous growth in exports
and envisaged a real annual GDP growth of 6%
cent until 2000, creating 44
000 new jobs per year. To achieve such targets,
savings and investments were
expected to reach at least 23% of the GDP and
the budget deficit reduced to
under 5 %.
Besides seeking to advance the unfinished work of ESAP,
ZIMPREST also
added socio-political goals such as improvements in the
quality of
democratic institutions; the pursuit of good governance; and the
elimination
of corruption. Thus, political conditionalities were added to
ZIMPREST.
ZIMPREST could not live to celebrate its fourth anniversary as it
was dumped
for another programme: the Millennium Economic Recovery Programme
(MERP)
launched in August 2001. MERP was touted as a short-term economic
programme
to restore economic vibrancy and address the underlying
macroeconomic
fundamentals. But it was rendered ineffective, largely due to
the withdrawal
of international donor support in February 2003.
So, what is next? If the government has run out of ideas, it is not
about to
admit this failure publicly. Gono postponed the delivery of his
latest
monetary review policy to this year, from 2006.
Most analysts say
they are not holding their breath until then.
Failure, Gono has said in the
past, is not an option. He may be about to rue
that smug
declaration.
Zim Standard
Comment
NOTHING short of a Zimbabwean version of The Big
Bang could galvanize
this government into action on any of the crises this
country is facing as a
result of their monumental economic and political
blunders.
If the so-called illegal sanctions had been effective in
persuading
the government to alter course, this would have happened a long
time ago.
That it hasn't suggests that the government is lying
through its teeth
when it keeps telling the people that the illegal
sanctions have brought
this country to its knees.
How can a
government on its knees allow its own institutions to
squander scarce
foreign currency on so many luxury vehicles?
Why would people not
be inclined to conclude that there is corruption
of the most stinking kind
when such seeming scandals occur in broad
daylight?
In this
issue, we carry a long letter from the Zimbabwe National
Students Union
(ZINASU). Its contents are not extraordinary in the manner of
being what the
sensational papers would call "shocking revelations".
Other
Zimbabweans, without the emotional baggage of being personally
involved in
the subject matter, have calmly ventilated this crisis in the
past: our
higher education system is going the same way as the lower
education system
- to the dogs.
ZINASU provides background and statistics. If the
government reacted
with what some cynics have called their customary
sang-froid, it wouldn't
surprise us at all. It is this deliberately
laid-back reaction to every
crisis which brought us to this miserable
state.
The students have been accused of being closet opposition
MDC
activists and their complaints will be readily dismissed on those
nebulous
grounds alone: it is their "master's voice" speaking, it will be
concluded.
The unions have had the same insults hurled at them: all
their efforts
to stage demonstrations have been ascribed, not to the massive
agitation
among their desperately undernourished members who just want a
decent wage,
but to the opposition.
The ultimate insult is the
scandalous allegation that none of this
anti-government activity would be
publicly displayed, either by the
students, or the National Constitutional
Assembly, if it was not being
orchestrated by the British government and
their allies,the United States
and the European |Union.
During
the liberation struggle, the racist regimes tried to use this
same ploy: if
it wasn't for the Soviet Union and the People's Republic, the
black people
would not protest against white rule.
Those who did had to be
"communist agitators", they said. Yet, like
the government of Zimbabwe
today, they knew that the people in general
loathed them intensely for
treating them like dirt, as if they didn't amount
to much as human beings
and could be kicked around without reacting in any
way.
We know
now that the racists were tragically mistaken, or allowed this
self-deception to take root until they believed it to be the truth: that the
Africans were spineless.
Then, of course, when the explosion
did occur, they were shocked: "How
would our nice Africans do this to
us?"
Today, there could be leaders in the ruling party and the
government
who may be laboring under this same illusion - that everybody is
happy with
their rule and it is only the few agitators, egged on by those
imperialists,
the British and the Americans, who are sowing the seeds of
discontent. They
too will be shocked to their core when these "nice
Zimbabwean" workers and
students decide it is time to shock the rulers into
an appreciation of how
angry a hungry person can be.
This may
be the final catalyst: hunger. The workers, the students,
even the
intelligentsia may, at last, conclude that if independence, for
which their
relatives died, cannot end their hunger because of the
selfishness of a few
pot-bellied politicians in their obscenely luxurious
cars on which precious
foreign currency has been squandered, then it is time
to stage their own Big
Bang.
Zim Standard
Reflections
With Alex T Magaisa
After reading my recent article on the
dynamics of change in Zanu PF
and Zimbabwean politics generally, a good
friend and generous reader
reminded me of a famous quote by Machiavelli, the
famed Italian politician
and thinker of the Renaissance period, whose works
on political thought have
become major planks of political philosophy. I
will shamelessly prise and
use that famous quote on change because it can
help us explore and
understand the challenges faced by those willing to
pursue change in
Zimbabwean politics, whether in Zanu PF, the MDC or
Zimbabwe generally. In
his most famous political treatise on the dynamics of
gaining and
maintaining power, The Prince, Machiavelli stated
that,
"It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult
to carry
out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle,
than to
initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all
those
who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those
who
would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from
fear of
their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly
from the
incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new
until they
have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every
opportunity
for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of
partisans,
the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them
he runs
great danger."
In this brief quotation, Machiavelli
captures an explanation of why it
is difficult for those who wish to pursue
change within a particular
context. It is such a beautiful quote because it
can be applied not just in
relation to political power but indeed to all
forms of power or units, be it
the family, the corporate organisation, or
any other unit in which people
are involved. Whenever change is an issue
there are at least three players:
the change agents; that is, people that
seek to lead change, then there are
those that resist change and finally the
ordinary members that are
pro-change.
As we saw in the last
article, there is evidence in Zanu PF of those
that have an appetite to
change the leadership structure. The significance
of what is now called the
Tsholotsho Declaration is that it demonstrated the
presence of change agents
within Zanu PF. However, the aftermath of that
event consisting of the
suspension and dismissals from key posts of persons
suspected of having been
involved also demonstrates the perils faced by
change agents. More recently,
the apparent lack of consensus on key issues
at the recent Zanu PF Congress
at Goromonzi has shown that the presence and
appetite of change agents has
not diminished. Nevertheless, there is also a
core component of anti-change
agents; those that favour the status quo and
therefore show a reluctance to
change.
Machiavelli's words indicate that initiating a new order is
not only
difficult to handle but it can also be a dangerous exercise. The
biggest
impediment is represented by those that profit from the existing
order. They
enjoy the benefits of the status quo and depend for their
survival both
literally and politically on the existing order. They owe
their status to
the patronage of the leadership and therefore have the most
to lose from any
change of leadership. This might explain the dogged
resistance to change by
a seemingly large section of Zanu PF, when it is
clear that change is not
only necessary but inevitable. Life might be
extremely tough for the
majority, but there is a section that is thriving,
perhaps better than they
have ever done before. They are even prepared to
postpone change in order to
continue enjoying the benefits of the current
order.
How can you, when you hold a senior government position
where you set
the rules, with its generous official and unofficial perks,
and you are also
a new farmer with interests in the lucrative tobacco and
flower industry,
and you have unlimited access to financial lines meant to
empower the
formerly oppressed, all of which enable you to purchase with
your own cash
the most luxurious automobile there is in Bavaria and build
the most
luxurious property and perhaps even enable you to marry another
wife?
The same could be said on the national scale, where those
Zimbabweans
that believe that they are doing well in the current economic
conditions are
not very keen on change. It is not surprising that those that
have benefited
from exploiting the current economic landscape have no desire
or concern for
change because making things right would immediately wipe out
their cash
cows. Similarly, in the MDC, resistance to change in leadership
could be
explained by the fact that those that are attached to the old order
have
interests to safeguard, which would be vulnerable if change were to
take
place.
The change agents might be bolder if they were
confident of receiving
the support of those that are
pro-change.
Arguably, there are ordinary members of Zanu PF who are
amenable to
change both at the party level. Like every other citizen, they
suffer due to
the deterioration of the national economy and they have not
benefited from
the cronyism and corruption that has sustained the wealth of
those leaders
who are against change. The problem however, as Machiavelli
pointed out, is
that their support for those leading change is only
lukewarm.
That support is lukewarm and lacks the necessary boldness
that would
otherwise drive change because firstly, they fear that the
leaders that
resist change have power at their disposal which they can use
against them,
whether through legal or non-legal means. The same argument is
probably more
pronounced at the national level, where the opposition
supporters have had a
lukewarm approach because Zanu PF has both the legal
and non-legal
machinery, which they deploy to thwart any attempts at
effecting change. The
raft of laws and the deployment of the security forces
in recent years is
clear evidence of this. Perhaps in the same way, those
within Zanu PF that
are prepared to seek change are apprehensive because the
opponents of change
appear to have the legal and security machinery within
their control.
However, in the event that the change agents within Zanu PF
have control of
these power institutions, then their fear of pursuing change
may be easier
to overcome.
The other reason in Machiavelli's
quote for the lukewarm support among
change agents is that by nature people
like to experience something new
before they can believe in it. There is a
certain inertia whereby people are
more comfortable with an existing order
for no reason other than that they
are used to it. We examined this
behaviour in the previous article, and
pointed out that people are generally
reluctant to change the order of
things and even if they know that it might
benefit them, they are not sure
they want to disturb the status quo. This
lukewarm support does not
encourage the change agents, who find themselves
vulnerable. The purge of
change-agents that followed the Tsholotsho
Declaration in 2004-5 and the
lack of visible support for those people by
ZANU PF members who may have
been pro-change is probably a good example of
the lukewarm approach often
given to change agents. Similarly, events in the
near future may be
indicative of how those who did not appear to support
proposals to
effectively maintain the status quo at the recent Goromonzi
Congress will be
treated. However, much will depend on the power that is
held by the change
agents, because if they are in control of key structures
of power, such as
the security and economic structures, they may not be as
easy to
marginalise. In fact, there may be a balance of power between the
pro-change
and anti-change agents, which will tip one way or the other
depending on the
circumstances.
Finally, the quote at the core
of this article is capable of being
applied not only in assessing the
dynamics of change within ZANU PF but also
as I have indicated in parts, it
can be applied within the context of the
MDC and indeed more generally on
the dynamics of change in Zimbabwe as a
whole. There is really nothing new
in all this, but Machiavelli's quote
crystallises the issues in a more
beautiful way that I thought it would make
an appropriate sequel to the
earlier article in which I questioned the
apparent reluctance of ZANU PF as
a party to make reforms especially at a
time when it appears beneficial not
only to its fortunes but also to the
country's future, seeing as it is that
ZANU PF remains a major player on the
political landscape.
The
fact is, there will always be a significant sector that resists
change
because they are beneficiaries of the existing order and the
reformists have
to be more pragmatic in dealing with the challenges. There
will be a lot of
people who support change but are reluctant to show it
because they fear
that those benefiting from the status quo have control of
the power
structures, which they can use against them. The key, I suppose,
is if
change agents have some measure of control of these power structures
which
power they can demonstrate in order to gain the confidence and
therefore
bolder support of those ordinary members that are pro-change. The
same
applies in ZANU PF as it does within the MDC and on the broader
national
political landscape.
Dr Magaisa can be contacted at wamagaisa@yahoo.co.uk
Zim Standard
Sundayview
By Philip Pasirayi
A news clip carried by Newsnet alleged that
there are some
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which are distributing
radios to
teachers and other people in the rural areas so that they can
listen to
anti-government propaganda churned out by Voice of America (VOA)
Studio 7
and Voice of the People (VOP).
This comes on the
backdrop of a related story carried by The Herald,
on Friday 5 January 2007,
which was titled "Chombo warns NGOs", in which the
Minister of Local
Government, Public Works and Urban Development issued a
stern warning
against NGOs "distributing radios, governance pamphlets and
holding capacity
building and consultancy work for local authorities".
In its story,
Newsnet painted the picture that NGOs distributing
radios for free want
people to listen to anti-government messages and rebel
against what the
Midlands Bureau Chief, Moses Gumbo said is "a
democratically-elected
government". Gumbo further alleged that the NGOs,
which include the
Progressive Teachers' Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) are
targeting the rural areas
"where Zanu PF has its greatest support."
Apart from the story
exposing government's contempt for NGOs and their
operations, it also
confirms the fact that the ruling Zanu PF government is
not committed to
media pluralism, freedom of expression and opinion and the
free flow of
information, which are essential ingredients of a functional
democracy.
It is surprising that the Zimbabwe Broadcasting
Holdings (ZBH), which
has for a long time been on the forefront for churning
out propaganda and
glorifying and propping up Zanu PF is now crying foul and
accusing everyone
but itself for the poor state of governance in
Zimbabwe.
There is no doubt that Newsnet had a scoop or a juicy
story in tracing
the possibility of about 10 or more rural villagers getting
around one small
radio in a remote rural area every evening to listen to
Studio 7. But what
the story failed to expose was the continued stifling of
democratic space in
Zimbabwe, partly because of ZBH's maintenance of a
monopoly on broadcasting.
Apart from blaming NGOs for distributing radios,
Newsnet alleged that the
British and Americans were behind what they termed
the "radio for free"
project. The culture that has crept in Zanu PF that the
Zimbabwean crisis is
exogenous is unsustainable and only meant to absolve
the government for bad
policies, human rights abuses and corruption, the
terms through which the
national crisis is better explained.
PTUZ is not in the wrong for distributing the radios in schools as it
is
only re-introducing a long abandoned government policy of the once
popular
radio lessons in schools. The radio lessons, which we all underwent,
were
popular in the rural schools and helped to open up school pupils
especially
from the village to get connected to the outside world. Some of
us are proud
products of such efforts by our government! If computers are
being given out
for free, if land is being given out for free and the
farming inputs, it is
also logical that the NGOs and individuals who are
capable should distribute
radios for free even to every household throughout
the country in support of
governmental efforts.
The people must be afforded an opportunity to
listen to what they want
without being forced to listen to one voice. One of
the basic tenets of
democracy is the free flow of information, which
enhances open and
competitive political contestations. The rural dwellers
must be afforded the
chance to listen to other voices so that they can
either confirm their
allegiance to Zanu PF or reject it outrightly, so that
we are able to speak
of the existence of a thriving democracy in Zimbabwe.
Decisions about who
governs are supposed to be done in an open, transparent
and competitive
manner, allowing all players to speak and be
heard.
Government should be grateful to such a sterling effort by
the
generous NGOs and individuals who have decided to help people who cannot
afford to buy these radios under the current harsh economic
climate.
More Free Radios to the People.
Mugabe's warped priorities to blame for decline in education
ZIMBABWE
is experiencing a crisis of unprecedented propositions in
higher education.
Since 1997, the academic atmosphere has become worse,
compared with colonial
times.
In 1979, budgetary allocation to the education sector was
37% of the
total national expenditure, while today the percentage is far
less. The
government of President Robert Mugabe has consistently refused to
accord
education its rightful place in our overall developmental
plan.
Annual budgetary allocation to the sector has been most
satanic and
cruel. Our passionate plea to the government to start spending
at least 26%
of the budget on education, as required by UNESCO, has fallen
on the deaf
ears of the power-drunk and blood-thirsty leaders who spend most
of their
time blaming everyone except themselves.
They blame
history, circumstances and imagined enemies for the total
collapse of our
education system, once the beacon and envy of Africa. The
natural
consequences of this is that the already overstretched facilities
are
further endangered.
A review of pertinent data shows that Zimbabwe
is facing a sharp
decline in public expenditure on higher education,
deteriorating teaching
conditions, decaying educational facilities and
infrastructure, perpetual
student unrest, erosion of university autonomy, a
shortage of experienced
and well-trained professors, lack of academic
freedoms, and an increasing
rate of unemployment among university
graduates.
One of the most critical problems challenging higher
education in
Zimbabwe is the rapid decline in public expenditure on
education, relative
to the rapid increase in enrollment at higher
educational level and
mushrooming of many State Universities. Instead of
maintaining and improving
the conditions at already existing universities,
the populist government of
Mugabe continues to build more
institutions.
The decrease in governmental expenditure on education
has caused
strained relations between the state and the public consumers of
education.
Unlike the educational funding system in the industrialised
countries,
education has traditionally been the financial responsibility of
the
Zimbabwean government, as in most African countries.
Unfortunately, due to gross economic mismanagement and, to a lesser
extent,
demographic pressures over the last decade; the government is now
turning
aggressively to already poverty-stricken parents to bear the heavy
burden of
the astronomical costs of education.
To further compound this, the
government's policies and stance on
sensitive issues germane to positive
growth of the sector are detrimental to
that goal. Directly or indirectly
from some or all of the foregoing,
Zimbabwe has the world's highest rate of
college drop-outs outside a war
zone.
The preliminary results
of the research conducted by Zimbabwe National
Students Union (ZINASU) in
2006 show that more than 31.5% of students were
forced out of school due to
the astronomical fees being charged in the
tertiary
institutions.
The government has this year increased both tuition
and accommodation
fees in all tertiary institutions. If the University of
Zimbabwe Council
meeting held on 12 December 2006 is anything to go by, then
an already
poverty-stricken intelligentsia of this land will be paying Z$300
000 (US$1
200) in accommodation fees only, up from Z$24 000 and they are
still waiting
for the ministry to approve a staggering Z$550 000 being the
tuition fees,
up from Z$12 000. Students from the School of Mines in
Bulawayo are expected
to pay over Z$537 500 beside the fact that they will
be going on attachment.
What will become of students who are not going for
attachment given that
they will have to pay for accommodation and catering
services? In all
polytechnic colleges the students will be paying Z$115 000
being tuition
fees and Z$200 000 for hostel facilities. The teachers
colleges are expected
to part away with Z$120 000 being money for tuition
and Z$300 000 for hostel
facilities. The agricultural college students will
have to pay Z$250 000 in
total.
What is amazing are the levels
of mediocrity insulated at the Reserve
Bank of Zimbabwe. The students are
questioning the rationality or lack of it
of having the Reserve Bank
Governor, Gideon Gono, ordering the world's
fastest car, a Mercedes Benz
Brabus EV12 Biturbo at an earth-shattering cost
of US$365 000; when
converted to the real market rate it amounts to Z$1 017
000 000, money which
can pay for considerable number of pupils from grade
one up to grade seven
pupils in all the 10 provinces in Zimbabwe for two
years or
more.
The students must notice that after having being weighed down
by years
of recklessness, looting, care-free attitude, amnesia, corruption
and
madness, they must now reclaim their rightful place in the struggle for
a
revolutionary transformation of our society to a democracy, where the
respect for and protection of academic freedom is prioritised. Some students
have argued that Mugabe and his cronies are not moved by the deteriorating
standards in tertiary institutions because they did most of their degrees in
prison. Former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela observed that
education is the most powerful weapon for development and it goes without
saying students constitute the largest reservoir of technocrats in the
Zimbabwe development milieu, providing highly trained manpower in many
sectors.
Lack of comprehensive and sustainable educational
policy is a major
factor in the shortage of manpower, especially trained
lecturers. Zimbabwe
is facing an acute shortage of a wide range of
professionals, particularly
in the areas of effective policy analysis,
policy formulation, policy
implementation, research and development,
engineering, technology, medicine,
teaching, agriculture and many other
specialised areas of development
process. Our economy is in the doldrums and
as a culmination many
professionals are leaving this country for greener
pastures.
Writing on the ZINASU website www.zinasu.org in his end of year
statement
the ZINASU president, Promise Mkwananzi promised the nation that
the
students would turn the corner in 2007. He warned that students, being
the
major stakeholder in the Zimbabwean body politic, would take it upon
themselves to save education and the nation at large from further abuse in
the hands of the ruling or ruining party.
While advising in
strong terms, Mkwananzi told the nation that if a
government rebels against
students, the students will rebel back and if the
government becomes
anti-students, then the students will become
anti-government. The onus is
now with us all, the pro-democracy forces, to
support the students as they
move to erode the authoritarian regime in
Zimbabwe.
ZINASU
Eastlea,
Harare
--------
Raw
deal from Chinese STATISTICS show that local industrial production is
declining. Companies are closing down resulting in mass retrenchments. These
are problems the government claims to be solving, but to no
avail.
We have been subjected to cheap propaganda with government
officials
telling us that our nation is benefiting from the deals signed
with eastern
countries, particularly China.
We are told that
the relationship with China is fair and on equal
terms but I beg to differ,
as I think that we are being duped by these
Chinese and this is partly the
cause of the continued decline in the
situation here.
The
donations by China are meant to silence the government on the
issue of the
poor quality goods it is dumping here. Chinese goods are
killing the local
industry because genuine local products are more
expensive.
Our
government should protect the local industry by striking a
pre-shipment
quality control deal on Chinese goods. This would ensure
customers get good
quality goods while protecting local industry.
TPZ
Highfield, Harare
Harare.
----------
Probe Gokwe South appointments RECENT reports carried a sad story of
a
District Administrator (DA) who is being accused of corruptly allocating
land to undeserving people and during the month of November 2006 there were
stories about a chief who corruptly appointed a
headman for a
bribe.
It is against this background that I write to air my
displeasure
about this kind of cancer that seems to be eating deep into the
gains of the
land reform programme.
A case in point is
the recent appointment of Village Head in
Gokwe South, under Chief Nemangwe
and Headman Ndlalambi. The three, DA,
Chief and Headman forcibly took land
that belonged to Village Head
Nyengetedzai and gave it to the new appointee
- Masiiwa.
This has caused a lot of confusion and unnecessary
squabbles and
hatred among the villagers. I therefore urge the powers that
be to
thoroughly investigate this case.
The cancer must
be nipped in the bud as early as is possible to
avoid distortion of our
well-deserved land reform programme. I wish to
remind the chiefs and DAs
that it is very important to consult with and
inform their subjects or
villagers rather than
single-handedly impose
changes.
If President Robert Mugabe can go down to mix with
the people
then I do not see any reason why DAs, Chiefs and Headmen can fail
to consult
the people to effect such crucial changes.
It
is also very important for DAs, Chiefs and Headmen to make
such changes in
conjunction with the local Councillors and MPs as these are
important arms
of government that help explain government policies to people
at the
grassroots level.
J Mwendamberi
Gokwe
South
------------
Welcome to 2007!
WELCOME to 2007! - I have just been told that
my delivery of flour today (3
January 2007) from National Foods will cost
Z$30 517 a bag compared to Z$7
500 a bag in December. That is a huge
increase - 400% in one
go!
The new bread price announced on the 22 December by
the
government was based on the old price. This completely negates the price
increase and puts bakers back to where they were before the increase - in a
loss position if they manufacture and sell bread at the controlled
prices.
At the same time, yeast prices and the price of
fats and
oils have also risen dramatically as has the cost of packaging and
energy
(liquid fuels are now selling for over Z$3 000 a
litre).
Sugar prices have doubled but we have yet to
see any
deliveries into the market and the product is virtually unavailable.
A
serious shortage of maize-meal is also evident in the
market.
Local bus fares for workers have doubled to Z$1
000 for a
single ticket into town from the high- density suburbs. Workers
simply
cannot afford the new prices and are now walking to
work.
Eddie Cross
Bulawayo
---------------
Mugabe is an Angel THE victories attained by President
Robert Mugabe over
the years in polls were a demonstration by Zimbabweans of
their confidence
in him. Now who are these bald pale-faced villains who are
demanding that he
be removed from power since they have failed to remove him
through the
ballot box?
Mugabe is an angel compared to the
Israeli and
Australian rightwing rulers and why are these critics not
demanding similar
action against those rulers as they are against
Mugabe?
What irks me is the fact that these
faceless
charlatans have no records of ever having have fought for human
rights of
Africans and that's why it baffles me as to why they're so
obsessed with
Zimbabwe and on a divisive level as well when they refer to
black
Zimbabweans.
President Thabo Mbeki and
the politically informed
indigenous people of South Africa will never
abandon Mugabe come what may!
Tim
Singiswa
Harare
-------------------
"He speaketh with a forked
tongue" No wonder Dr
David Parirenyatwa is so unpopular with his medical
staff in his ministry --
he seems to speak with a forked
tongue.
It is very degrading to our doctors
and nurses
to be called liars when they complain about 'appalling working
conditions'.
If our hospitals, in
particular Mpilo are 70%
fully stocked, why are the sick preferring to die
at home leaving 70% fully
stocked hospitals or relying on inexpensive
traditional medicines?
Surely our doctors
and nurses are not
neglecting their duties, staying away, claiming that they
cannot go on
working because of lack of materials, drugs, tools, stationery,
blankets/sheets, vehicle, bandages,
etc.
Dr Parirenyatwa, you are the one who
is using
the health system, as a punch bag with your ineffectiveness where
updating
the system is concerned. Like everyone in Zanu PF, you are not
willing and
ready to learn from people you consider to be saboteurs. Your
acquired
arrogance and ignorance will be your undoing. Why you chose to be a
politician is beyond me. You are not meant to be a politician because your
very nature fits you snugly as a medical
doctor.
Leave all the boot-licking,
perceptions,
lying, pretence, one-up-manship common in your political party,
greed,
plundering, etc to true Zanu PF members. Go back to your surgery -
there is
more honest, clean money in the private medical sector where you
are needed.
Avoid being ridiculed by people who are way below your medical
position. You
look too nice and honest to be a
politician.
The truth of the matter,
doctor, is that our
medical system has finally collapsed and even if you are
aware of this fact,
you are in a state of
denial.
The Watch
Doctor
Masvingo
-------------
A student writes to the
President THE kind of
life that I am leading is contrary to my expectations.
I went through a
university education hoping that after completion, Zimbabwe
would offer me a
decent living. This has not been the
case.
I have gone through a lot of
suffering and I
do not even have any hope that anything good will
materialise. The suffering
has forced me to put pen and paper to express my
views.
Sir, you have been the source of
unhappiness, the breakages of families and the killings of several innocent
victims.
In my case, I never thought
I would become a
black market dealer. After completing my first degree in
Physics and
Mathematics, I thought I had achieved something worthy of note.
I thought
that companies would offer me a better job. This was not to
be.
Initially I became a teacher. I left
after
two years as an underpaid civil servant. I started buying petrol and
selling
it at inflated prices. This proved to be a better paying job for
some time
until recently when fuel prices were hiked to match that of ours
(Makorokoza).
Anyway I do not have
any option since I need
to take care of my daughter and my wife. That is a
brief of how I am trying
to make ends
meet.
I want you, Sir, to help us do
something
positive. Every day, Dr Gideon Gono, Joseph Made and a whole lot
of others
promise us a better tomorrow but I know my life is getting
worse.
I know that you have a personal
belief that
urban people are the most troublesome, hence you expose us to
untold
suffering in the form of Operation Murambatsvina. Mr President, I
personally
believe that urbanites contribute to the smooth running of this
country.
Right now some families can't
even afford a
bottle of cooking oil or even maize-meal. We have tried
everything including
prayers to amend our tattered land but this hasn't
helped either. We don't
know where we are heading. We just hope you will do
something positive to
lift us out of our
misery.
I am not an enemy of the State,
even though
I might sound like one. No white person has incited me into
writing about my
plight and that of others. All I am trying to do is let you
know that we
have suffered a lot, Sir, despite a lot of promises from you
and your
ministers.
Let me leave you
with this parting note by
Albert Einstein: "Anyone who has never made a
mistake has never tried
anything
new."
T
Kamangira
Harare
---------------
It is politics behind
our economic decline
I feel compelled to respond to the latest publication
from the RBZ, Sunday
Mail, December
10-16-2006.
We have seen the publication
of 31 letters
received by the bank between 21 September 2004, and 15 October
2006 and of
these letters, 24 deal with agricultural issues and the rest
with water
provision. Only 10 are letters of authority to release funds for
various
projects (30%), the rest are either requests for funding or letters
of
appreciation.
We are told of a
"deafening silence' in
paragraph 9 to 13 where some very strong words
indicate that there are
inefficiencies elsewhere, and in paragraph 18 we are
told about some brain
drain. Elsewhere in the paper we read that the RBZ had
to make various
interventions to save our economy from collapse including
the some called
quasi-fiscal
operations.
In my opinion, the
publication of the said
supplement in The Sunday Mail did more damage to the
RBZ than its intended
purpose. There must be a reason why the Ministry of
Finance officials
accused of not informing the Minister "correctly" are
still employed by that
Ministry and why only the RBZ seems to see that
problem.
The attempt by "our" governor,
or "Monetary
Authorities" as he likes to call himself, to confuse the nation
was very
poor indeed, especially as he publishes only 31 articles
purportedly
received over a period of three years. In addition, there is
nothing to
indicate that he had authority to intervene in such parastatals
as the NRZ,
ZUPCO, ZISCO and etc where he seems to claim credit for their
imagined
recovery.
Our Monetary
Authorities are right about the
factors that propel inflation. They are also
right about our ability to
overcome the problems facing our nation. But they
have no idea where to
start. It is true that one cannot separate economics
from politics.
In our case the economy is
in a poor state
because of politics, Therefore there is a major problem with
our politics,
or politicians, to be precise; and the politicians are the
ones that rule
us; therefore there is a major problem with our
government.
Our problems are indeed
surmountable and our
economy will indeed recover one day, provided we
address our politics
correctly and
honestly.
Austine
Manyiwa
Harare
Less than a decade ago, the biggest problem in global health seemed to be the lack of resources available to combat the multiple scourges ravaging the world's poor and sick. Today, thanks to a recent extraordinary and unprecedented rise in public and private giving, more money is being directed toward pressing heath challenges than ever before. But because the efforts this money is paying for are largely uncoordinated and directed mostly at specific high-profile diseases -- rather than at public health in general -- there is a grave danger that the current age of generosity could not only fall short of expectations but actually make things worse on the ground.
This danger exists despite the fact that today, for the first time in history, the world is poised to spend enormous resources to conquer the diseases of the poor. Tackling the developing world's diseases has become a key feature of many nations' foreign policies over the last five years, for a variety of reasons. Some see stopping the spread of HIV, tuberculosis (TB), malaria, avian influenza, and other major killers as a moral duty. Some see it as a form of public diplomacy. And some see it as an investment in self-protection, given that microbes know no borders. Governments have been joined by a long list of private donors, topped by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, whose contributions to today's war on disease are mind-boggling.
Thanks to their efforts, there are now billions of dollars being made available for health spending -- and thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and humanitarian groups vying to spend it. But much more than money is required. It takes states, health-care systems, and at least passable local infrastructure to improve public health in the developing world. And because decades of neglect there have rendered local hospitals, clinics, laboratories, medical schools, and health talent dangerously deficient, much of the cash now flooding the field is leaking away without result.
Moreover, in all too many cases, aid is tied to short-term numerical targets such as increasing the number of people receiving specific drugs, decreasing the number of pregnant women diagnosed with HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), or increasing the quantity of bed nets handed out to children to block disease-carrying mosquitoes. Few donors seem to understand that it will take at least a full generation (if not two or three) to substantially improve public health -- and that efforts should focus less on particular diseases than on broad measures that affect populations' general well-being.
The fact that the world is now short well over four million health-care workers, moreover, is all too often ignored. As the populations of the developed countries are aging and coming to require ever more medical attention, they are sucking away local health talent from developing countries. Already, one out of five practicing physicians in the United States is foreign-trained, and a study recently published in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that if current trends continue, by 2020 the United States could face a shortage of up to 800,000 nurses and 200,000 doctors. Unless it and other wealthy nations radically increase salaries and domestic training programs for physicians and nurses, it is likely that within 15 years the majority of workers staffing their hospitals will have been born and trained in poor and middle-income countries. As such workers flood to the West, the developing world will grow even more desperate.
Yet the visionary leadership required to tackle such problems is sadly lacking. Over the last year, every major leadership position on the global health landscape has turned over, creating an unprecedented moment of strategic uncertainty. The untimely death last May of Dr. Lee Jong-wook, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), forced a novel election process for his successor, prompting health advocates worldwide to ask critical, long-ignored questions, such as, Who should lead the fight against disease? Who should pay for it? And what are the best strategies and tactics to adopt?
The answers have not been easy to come by. In November, China's Dr. Margaret Chan was elected as Lee's successor. As Hong Kong's health director, Chan had led her territory's responses to SARS and bird flu; later she took the helm of the WHO's communicable diseases division. But in statements following her election, Chan acknowledged that her organization now faces serious competition and novel challenges. And as of this writing, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria remained without a new leader following a months-long selection process that saw more than 300 candidates vie for the post and the organization's board get mired in squabbles over the fund's mission and future direction.
Few of the newly funded global health projects, meanwhile, have built-in methods of assessing their efficacy or sustainability. Fewer still have ever scaled up beyond initial pilot stages. And nearly all have been designed, managed, and executed by residents of the wealthy world (albeit in cooperation with local personnel and agencies). Many of the most successful programs are executed by foreign NGOs and academic groups, operating with almost no government interference inside weak or failed states. Virtually no provisions exist to allow the world's poor to say what they want, decide which projects serve their needs, or adopt local innovations. And nearly all programs lack exit strategies or safeguards against the dependency of local governments.
As a result, the health world is fast approaching a fork in the road. The years ahead could witness spectacular improvements in the health of billions of people, driven by a grand public and private effort comparable to the Marshall Plan -- or they could see poor societies pushed into even deeper trouble, in yet another tale of well-intended foreign meddling gone awry. Which outcome will emerge depends on whether it is possible to expand the developing world's local talent pool of health workers, restore and improve crumbling national and global health infrastructures, and devise effective local and international systems for disease prevention and treatment.
SHOW ME THE MONEY
The recent surge in funding started as a direct consequence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. For decades, public health experts had been confronted with the profound disparities in care that separated the developed world from the developing one. Health workers hated that inequity but tended to accept it as a fact of life, given that health concerns were nested in larger issues of poverty and development. Western AIDS activists, doctors, and scientists, however, tended to have little experience with the developing world and were thus shocked when they discovered these inequities. And they reacted with vocal outrage.
The revolution started at an international AIDS meeting in Vancouver, Canada, in 1996. Scientists presented exhilarating evidence that a combination of anti-HIV drugs (known as antiretrovirals, or ARVs) could dramatically reduce the spread of the virus inside the bodies of infected people and make it possible for them to live long lives. Practically overnight, tens of thousands of infected men and women in wealthy countries started the new treatments, and by mid-1997, the visible horrors of AIDS had almost disappeared from the United States and Europe.
But the drugs, then priced at about $14,000 per year and requiring an additional $5,000 a year for tests and medical visits, were unaffordable for most of the world's HIV-positive population. So between 1997 and 2000, a worldwide activist movement slowly developed to address this problem by putting pressure on drug companies to lower their prices or allow the generic manufacture of the new medicines. The activists demanded that the Clinton administration and its counterparts in the G-8, the group of advanced industrial nations, pony up money to buy ARVs and donate them to poor countries. And by 1999, total donations for health-related programs (including HIV/AIDS treatment) in sub-Saharan Africa hit $865 million -- up more than tenfold in just three years.
In 2000, some 20,000 activists, scientists, doctors, and patients gathered in Durban, South Africa, for another international AIDS conference. There, South Africa's former president, Nelson Mandela, defined the issue of ARV access in moral terms, making it clear that the world should not permit the poor of Harare, Lagos, or Hanoi to die for lack of treatments that were keeping the rich of London, New York, and Paris alive. The World Bank economist Mead Over told the gathering that donations to developing countries for dealing with HIV/AIDS had reached $300 million in 1999 -- 0.5 percent of all development assistance. But he characterized that sum as "pathetic," claiming that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was costing African countries roughly $5 billion annually in direct medical care and indirect losses in labor and productivity.
In 2001, a group of 128 Harvard University faculty members led by the economist Jeffrey Sachs estimated that fewer than 40,000 sub-Saharan Africans were receiving ARVs, even though some 25 million in the region were infected with HIV and perhaps 600,000 of them needed the drugs immediately. Andrew Natsios, then director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), dismissed the idea of distributing such drugs, telling the House International Relations Committee that Africans could not take the proper combinations of drugs in the proper sequences because they did not have clocks or watches and lacked a proper concept of time. The Harvard faculty group labeled Natsios' comments racist and insisted that, as Sachs put it, all the alleged obstacles to widespread HIV/AIDS treatment in poor countries "either don't exist or can be overcome," and that three million people in Africa could be put on ARVs by the end of 2005 at "a cost of $1.1 billion per year for the first two to three years, then $3.3 billion to $5.5 billion per year by Year five."
Sachs added that the appropriate annual foreign-aid budget for malaria, TB, and pediatric respiratory and diarrheal diseases was about $11 billion; support for AIDS orphans ought to top $1 billion per year; and HIV/AIDS prevention could be tackled for $3 billion per year. In other words, for well under $20 billion a year, most of it targeting sub-Saharan Africa, the world could mount a serious global health drive.
What seemed a brazen request then has now, just five years later, actually been eclipsed. HIV/AIDS assistance has effectively spearheaded a larger global public health agenda. The Harvard group's claim that three million Africans could easily be put on ARVs by the end of 2005 proved overoptimistic: the WHO's "3 by 5 Initiative" failed to meet half of the three million target, even combining all poor and middle-income nations and not just those in Africa. Nevertheless, driven by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, a marvelous momentum for health assistance has been built and shows no signs of abating.
MORE, MORE, MORE
In recent years, the generosity of individuals, corporations, and foundations in the United States has grown by staggering proportions. As of August 2006, in its six years of existence, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had given away $6.6 billion for global health programs. Of that total, nearly $2 billion had been spent on programs aimed at TB and HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Between 1995 and 2005, total giving by all U.S. charitable foundations tripled, and the portion of money dedicated to international projects soared 80 percent, with global health representing more than a third of that sum. Independent of their government, Americans donated $7.4 billion for disaster relief in 2005 and $22.4 billion for domestic and foreign health programs and research.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration increased its overseas development assistance from $11.4 billion in 2001 to $27.5 billion in 2005, with support for HIV/AIDS and other health programs representing the lion's share of support unrelated to Iraq or Afghanistan. And in his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush called for the creation of a $15 billion, five-year program to tackle HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria. Approved by Congress that May, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) involves assistance from the United States to 16 nations, aimed primarily at providing ARVs for people infected with HIV. Roughly $8.5 billion has been spent to date. PEPFAR's goals are ambitious and include placing two million people on ARVs and ten million more in some form of care by early 2008. As of March 2006, an estimated 561,000 people were receiving ARVs through PEPFAR-funded programs.
The surge in giving has not just come from the United States, however. Overseas development assistance from every one of the nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) skyrocketed between 2001 and 2005, with health making up the largest portion of the increase. And in 2002, a unique funding-dispersal mechanism was created, independent of both the UN system and any government: the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The fund receives support from governments, philanthropies, and a variety of corporate-donation schemes. Since its birth, it has approved $6.6 billion in proposals and dispersed $2.9 billion toward them. More than a fifth of those funds have gone to four nations: China, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia. The fund estimates that it now provides 20 percent of all global support for HIV/AIDS programs and 66 percent of the funding for efforts to combat TB and malaria.
The World Bank, for its part, took little interest in health issues in its early decades, thinking that health would improve in tandem with general economic development, which it was the bank's mission to promote. Under the leadership of Robert McNamara (which ran from 1968 to 1981), however, the bank slowly increased direct investment in targeted health projects, such as the attempted elimination of river blindness in West Africa. By the end of the 1980s, many economists were beginning to recognize that disease in tropical and desperately poor countries was itself a critical impediment to development and prosperity, and in 1993 the bank formally announced its change of heart in its annual World Development Report. The bank steadily increased its health spending in the following decade, reaching $3.4 billion in 2003 before falling back to $2.1 billion in 2006, with $87 million of that spent on HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria programs and $250 million on child and maternal health. The bank, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the OECD, and the G-8, has also recently forgiven the debts of many poor nations hard-hit by AIDS and other diseases, with the proviso that the governments in question spend what would otherwise have gone for debt payments on key public services, including health, instead.
When the Asian tsunami struck in December 2004, the world witnessed a profound level of globalized generosity, with an estimated $7 billion being donated to NGOs, churches, and governments, largely by individuals. Although health programs garnered only a small percentage of that largess, many of the organizations that are key global health players were significantly bolstered by the funds.
In January 2006, as the threat of avian influenza spread, 35 nations pledged $1.9 billion toward research and control efforts in hopes of staving off a global pandemic. Since then, several G-8 nations, particularly the United States, have made additional funding available to bolster epidemiological surveillance and disease-control activities in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
And poor nations themselves, finally, have stepped up their own health spending, partly in response to criticism that they were underallocating public funds for social services. In the 1990s, for example, sub-Saharan African countries typically spent less than 3 percent of their budgets on health. By 2003, in contrast, Tanzania spent nearly 13 percent of its national budget on health-related goods and services; the Central African Republic, Namibia, and Zambia each spent around 12 percent of their budgets on health; and in Mozambique, Swaziland, and Uganda, the figure was around 11 percent.
For most humanitarian and health-related NGOs, in turn, the surge in global health spending has been a huge boon, driving expansion in both the number of organizations and the scope and depth of their operations. By one reliable estimate, there are now more than 60,000 AIDS-related NGOs alone, and there are even more for global health more generally. In fact, ministers of health in poor countries now express frustration over their inability to track the operations of foreign organizations operating on their soil, ensure those organizations are delivering services in sync with government policies and priorities, and avoid duplication in resource-scarce areas.
PIPE DREAMS
One might think that with all this money on the table, the solutions to many global health problems would at least now be in sight. But one would be wrong. Most funds come with strings attached and must be spent according to donors' priorities, politics, and values. And the largest levels of donations are propelled by mass emotional responses, such as to the Asian tsunami. Still more money is needed, on a regular basis and without restrictions on the uses to which it is put. But even if such resources were to materialize, major obstacles would still stand in the way of their doing much lasting good.
One problem is that not all the funds appropriated end up being spent effectively. In an analysis prepared for the second annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, in September 2006, Dalberg Global Development Advisors concluded that much current aid spending is trapped in bureaucracies and multilateral banks. Simply stripping layers of financing bureaucracy and improving health-delivery systems, the firm argued, could effectively release an additional 15-30 percent of the capital provided for HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria programs.
A 2006 World Bank report, meanwhile, estimated that about half of all funds donated for health efforts in sub-Saharan Africa never reach the clinics and hospitals at the end of the line. According to the bank, money leaks out in the form of payments to ghost employees, padded prices for transport and warehousing, the siphoning off of drugs to the black market, and the sale of counterfeit -- often dangerous -- medications. In Ghana, for example, where such corruption is particularly rampant, an amazing 80 percent of donor funds get diverted from their intended purposes.
Another problem is the lack of coordination of donor activities. Improving global health will take more funds than any single donor can provide, and oversight and guidance require the skills of the many, not the talents of a few compartmentalized in the offices of various groups and agencies. In practice, moreover, donors often function as competitors, and the only organization with the political credibility to compel cooperative thinking is the WHO. Yet, as Harvard University's Christopher Murray points out, the WGO itself is dependent on donors, who give it much more for disease-specific programs than they do for its core budget. If the WHO stopped chasing such funds, Murray argues, it could go back to concentrating on its true mission of providing objective expert advice and strategic guidance.
This points to yet another problem, which is that aid is almost always "stovepiped" down narrow channels relating to a particular program or disease. From an operational perspective, this means that a government may receive considerable funds to support, for example, an ARV-distribution program for mothers and children living in the nation's capital. But the same government may have no financial capacity to support basic maternal and infant health programs, either in the same capital or in the country as a whole. So HIV-positive mothers are given drugs to hold their infection at bay and prevent passage of the virus to their babies but still cannot obtain even the most rudimentary of obstetric and gynecological care or infant immunizations.
Stovepiping tends to reflect the interests and concerns of the donors, not the recipients. Diseases and health conditions that enjoy a temporary spotlight in rich countries garner the most attention and money. This means that advocacy, the whims of foundations, and the particular concerns of wealthy individuals and governments drive practically the entire global public health effort. Today the top three killers in most poor countries are maternal death around childbirth and pediatric respiratory and intestinal infections leading to death from pulmonary failure or uncontrolled diarrhea. But few women's rights groups put safe pregnancy near the top of their list of priorities, and there is no dysentery lobby or celebrity attention given to coughing babies.
The HIV/AIDS pandemic, meanwhile, continues to be the primary driver of global concern and action about health. At the 2006 International AIDS Conference, former U.S. President Bill Clinton suggested that HIV/AIDS programs would end up helping all other health initiatives. "If you first develop the health infrastructure throughout the whole country, particularly in Africa, to deal with AIDS," Clinton argued, "you will increase the infrastructure of dealing with maternal and child health, malaria, and TB. Then I think you have to look at nutrition, water, and sanitation. All these things, when you build it up, you'll be helping to promote economic development and alleviate poverty."
But the experience of bringing ARV treatment to Haiti argues against Clinton's analysis. The past several years have witnessed the successful provision of antiretroviral treatment to more than 5,000 needy Haitians, and between 2002 and 2006, the prevalence of HIV in the country plummeted from six percent to three percent. But during the same period, Haiti actually went backward on every other health indicator.
Part of the problem is that most of global HIV/AIDS-related funding goes to stand-alone programs: HIV testing sites, hospices and orphanages for people affected by AIDS, ARV-dispersal stations, HIV/AIDS education projects, and the like. Because of discrimination against people infected with HIV, public health systems have been reluctant to incorporate HIV/AIDS-related programs into general care. The resulting segregation has reinforced the anti-HIV stigma and helped create cadres of health-care workers who function largely independently from countries' other health-related systems. Far from lifting all boats, as Clinton claims, efforts to combat HIV/AIDS have so far managed to bring more money to the field but have not always had much beneficial impact on public health outside their own niche.
DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH
Arguably the best example of what is possible when forces align properly can be found in the tiny African nation of Botswana. In August 2000, the Gates Foundation, the pharmaceutical companies Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb, and the Harvard AIDS Initiative announced the launching of an HIV/AIDS treatment program in collaboration with the government of Botswana. At the time, Botswana had the highest HIV infection rate in the world, estimated to exceed 37 percent of the population between the ages of 15 and 40. The goal of the new program was to put every single one of Botswana's infected citizens in treatment and to give ARVs to all who were at an advanced stage of the disease. Merck donated its anti-HIV drugs, Bristol-Myers Squibb discounted its, Merck and the Gates Foundation subsidized the effort to the tune of $100 million, and Harvard helped the Botswanan government design its program.
When the collaboration was announced, the target looked easily attainable, thanks to its top-level political support in Botswana, the plentiful money that would come from both the donors and the country's diamond wealth, the free medicine, and the sage guidance of Merck and Harvard. Unlike most of its neighbors, Botswana had an excellent highway system, sound general infrastructure, and a growing middle class. Furthermore, Botswana's population of 1.5 million was concentrated in the capital city of Gaborone. The national unemployment rate was 24 percent -- high by Western standards but the lowest in sub-Saharan Africa. The conditions looked so propitious, in fact, that some activists charged that the parties involved had picked an overly easy target and that the entire scheme was little more than a publicity stunt, concocted by the drug companies in the hopes of deflecting criticism over their global pricing policies for AIDS drugs.
But it soon became apparent that even comparatively wealthy Botswana lacked sufficient health-care workers or a sound enough medical infrastructure to implement the program. The country had no medical school: all its physicians were foreign trained or immigrants. And although Botswana did have a nursing school, it still suffered an acute nursing shortage because South Africa and the United Kingdom were actively recruiting its English-speaking graduates. By 2005, the country was losing 60 percent of its newly trained health-care workers annually to emigration. (In the most egregious case, in 2004 a British-based company set up shop in a fancy Gaborone hotel and, in a single day, recruited 50 nurses to work in the United Kingdom.)
By 2002, the once-starry-eyed foreigners and their counterparts in Botswana's government had realized that before they could start handing out ARVs, they would have to build laboratories and clinics, recruit doctors from abroad, and train other health-care personnel. President Festus Mogae asked the U.S. Peace Corps to send doctors and nurses. Late in the game, in 2004, the PEPFAR program got involved and started working to keep HIV out of local hospitals' blood supplies and to build a network of HIV testing sites.
After five years of preparation, in 2005 the rollout of HIV treatment commenced. By early 2006, the program had reached its goal of treating 55,000 people (out of an estimated HIV-positive population of 280,000) with ARVs. The program is now the largest such chronic-care operation -- at least per capita -- in the world. And if it works, Botswana's government will be saddled with the care of these patients for decades to come -- something that might be sustainable if the soil there continues to yield diamonds and the number of people newly infected with HIV drops dramatically.
But Kwame Ampomah, a Ghana-born official for the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS, based in Gaborone, now frets that prevention efforts are not having much success. As of 2005, the incidence of new cases was rising eight percent annually. Many patients on ARVs may develop liver problems and fall prey to drug-resistant HIV strains. Ndwapi Ndwapi, a U.S.-trained doctor who works at Princess Marina Hospital, in Gaborone, and handles more of the government's HIV/AIDS patients than anyone else, also frets about the lack of effective prevention efforts. In slums such as Naledi, he points out, there are more bars than churches and schools combined. The community shares latrines, water pumps, alcohol -- and HIV. Ndawpi says Botswana's future rests on its ability to fully integrate HIV/AIDS care into the general health-care system, so that it no longer draws away scarce doctors and nurses for HIV/AIDS-only care. If this cannot be accomplished, he warns, the country's entire health-care system could collapse.
Botswana is still clearly somewhat of a success story, but it is also a precariously balanced one and an effort that will be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Ampomah says that other countries might be able to achieve good results by following a similar model, but "it requires transparency, and a strong sense of nationalism by leaders, not tribalism. You need leaders who don't build palaces on the Riviera. You need a clear health system with equity that is not donor-driven. Everything is unique to Botswana: there is a sane leadership system in Gaborone. So in Kenya today maybe the elite can get ARVs with their illicit funds, but not the rest of the country. You need a complete package. If the government is corrupt, if everyone is stealing money, then it will not work. So there is a very limited number of African countries that could replicate the Botswana experience." And despite the country's HIV/AIDS achievements and the nation's diamond wealth, life expectancy for children born in Botswana today is still less than 34 years, according to CIA estimates.
BRAIN DRAIN
As in Haiti, even as money has poured into Ghana for HIV/AIDS and malaria programs, the country has moved backward on other health markers. Prenatal care, maternal health programs, the treatment of guinea worm, measles vaccination efforts -- all have declined as the country has shifted its health-care workers to the better-funded projects and lost physicians to jobs in the wealthy world. A survey of Ghana's health-care facilities in 2002 found that 72 percent of all clinics and hospitals were unable to provide the full range of expected services due to a lack of sufficient personnel. Forty-three percent were unable to provide full child immunizations; 77 percent were unable to provide 24-hour emergency services and round-the-clock safe deliveries for women in childbirth. According to Dr. Ken Sagoe, of the Ghana Health Service, these statistics represent a severe deterioration in Ghana's health capacity. Sagoe also points out that 604 out of 871 medical officers trained in the country between 1993 and 2002 now practice overseas.
Zimbabwe, similarly, trained 1,200 doctors during the 1990s, but only 360 remain in the country today. In Kadoma, eight years ago there was one nurse for every 700 residents; today there is one for every 7,500. In 1980, the country was able to fill 90 percent of its nursing positions nationwide; today only 30 percent are filled. Guinea-Bissau has plenty of donated ARV supplies for its people, but the drugs are cooking in a hot dockside warehouse because the country lacks doctors to distribute them. In Zambia, only 50 of the 600 doctors trained over the last 40 years remain today. Mozambique's health minister says that AIDS is killing the country's health-care workers faster than they can be recruited and trained: by 2010, the country will have lost 6,000 lab technicians to the pandemic. A study by the International Labor Organization estimates that 18-41 percent of the health-care labor force in Africa is infected with HIV. If they do not receive ARV therapy, these doctors, nurses, and technicians will die, ushering in a rapid collapse of the very health systems on which HIV/AIDS programs depend.
Erik Schouten, HIV coordinator for the Malawi Ministry of Health, notes that of the country's 12 million people, 90,000 have already died from AIDS and 930,000 people are now infected with HIV. Over the last five years, the government has lost 53 percent of its health administrators, 64 percent of its nurses, and 85 percent of its physicians -- mostly to foreign NGOs, largely funded by the U.S. or the British government or the Gates Foundation, which can easily outbid the ministry for the services of local health talent. Schouten is now steering a $270 million plan, supported by PEPFAR, to use financial incentives and training to bring back half of the lost health-care workers within five years; nearly all of these professionals will be put to use distributing ARVs. But nothing is being done to replace the health-care workers who once dealt with malaria, dysentery, vaccination programs, maternal health, and other issues that lack activist constituencies.
Ibrahim Mohammed, who heads an effort similar to Schouten's in Kenya, says his nation lost 15 percent of its health work force in the years between 1994 and 2001 but has only found donor support to rebuild personnel for HIV/AIDS efforts; all other disease programs in the country continue to deteriorate. Kenya's minister of health, Charity Kaluki Ngilu, says that life expectancy has dropped in her country, from a 1963 level of 63 years to a mere 47 years today for men and 43 years for women. In most of the world, male life expectancy is lower than female, but in Kenya women suffer a terrible risk of dying in childbirth, giving men an edge in survival. Although AIDS has certainly taken a toll in Kenya, Ngilu primarily blames plummeting life expectancy on former President Daniel arap Moi, who kept Kenyan spending on health down to a mere $6.50 per capita annually. Today, Kenya spends $14.20 per capita on health annually -- still an appallingly low number. The country's public health and medical systems are a shambles. Over the last ten years, the country has lost 1,670 physicians and 3,900 nurses to emigration, and thousands more nurses have retired from their profession.
Data from international migration-tracking organizations show that health professionals from poor countries worldwide are increasingly abandoning their homes and their professions to take menial jobs in wealthy countries. Morale is low all over the developing world, where doctors and nurses have the knowledge to save lives but lack the tools. Where AIDS and drug-resistant TB now burn through populations like forest fires, health-care workers say that the absence of medicines and other supplies leaves them feeling more like hospice and mortuary workers than healers.
Compounding the problem are the recruitment activities of Western NGOs and OECD-supported programs inside poor countries, which poach local talent. To help comply with financial and reporting requirements imposed by the IMF, the World Bank, and other donors, these programs are also soaking up the pool of local economists, accountants, and translators. The U.S. Congress imposed a number of limitations on PEPFAR spending, including a ceiling for health-care-worker training of $1 million per country. PEPFAR is prohibited from directly topping off salaries to match government pay levels. But PEPFAR-funded programs, UN agencies, other rich-country government agencies, and NGOs routinely augment the base salaries of local staff with benefits such as housing and education subsidies, frequently bringing their employees' effective wages to a hundred times what they could earn at government-run clinics.
USAID's Kent Hill says that this trend is "a horrendous dilemma" that causes "immense pain" in poor countries. But without tough guidelines or some sort of moral consensus among UN agencies, NGOs, and donors, it is hard to see what will slow the drain of talent from already-stressed ministries of health.
GOING DUTCH?
The most commonly suggested solution to the problematic pay differential between the wages offered by local governments and those offered by international programs is to bolster the salaries of local officials. But this move would be enormously expensive (perhaps totaling $2 billion over the next five years, according to one estimate) and might not work, because of the problems that stem from injecting too much outside capital into local economies.
In a recent macroeconomic analysis, the UN Development Program (UNDP) noted that international spending on HIV/AIDS programs in poor countries doubled between 2002 and 2004. Soon it will have doubled again. For poor countries, this escalation means that by the end of 2007, HIV/AIDS spending could command up to ten percent of their GDPs. And that is before donors even begin to address the health-care-worker crisis or provide subsidies to offset NGO salaries.
There are three concerns regarding such dramatic escalations in external funding: the so-called Dutch disease, inflation and other economic problems, and the deterioration of national control. The UNDP is at great pains to dismiss the potential of Dutch disease, a term used by economists to describe situations in which the spending of externally derived funds so exceeds domestic private-sector and manufacturing investment that a country's economy is destabilized. UNDP officials argue that these risks can be controlled through careful monetary management, but not all observers are as sanguine.
Some analysts, meanwhile, insist that massive infusions of foreign cash into the public sector undermine local manufacturing and economic development. Thus, Arvind Subramanian, of the IMF, points out that all the best talent in Mozambique and Uganda is tied up in what he calls "the aid industry," and Steven Radelet, of the Center for Global Development, says that foreign-aid efforts suck all the air out of local innovation and entrepreneurship. A more immediate concern is that raising salaries for health-care workers and managers directly involved in HIV/AIDS and other health programs will lead to salary boosts in other public sectors and spawn inflation in the countries in question. This would widen the gap between the rich and the poor, pushing the costs of staples beyond the reach of many citizens. If not carefully managed, the influx of cash could exacerbate such conditions as malnutrition and homelessness while undermining any possibility that local industries could eventually grow and support themselves through competitive exports.
Regardless of whether these problems proliferate, it is curious that even the most ardent capitalist nations funnel few if any resources toward local industries and profit centers related to health. Ministries of health in poor countries face increasing competition from NGOs and relief agencies but almost none from their local private sectors. This should be troubling, because if no locals can profit legitimately from any aspect of health care, it is unlikely that poor countries will ever be able to escape dependency on foreign aid.
Finally, major influxes of foreign funding can raise important questions about national control and the skewing of health-care policies toward foreign rather than domestic priorities. Many governments and activists complain that the U.S. government, in particular, already exerts too much control over the design and emphasis of local HIV/AIDS programs. This objection is especially strong regarding HIV-prevention programs, with claims that the Bush administration has pushed abstinence, fidelity, and faith-based programs at the expense of locally generated condom- and needle-distribution efforts.
Donor states need to find ways not only to solve the human resource crisis inside poor countries but also to decrease their own dependency on foreign health-care workers. In 2002, stinging from the harsh criticism leveled against the recruitment practices of the NHS (the United Kingdom's National Health Service) in Africa, the United Kingdom passed the Commonwealth Code of Practice for the International Recruitment of Health Workers, designed to encourage increased domestic health-care training and eliminate recruitment in poor countries without the full approval of host governments. British officials argue that although the code has limited efficacy, it makes a contribution by setting out guidelines for best practices regarding the recruitment and migration of health-care personnel. No such code exists in the United States, in the EU more generally, or in Asia -- but it should.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Congress has gone in the opposite direction, acceding to pressure from the private health-care sector and inserting immigration-control exemptions for health-care personnel into recent legislation. In 2005, Congress set aside 50,000 special immigration visas for nurses willing to work in U.S. hospitals. The set-aside was used up by early 2006, and Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) then sponsored legislation eliminating all caps on the immigration of nurses. The legislation offers no compensation to the countries from which the nurses would come -- countries such as China, India, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, and the English-speaking Caribbean nations.
American nursing schools reject more than 150,000 applicants every year, due less to the applicants' poor qualifications than to a lack of openings. If it fixed this problem, the United States could be entirely self-sufficient in nursing. So why is it failing to do so? Because too few people want to be nursing professors, given that the salaries for full-time nurses are higher. Yet every year Congress has refused to pass bills that would provide federal support to underfunded public nursing schools, which would augment professors' salaries and allow the colleges to accept more applicants. Similar (although more complex) forms of federal support could lead to dramatic increases in the domestic training of doctors and other health-care personnel.
Jim Leach, an outgoing Republican member of the House of Representatives from Iowa, has proposed something called the Global Health Services Corps, which would allocate roughly $250 million per year to support 500 American physicians working abroad in poor countries. And outgoing Senator Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who volunteers his services as a cardiologist to poor countries for two weeks each year, has proposed federal support for sending American doctors to poor countries for short trips, during which they might serve as surgeons or medical consultants.
Although it is laudable that some American medical professionals are willing to volunteer their time abroad, the personnel crisis in the developing world will not be dealt with until the United States and other wealthy nations clean up their own houses. OECD nations should offer enough support for their domestic health-care training programs to ensure that their countries' future medical needs can be filled with indigenous personnel. And all donor programs in the developing world, whether from OECD governments or NGOs and foundations, should have built into their funding parameters ample money to cover the training and salaries of enough new local health-care personnel to carry out the projects in question, so that they do not drain talent from other local needs in both the public and the private sectors.
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
Instead of setting a hodgepodge of targets aimed at fighting single diseases, the world health community should focus on achieving two basic goals: increased maternal survival and increased overall life expectancy. Why? Because if these two markers rise, it means a population's other health problems are also improving. And if these two markers do not rise, improvements in disease-specific areas will ultimately mean little for a population's general health and well-being.
Dr. Francis Omaswa, leader of the Global Health Workforce Alliance -- a WHO-affiliated coalition -- argues that in his home country of Zambia, which has lost half of its physicians to emigration over recent years, "maternal mortality is just unspeakable." When doctors and nurses leave a health system, he notes, the first death marker to skyrocket is the number of women who die in childbirth. "Maternal death is the biggest challenge in strengthening health systems," Omaswa says. "If we can get maternal health services to perform, then we are very nearly perfecting the entire health system."
Maternal mortality data is a very sensitive surrogate for the overall status of health-care systems since pregnant women survive where safe, clean, round-the-clock surgical facilities are staffed with well-trained personnel and supplied with ample sterile equipment and antibiotics. If new mothers thrive, it means that the health-care system is working, and the opposite is also true.
Life expectancy, meanwhile, is a good surrogate for child survival and essential public health services. Where the water is safe to drink, mosquito populations are under control, immunization is routinely available and delivered with sterile syringes, and food is nutritional and affordable, children thrive. If any one of those factors is absent, large percentages of children perish before their fifth birthdays. Although adult deaths from AIDS and TB are pushing life expectancies down in some African countries, the major driver of life expectancy is child survival. And global gaps in life expectancy have widened over the last ten years. In the longest-lived society, Japan, a girl who was born in 2004 has a life expectancy of 86 years, a boy 79 years. But in Zimbabwe, that girl would have a life expectancy of 34 years, the boy 37.
The OECD and the G-8 should thus shift their targets, recognizing that vanquishing AIDS, TB, and malaria are best understood not simply as tasks in themselves but also as essential components of these two larger goals. No health program should be funded without considering whether it could, as managed, end up worsening the targeted life expectancy and maternal health goals, no matter what its impacts on the incidence or mortality rate of particular diseases.
Focusing on maternal health and life expectancy would also broaden the potential impact of foreign aid on public diplomacy. For example, seven Islamic nations (Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen) lose a combined 1.4 million children under the age of five every year to entirely preventable diseases. These countries also have some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. The global focus on HIV/AIDS offers little to these nations, where the disease is not prevalent. By setting more encompassing goals, government agencies such as USAID and its British counterpart could both save lives in these nations and give them a legitimate reason to believe that they are welcome members of the global health movement.
Legislatures in the major donor nations should consider how the current targeting requirements they place on their funding may have adverse outcomes. For example, the U.S. Congress and its counterparts in Europe and Canada have mandated HIV/AIDS programs that set specific targets for the number of people who should receive ARVs, be placed in orphan-care centers, obtain condoms, and the like. If these targets are achievable only by robbing local health-care workers from pediatric and general health programs, they may well do more harm than good, and should be changed or eliminated.
In the philanthropic world, targeting is often even narrower, and the demand for immediate empirical evidence of success is now the norm. From the Gates Foundation on down to small family foundations and individual donors, there is an urgent need to rethink the concept of accountability. Funders have a duty to establish the efficacy of the programs they support, and that may require use of very specific data to monitor success or failure. But it is essential that philanthropic donors review the relationship between the pressure they place on recipients to achieve their narrow targets and the possible deleterious outcomes for life expectancy and maternal health due to the diversion of local health-care personnel and research talent.
SYSTEMS AND SUSTAINABILITY
Perched along the verdant hillsides of South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal Province are tin-roofed mud-and-wood houses, so minimal that they almost seem to shiver in the winter winds. An observant eye will spot bits of carved stone laying flat among the weeds a few steps from the round houses, under which lay the deceased. The stones are visible evidence of a terrifying death toll, as this Zulu region may well have the highest HIV prevalence rate in the world.
At the top of one hill in the Vulindlela area resides Chief Inkosi Zondi. A quiet man in his early 40s, Zondi shakes his head over the AIDS horror. "We can say there are 40,000 people in my 18 subdistricts," he says. "Ten thousand have died. So about 25 percent of the population has died." In this rugged area, only about ten percent of the adults have formal employment, and few young people have much hope of a reasonable future. Funerals are the most commonplace form of social gathering. Law and order are unraveling, despite Chief Zondi's best efforts, because the police and the soldiers are also dying of AIDS.
In such a setting, it seems obvious that pouring funds into local clinics and hospitals to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS should be the top priority. For what could be more important that stopping the carnage?
But HIV does not spread in a vacuum. In the very South African communities in which it flourishes, another deadly scourge has emerged: XDR-TB, a strain of TB so horribly mutated as to be resistant to all available antibiotics. Spreading most rapidly among people whose bodies are weakened by HIV, this form of TB, which is currently almost always lethal, endangers communities all over the world. In August 2006, researchers first announced the discovery of XDR-TB in KwaZulu-Natal, and since then outbreaks have been identified in nine other South African provinces and across the southern part of the continent more generally. The emergence of XDR-TB in KwaZulu-Natal was no doubt linked to the sorry state of the region's general health system, where TB treatment was so poorly handled that only a third of those treated for regular TB completed the antibiotic therapy. Failed therapy often promotes the emergence of drug-resistant strains.
There is also an intimate relationship between HIV and malaria, particularly for pregnant women: being infected with one exacerbates cases of the other. Physicians administering ARVs in West Africa have noticed a resurgence of clinical leprosy and hepatitis C, as latent infections paradoxically surge in patients whose HIV is controlled by medicine. HIV-positive children face a greater risk of dying from vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles, polio, and typhoid fever, if they have not been immunized than do those nonimmunized children without HIV. But if financial constraints force health-care workers to reuse syringes for a mass vaccination campaign in a community with a Vulindlela-like HIV prevalence, they will almost certainly spread HIV among the patients they vaccinate. And if the surgical instruments in clinics and hospitals are inadequately sterilized or the blood-bank system lacks proper testing, HIV can easily spread to the general population (as has happened in Canada, France, Japan, Kazakhstan, Libya, Romania, and elsewhere).
As concern regarding the threat of pandemic influenza has risen worldwide over the last two years, so has spending to bolster the capacities of poor countries to control infected animal populations, spot and rapidly identify human flu cases, and isolate and treat the people infected. It has become increasingly obvious to the donor nations that these tasks are nearly impossible to perform reliably in countries that lack adequate numbers of veterinarians, public health experts, laboratory scientists, and health-care workers. Moreover, countries need the capacity to coordinate the efforts of all these players, which requires the existence of a public health infrastructure.
At a minimum, therefore, donors and UN agencies should strive to integrate their infectious-disease programs into general public health systems. Some smaller NGOs have had success with community-based models, but this needs to become the norm. Stovepiping should yield to a far more generalized effort to raise the ability of the entire world to prevent, recognize, control, and treat infectious diseases -- and then move on to do the same for chronic killers such as diabetes and heart disease in the long term. Tactically, all aspects of prevention and treatment should be part of an integrated effort, drawing from countries' finite pools of health talent to tackle all monsters at once, rather than dueling separately with individual dragons.
David de Ferranti, of the Brookings Institution, reckons that meeting serious health goals -- such as getting eight million more people on ARVs while bringing life expectancies in poor countries up to at least the level of middle-income nations and reducing maternal mortality by 15-20 percent -- will cost about $70 billion a year, or more than triple the current spending.
Even if such funds could be raised and deployed, however, for the increased spending to be effective, the structures of global public health provision would have to undergo a transformation. As Tore Godal, who used to run the neglected-diseases program at the WHO, recently wrote in Nature, "There is currently no systemic approach that is designed to match essential needs with the resources that are actually available." He called for a strategic framework that could guide both donations and actions, with donors thinking from the start about how to build up the capabilities in poor countries in order to eventually transfer operations to local control -- to develop exit strategies, in other words, so as to avoid either abrupt abandonment of worthwhile programs or perpetual hemorrhaging of foreign aid.
In the current framework, such as it is, improving global health means putting nations on the dole -- a $20 billion annual charity program. But that must change. Donors and those working on the ground must figure out how to build not only effective local health infrastructures but also local industries, franchises, and other profit centers that can sustain and thrive from increased health-related spending. For the day will come in every country when the charity eases off and programs collapse, and unless workable local institutions have already been established, little will remain to show for all of the current frenzied activity.
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As a thought experiment, the Council on Foreign Relations' Global Health Program has conceived of Doc-in-a-Box, a prototype of a delivery system for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. The idea is to convert abandoned shipping containers into compact transportable clinics suitable for use throughout the developing world.
Shipping containers are durable structures manufactured according to universal standardized specifications and are able to be transported practically anywhere via ships, railroads, and trucks. Because of trade imbalances, moreover, used containers are piling up at ports worldwide, abandoned for scrap. Engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute converted a sample used container into a prototype Doc-in-a-Box for about $5,000, including shipping. It was wired for electricity and fully lit and featured a water filtration system, a corrugated tin roofing system equipped with louvers for protection during inclement weather, a newly tiled floor, and conventional doors and windows. Given economies of scale and with the conversions performed in the developing world rather than New York, it is estimated that large numbers of Doc-in-a-Boxes could be produced and delivered for about $1,500 each.
Staffed by paramedics, the boxes would be designed for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of all major infectious diseases. Each would be linked to a central hub via wireless communications, with its performance and inventory needs monitored by nurses and doctors.
Governments, donors, and NGOs could choose from a variety of models with customizable options, ordering paramedic training modules, supplies, and systems-management equipment as needed. Doc-in-a-Boxes could operate under a franchise model, with the paramedics involved realizing profits based on the volume and quality of their operations. Franchises could be located in areas now grossly underserved by health clinics and hospitals, thus extending health-care opportunities without generating competitive pressure for existing facilities.
On a global scale, with tens of thousands of Doc-in-a-Boxes in place, the system would be able to track and respond to changing needs on the ground. It would generate incentives to pull rapid diagnostics, easy-to-take medicines, new types of vaccines, and novel prevention tools out of the pipelines of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. Supplies could be purchased in bulk, guaranteeing low per-unit costs. And the sorts of Fortune 500 companies that now belong to the Global Business Coalition on HIV/ AIDS, TB, and Malaria would be able to provide services and advice.
Over time, Doc-in-a-Boxes could emerge as sustainable local businesses, providing desperately needed health-care services to poor communities while generating investment and employment, like branches of Starbucks or McDonald's.
{Footnote 1} In the original version of "The Challenge of Global Health," the view that "foreign aid efforts suck all the air out of local innovation and entrepreneurship" was incorrectly attributed to Steven Radelet.