http://www.latimes.com
Central bank chief Gideon Gono makes
no apology for continuing to crank out
money, which economists say fuels
hyperinflation. Critics call him a
megalomaniac with a vise-like grip on the
economy.
By Robyn Dixon
January 1, 2009
Reporting from Harare, Zimbabwe
-- Gideon Gono prints money, lots and lots
of money that's worth next to
nothing. Depending on whom you talk to, the
architect of Zimbabwe's
hyperinflation is a megalomaniac, a workaholic, a
thief -- or the country's
savior.
Zimbabwe's central bank chief seems to have a finger in every
government
ministry. No project goes ahead without his approval. No
underling
approaches without fear and trembling.
He makes no
apologies for his furious money-printing, as the country, mired
in disease
and hunger, inflation beyond calculation and political crisis,
keeps on
spiraling downward. Extraordinary situations call for extraordinary
measures, he says.
The 49-year-old former tea boy, target of Western
economic sanctions and
confidant of President Robert Mugabe has made more
enemies in the ruling
ZANU-PF party than any other senior member. And some
people think he may be
its weak link. But for now, it's his obsession with
photo ops and his
autocratic control over government affairs that
dominate.
One pro-ZANU-PF banker shudders while recalling Gono's summons
of top
banking officials to his office in early December. It was a
made-for-television ambush. As the cameras rolled, Gono berated the bankers
for releasing new bank notes a day before their launch.
They
weren't even his employees, but he fired them anyway. On television.
But
Gono wasn't done with them. The lobby was full of police waiting to
arrest
them when their elevator opened on the ground floor.
"I had to sleep on
the floor in the cell," the banker said, deeply shaken,
two days after his
release on bail. "I've never slept on the floor in my
life. There was water
dripping everywhere." He spoke on condition of
anonymity for fear of
jeopardizing his trial.
As pressure on Gono has grown with the collapse
of Zimbabwe's economy, he
has blamed banks, the stock exchange, black market
currency dealers and
insurance companies. As well as firing the bankers, he
blacklisted 20
investment companies and froze their accounts.
As a
survival tactic, it has worked. Despite the highest inflation rate on
Earth,
estimated by independent economists in at least quadrillions of
percents,
Mugabe recently reappointed Gono for another five-year term. It
sparked as
much outrage in the ZANU-PF as it did in the opposition.
"Not only is he
destroying the country, he is destroying the party," growled
one senior
ZANU-PF official.
Gono employs florid, indignant rhetoric and wears a
large, flashy gold
watch. When he strides into the bank at his usual
breakneck pace in the
morning, there's a flurry of panic. A security guard
who fails to open the
door before Gono reaches it faces certain punishment
and possible dismissal,
according to one Reserve Bank manager. The manager,
who like others
interviewed for this story, is afraid of getting fired and
spoke on
condition of anonymity.
Gono usually works until midnight.
Under his leadership, the Reserve Bank
has taken on myriad tasks unrelated
to central banking: buying government
cars, supplying farm equipment and
fertilizer, setting up and supplying
"People's Shops" to sell cheap goods,
setting up foreign currency shops,
supplying medicines to state hospitals,
mobilizing rigs to drill bore holes
for clean water in the cholera crisis
and a biofuels project, to name a few.
"He's now like the head of state.
He's reaching almost everything," the
manager said.
"People fall over
each other to please him and some get hurt in the process,
and he likes
that. He likes that attention. He likes power," said another
Reserve Bank
employee. "He's very vindictive. He can hold a grudge for
weeks."
Like Mugabe, Gono blames Zimbabwe's ills on Western
sanctions. U.S. and
European countries imposed bans on senior officials,
preventing them from
traveling to or doing business with the West. Gono is
among those under
sanctions.
The Times requested a phone interview
with Gono but did not receive a
response.
Rejecting what he calls
"traditional" economics (like the principle that
printing money endlessly
causes runaway inflation), he contends that
printing money is actually a
form of "sanctions busting."
"I must reiterate that I am going to print
and print and sign the money
until sanctions are removed and there is
balance-of-payments support. It's a
commitment I am ready to be fired for
because we need money for
infrastructural development," Gono said, quoted in
the government-owned
Herald on Oct. 1.
But the senior ZANU-PF
official scoffs at that argument. "If the money was
being provided to build
hospitals, schools and roads, it might be sanctions
busting. But it's being
used for conspicuous consumption. Everywhere you go
there are
Mercedeses."
Gono's own website, www.gideongono.com, gives a taste of the
Reserve Bank
governor's ego, charting his course from tea boy and cleaner at
a provincial
brewery to becoming one of the most powerful men in the
country.
But Gonogonow.com, a website run by activists, offers a sense of
how loathed
he is. It (and his enemies in ZANU-PF) accuse him of massive
looting of
state finances, claims he has denied.
The activists print
anti-Gono fliers in English and Shona and target people
standing in line at
banks to withdraw money. They feature cartoons of Gono
loading Reserve Bank
money into the back of cars or gulping down feasts,
usually with his foot on
a child's skeleton.
"Gono is the weak link in the Mugabe
regime because he's become incredibly
powerful and incredibly bloated, and
he's got very few friends in the
system," said one activist involved in the
project, who spoke anonymously
for fear of reprisals. "No ministry can get
access to cash without going to
Gono. He controls everything. He's become
this power-mad individual who's
loathed by the whole country."
He
said other members of the group regarded the GonoGoNow project as their
most
dangerous anti-regime activity. "They think Gono would kill over this,"
said
the activist.
Gono recently launched his book, "Zimbabwe's Casino
Economy," dashed off in
60 days. In an economy where most U.S. dollar
transactions are banned, his
book is priced at $40.
Tony Hawkins, an
independent Harare-based economist whose citation awarding
Gono an MBA
distinction is appended, these days describes Gono's performance
as
"disastrous."
"We've got to the point where his policy seems to be living
from day to day
and making sure there's cash. There's no policy, there's no
strategy,
there's no direction, there's nothing," said Hawkins.
But
Gono sees himself as the country's shepherd. Blaming him for the
economy, he
said, "is the worst form of diabolical nonsense and the highest
form of
intellectual naivete and dishonesty . . . only matched by a hyena
trying to
tell a flock of sheep that the worst enemy is their shepherd,"
according to
a report in the Herald on Sept. 30.
Before he went to the Reserve Bank,
Gono had a reputation as a solid banker.
In 2003, Hawkins warned Gono not to
take the Reserve Bank job because it
would destroy him.
Hawkins
remembers: "He said, 'No, I'm going to sort everything out.' "
robyn.dixon@latimes.com
http://www.africasia.com
HARARE,
Jan 1 (AFP)
Zimbabwe's economy is now virtually based on foreign exchange, a state
daily
said Thursday, with fewer goods and services available in the local
dollar
which is rapidly losing its worth because of galloping
inflation,
"A survey by The Herald this week revealed a significant drop
in demand for
the local unit as very few shops and traders were still
selling products in
Zim dollars," the newspaper reported.
The
Zimbabwe dollar continues to lose its worth as the country's chronic
economic woes show no sign of abating. One US dollar is worth four million
Zim dollars at the official exchange rate and three billion Zim dollars on
the black market.
Most traders and service providers from streetside
vegetable vendors to
mobile phone service providers are pegging their prices
in foreign currency
to hedge against losses.
Since September last
year, Zimbabwe's central bank has licensed at least
1,000 shops to sell
goods in foreign currency in a move aimed at helping
businesses suffering
from a chronic shortage of foreign currency to import
spare parts and
foreign goods.
Others shops and service providers have followed suit
although they have not
been authorised by the government and despite
warnings that those arrested
for flouting foreign exchange regulations would
be prosecuted.
A single journey by minibus within Harare costs one US
dollar while hired
taxis charge at the rate of one dollar per kilometre
(about half a mile).
In the latest move, the authorities licenced mobile
phone service providers
to charge for airtime and other services in foreign
currency.
The Herald said the prevalent use of foreign exchange is
threatening the
once flourishing parallel foreign exchange market as traders
get fewer
people in need of the local currency.
Once a regional
economic model, Zimbabwe is in the throes of economic crisis
with inflation
officially at 231 million percent and most families unable to
afford a
square meal.
A power-sharing deal aimed at reviving the moribund economy
and ending
tensions between the country's main political rivals stalled over
the
allocation of key cabinet ministries.
http://www.thezimbabwetimes.com/?p=9369
January 1, 2009
By Raymond
Maingire
HARARE - Didymus Mutasa, who continues to act as State Security
Minister,
attempted on Wednesday to block attempts by lawyers representing
Zimbabwe
Peace Project director, Jestina Mukoko and eight others, to compel
the state
to disclose the identity of the abductors of the accused
persons.
The defence had filed an urgent application in the High Court
seeking to
stop any further prosecution of the group pending a full enquiry
into their
kidnappings.
The defence also wanted the police to arrest
the kidnappers and the state to
further disclose where the accused persons
were being held for nearly two
months after their kidnappings.
The
state last month admitted in court the accused persons were abducted.
The
defence also wants the state to summon one Chigumira, an army medical
doctor
who is said to have examined the accused persons in their torture
chambers,
to appear in court and disclose who called him.
The defence says it
cannot rely on the findings of a state doctor who could
have been called to
"minimize the trauma" the accused suffered.
The accused persons claim
torture at the hands of state security agents.
A private doctor, who
examined them in prison on Tuesday, confirmed the
torture.
In its
argument, the state said the Attorney General's office was not
subject to
directives by anybody including the courts.
Mutasa, in an affidavit to
support the state's contention, said the charges
faced by the accused
persons make it "imperative" for the state not to
disclose matters of state
security even in court.
"The said allegations constitute a clear and
present threat to national
security which threat if left unchecked could
result in consequences too
ghastly to contemplate," Mutasa said.
The
accused persons are being held on alleged attempts to seek the overthrow
of
President Robert Mugabe through recruiting persons to train as bandits
and
insurgents.
Said Mutasa, "The state of affairs warranted state security
agents whose
mandate and responsibility it is to promote and preserve the
security of the
state to undertake investigations into the
matter.
"Investigations are still ongoing and in view of the sensitivity
of the
matter, and necessarily clandestine modus operandi and nature of
state
security organs, it is imperative and prudent that the identities of
officers charged with investigating matters of this nature and any
facilities involved be kept a closely guarded secret.
"To do
otherwise would not be in the best interests of national security."
After
hearing both submissions by the state and the defence, Justice Elphas
Chitakunye reserved judgement until Friday, January 2, 2009.
Beatrice
Mtetwa, one of the lawyers handling the matter was evidently
disappointed.
"So you have a minister in the government saying that
in fact it has certain
undisclosed facilities where they keep people who
have been abducted by
stated security agents and that courts should not
enquire into those forced
disappearances," she said.
"If anybody has
committed an offence in Zimbabwe, the law is very clear as
to how they
should be dealt with.
"The court situation does not get suspended because
they are allegations of
state security issues.
"There is no law in
Zimbabwe that allows anybody to grab you in your night
clothes, put you in a
car, blind fold you and take you to undisclosed places
for three weeks
without your family knowing where you are."
The accused persons were
seized by armed squads from their homes and
workplaces in Harare, Norton,
Chinhoyi and Banket on different occasions
since October end.
Until
December 22 when the police apparently took custody of them, they
continuously denied any knowledge of their whereabouts.
"We are
clearly not satisfied with that," said Mtetwa.
"The courts are there to
ensure that if it is alleged you have committed an
offence you are dealt
with in terms of the law; not through some operations
that are not subject
to any form of judicial review."
http://www.iol.co.za
January 01 2009 at
05:38PM
The Anglican bishop of Pretoria - Right Reverend Dr Jo Seoka
- on Thursday
called upon President Kgalema Motlanthe to act against
Zimbabwe's Robert
Mugabe.
"Looking at the situation in Zimbabwe, one
cannot help but challenge the
government of South Africa to consider
seriously the humanitarian crisis
faced by the Zimbabwean people in Musina
and act decisively on it," the
bishop said.
He added that he had
previously called upon both the government and the SADC
to take tougher
action against Mugabe.
"However, no action has been taken by the
political leaders of our country
to protect the Zimbabwean nationals within
our borders.
"Yet people continue to be detained
without trial, and to die of diseases of
impoverishment such as
cholera."
The conditions under which the Zimbabweans found themselves
could no longer
be tolerated, Seoka said.
"As a spiritual leader and
the Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Pretoria, I
challenge my own
government first, to send a delegation on a fact-finding
mission that will
inform and empower us to act decisively to rescue the
innocent nationals of
Zimbabwe, both in their country, and in such places as
Musina, where they
are being treated to a fate worse than animals."
He said it was tragic to
learn that one of the observers in the area (as
reported in the Mail and
Guardian) noted that even his dogs did not live
under the conditions to
which the Zimbabwean nationals were being subjected.
The bishop added
that SA had to now consider sending a peacekeeping force to
Zimbabwe, to
protect civilians, "particularly those who are human rights
advocates, such
as Jestina Mukoko, who was abducted and molested".
He also called upon SA
to stop supplying electricity and water to Zimbabwe,
"simply because these
amenities have become accessible only to Mugabe and
his cronies, and not the
poor who are evidently dying of starvation and
thirst".
Seoka said it
was the right of SA citizens to speak out on such matters, "as
it is our tax
which subsidises the supply of these amenities".
He added that should
peacekeeping fail, "we must, as a country, call upon
our President, Kgalema
Motlanthe, to exercise his responsibility as the
chair of Southern African
Development Community (SADC), to mobilise SADC
forces to go to Zimbabwe as
peacemakers". - Sapa
http://www.africasia.com
GENEVA,
Jan 1 (AFP)
More than 30,000
people in Zimbabwe have been diagnosed with cholera, the
World Health
Organisation said Thursday, as the number of those contracting
the deadly
disease continues to mount.
As many as 31,656 suspected cases were
diagnosed to date with one third of
them in the capital of Harare, the WHO
said.
The organisation last reported some 29,131 suspected cases on
Monday and
1,564 deaths from the water-borne disease.
Cholera also
continues to plague neighbouring South Africa, where it has
killed 13
people, mainly in the Limpopo border region where nine people have
died from
a total of 1,334 suspected cases, the WHO said citing South
African
sources.
United Nations aid agencies fear Zimbabwe may be hit with up to
60,000
cases, with the upcoming rainy season likely to spread the disease
more
easily.
The Red Cross announced on Wednesday that it would send
seven international
emergency response teams to the impoverished southern
African country to
help fight the spread.
Zimbabweans are also
struggling against hyper-inflation, severe food
shortages and chronic
political instability.
http://www.apanews.net
APA-Harare (Zimbabwe)
Cumulative donor assistance for Zimbabwe's cholera
outbreak reached more
than US$35 million at the end of 2008, the UN Office
for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Aid (OCHA) said here Thursday.
A total of US$35.6 million
had by December 31 been donated towards helping
Zimbabwe fight a deadly
cholera outbreak that killed more than 1,600 people
in the last four months
of 2008.
Zimbabwe's former colonial masters Britain accounted for nearly
40 percent
of the donations, with a cumulative total of US$13.8 million
channelled
through UN agencies and the Red Cross.
Other significant
donations came from the United States which gave US$6.8
million, the
Netherlands provided US$2.5 million, pharmaceutical firm
GlaxoSmithKline
which chipped in with US$1.3 million, and Japan which
offered US$1.5 million
for water purification chemicals and health
education.
Most of the
donor assistance poured in after the Zimbabwe government
declared cholera a
national emergency at the beginning of December.
The cholera outbreak has
spread to other southern African countries, with
cases reported in Botswana,
Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa.
JN/daj/APA 2009-01-01
Associated Press
By
CLARE NULLIS - 1 hour ago
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) - South African
anti-apartheid activist Helen
Suzman, who won international acclaim as one
of the few white lawmakers to
fight against the injustices of racist rule,
died Thursday. She was 91.
Suzman, who was twice nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize, fought a long and
lonely battle in the South African parliament
against government repression
of the country's black majority and the
imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.
Nelson Mandela Foundation chief executive
Achmat Dangor said Suzman was a
"great patriot and a fearless fighter
against apartheid."
Suzman's daughter, Frances Jowell, said that Suzman
died peacefully at her
Johannesburg home. Jowell told the South African
Press Association that
there would be a private funeral this weekend and a
public memorial service
in February.
For 13 years, Suzman was the
sole opposition lawmaker in South Africa's
parliament, raising her voice
time after time against the introduction of
racist legislation by the
National Party government.
After her retirement from parliament in 1989,
she served on a variety of top
public institutions, including the
Independent Electoral Commission that
oversaw the country's first
multiracial elections in 1994.
She was at Mandela's side when he signed
the new constitution in 1996 as
South Africa's first black president. A year
later, Mandela awarded her a
special gold medal in honor of her
contributions.
"It is a courage born of the yearning for freedom; of
hatred of oppression,
injustice and inequity whether the victim be oneself
or another; a fortitude
that draws its strength from the conviction that no
person can be free while
others are unfree," Mandela said at the
time.
Suzman had first visited Mandela in prison on Robben Island in
1967, when
she heard his grievances about prison conditions.
"It was
an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into
our
cells and strolling around our courtyard. She was the first and only
woman
ever to grace our cells," Mandela later recalled.
"Mrs. Suzman was one of
the few, if not the only, member of Parliament who
took an interest in the
plight of political prisoners," he said.
Suzman was born in the mining
town of Germiston, east of Johannesburg, to
Lithuanian-Jewish parents who
had fled anti-Semitism. Her childhood was the
charmed one of most whites -
tennis, swimming lessons and private schooling.
When Suzman got to
university, she began to speak out against the conditions
under which black
people were forced to live, especially the dreaded pass
system that
restricted their movement.
In 1953, she was elected to parliament for
General Jan Smuts' United Party.
A few years later, she helped formed the
liberal democratic Progressive
Party, a later reincarnation of which is
still the official opposition. A
snap election in 1961 devastated the party,
leaving Suzman on her own until
1974. She kept her seat until her retirement
in 1989 at the age of 72.
She was especially jubilant about the 1986
abolition of the pass laws as
part of the slow and uneven unravelling of
apartheid legislation and had
just one regret about leaving Parliament:
"That I didn't stay on one extra
year to watch all the bills that I'd
opposed being repealed."
In interview with The Associated Press on her
90th birthday in November
2007, Suzman said: "I had a wonderful opportunity
to use the parliamentary
stage to bring the world's attention to what was
going on."
Suzman's relationship with former President P.W. Botha, one of
the most
ruthless enforcers of apartheid laws, was one of mutual loathing.
She
described him as "an obnoxious bully" and said that if he were female,
"he
would arrive in Parliament on a broomstick," according to the Helen
Suzman
Foundation Web site.
Botha once referred to her as "a vicious
little cat" - Suzman didn't mind as
she adored animals and was surrounded by
them at her home.
Suzman was bestowed with 27 honorary doctorates,
including ones from Oxford,
Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Cambridge
universities. She was made Dame of
the British Empire in 1989 - a rare honor
for a foreigner.
In addition to many other titles, she said she was
especially proud of being
declared "Enemy of the State" by Zimbabwe's
autocratic President Robert
Mugabe in 2001.
At her 90th birthday, she
spoke openly about her disillusionment with the
lack of progress in
addressing crime, unemployment and poverty in South
Africa but praised the
post-apartheid government for economic policy
achievements.
"Masses
of black people are very disappointed with lack of delivery of
housing,
water and sanitation," she told the AP.
Suzman prided herself for reading
four newspapers every morning and
championing causes close to her heart -
including the decriminalization of
marijuana.
"The great thing about
my life is that is has never been boring - long,
interesting, maddening at
times but never boring," she said.
Associated Press Writer Celean
Jacobson in Johannesburg contributed to this
report.
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com
Blake Lambert 01 Jan 2009
World Politics
Review
Pray for Zimbabweans. Their economy, shrinking for a
decade, is
suffering hyperinflation of more than 230 million percent. The
government,
which has no money to keep most primary and secondary schools
open, has even
closed down several hospitals during a cholera epidemic. The
disease has
left nearly 1,200 people dead and more than 23,000 others
infected,
according to the United Nations. With food, water, electricity and
public
services all scarce, Zimbabwe confirms Hobbes' belief in the
harshness of
existence.
President Robert Mugabe, the country's
sole leader since independence
in 1980, deserves much of the blame. He has
clung to power, emboldened by
his ZANU-PF party, no matter what the national
cost. Still, it is unclear
how to effect the necessary change to begin
Zimbabwe's reconstruction.
For Western officials, that process no
longer includes a role for
Mugabe, with outgoing U.S. President George W.
Bush going so far as to say
recently, "It is time for Robert Mugabe to go."
The stalemated Sept. 11
power sharing agreement, which attempted to create
an inclusive government
between ZANU-PF and opposition leader Morgan
Tsvangirai's Movement for
Democratic Change, is now a non-starter for the
U.S. and perhaps Britain.
Beyond their rhetoric, the U.S. and the European
Union have also imposed
sanctions on members of Mugabe's regime and his
financial enablers.
Given the depths of Zimbabwe's catastrophe,
however, such actions seem
insufficient. Not surprisingly, more robust
solutions are now being
proffered to dislodge Mugabe, including the threat
of military force,
invoking the U.N. principle of "responsibility to
protect," and charging
Mugabe with crimes against humanity at the
International Criminal Court for
mass atrocities. While theoretically
legitimate, all three options
demonstrate an idealistic approach to
international affairs that is
ill-suited to Zimbabwe.
Start
with the ICC. Though very few individuals are more deserving of
being
brought before it than Mugabe, the court has no army or police force
to
arrest suspects. Charges would likely strengthen the will of Mugabe and
his
compatriots to cling even more stubbornly to power, relying on allies
such
as China for their bankroll.
Threatening force, meanwhile, requires
military capacity and political
will. But which country, if any, will supply
the troops to level the threat?
As for the extreme edge of the
responsibility to protect, an actual
military intervention would require
approval from the U.N. Security Council
or from the African Union and the
Southern African Development Community,
according to the International
Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention
organization. Neither option is likely
because of China and Russia's veto at
the Security Council, and the respect
Mugabe commands from his neighbors for
having liberated Zimbabwe from
colonial rule.
Negotiation, as tepid it has been, may be the most
viable option. The
International Crisis Group proposed the establishment of
an 18-month
"transitional administration, run by non-partisan experts, in
which neither
Mugabe nor Tsvangirai would have any position." The government
should be led
by a Chief Administrator who would be banned from running for
office or
serving as prime minister. Its chief tasks would be to implement
economic
and political reforms, and to prepare new presidential elections.
In
exchange for Mugabe leaving the presidency, he would receive guarantees
of
immunity from domestic prosecution and extradition, along with security
for
his family. This amnesty would also apply to senior military commanders
who
accepted retirement and did not threaten Zimbabwe's
stability.
That final plank horrified AIDS-Free World, a U.S.-based
advocacy
group that focuses on HIV/AIDS. "Amnesty is deeply offensive to
anyone who
has even an inkling of the devastation this man has wrought," it
said in a
press release. "The idea that if the top ranks of ZANU-PF retire
quietly,
the rest will stop the carnage and blithely rebuild their country
while the
world watches in approval, is ludicrous."
AIDS-Free
World has instead called on southern African countries to
"end . . .
Africa's failure to solve Africa's problem" by pressuring Mugabe
to step
down. But that ignores both the region's political realities and
Mugabe's
intransigence. While Botswana and Zambia, both members of SADC,
have spoken
out against Mugabe, their words are feeble compared to South
Africa's
ambivalent embrace of the former revolutionary. Meanwhile, human
rights
groups report that the ZANU-PF regime is terrorizing both human
rights
activists and members of the MDC in order to strengthen itself.
Sadly, the best option for Zimbabwe requires swallowing the poison
pill of
granting immunity to Mugabe. But that is relative and offers little
reason
to expect the situation to improve. No wonder hope is in dreadfully
short
supply.
Blake Lambert is a veteran Africa correspondent and a World
Politics
Review contributing editor. He has reported for the Economist, the
Christian
Science Monitor and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, amongst
other
media outlets.
http://www.northstarwriters.com/lk078.htm
Llewellyn
King
January 1, 2009
The pictures are harder to take than the words. The words
you can skip over.
The pictures take you by the throat. All of my boyhood in
Southern Rhodesia,
now Zimbabwe, came surging back to me with choking sorrow
when I saw press
pictures of Zimbabwean children digging through the
roadside gravel, in the
hopes of finding kernels of maize - corn in American
English - that may have
blown off passing trucks.
When hunger
stalks Africa, maize is more important than gold - the
difference between
living and dying. It is eaten in several ways. Even the
stalks are chewed in
the way Latin Americans chew sugar cane. Mostly, it is
made into a stiff
porridge called sadza.
Some of my earliest memories of the vital
importance attached to maize go
back to when I was nine years old and was
awarded the job in our household
of measuring the weekly maize ration to
each employee. By law, every man -
and domestic helpers were mostly men -
received 15 pounds of maize each
week.
My job was to watch
the precious ground maize - grits to Americans - weighed
out of 100-pound
sacks into smaller sacks. The weekly weighing was a jolly
time, with much
joking and laughing (and you have not laughed until you have
laughed in
Africa) while the meal was dispensed, weighed with a scale hung
on a tree
limb.
This weekly ceremony, together with the distribution of
stewing beef, was
symptomatic of everything that was right and wrong with
life in colonial
Africa. It was humanitarian; it was generous; and it was
patronizing. The
amount of meal far exceeded the daily consumption of one
person and was
designed, although this was not mentioned, to feed more than
one hungry
mouth. It was a government-abetted welfare - paternalism in
action.
I have often thought about this conscious food
distribution from the
better-off whites to the poor blacks as less an act of
racism than of
British class snobbery - noblesse oblige in the colonial
context. It was the
same instinct that caused the viceroy of India to
pretend to find work for
5,000 people at his palace in New
Delhi.
Much of the meal ration found its way to extended families
in the townships
or to peddlers who came around on bicycles. None of it went
to waste. The
classic meal, eaten with little variation, was sadza, which is
a dumpling
that diners shape with their hands and dip into a stew made
ideally with
meat, but sometimes with other protein-rich ingredients like
beans, or
termites and caterpillars, which were harvested as delicacies. I
ate a lot
sadza with various stews, but the caterpillars were beyond
me.
The question I have most often been asked is, "What was it
like in
Rhodesia?" I have never had a good answer except to say that it was
like
living in a good London suburb, but with a back story of indigenous
people
who came and went in our lives without really registering. British
author
Evelyn Waugh described this phenomenon as far back as 1937, when he
wondered
at the "morbid lack of curiosity" of the settlers for the
indigenous people.
He might have been told that it was the selfsame lack of
curiosity that his
characters in Brideshead Revisited had about the workers
in the rest of
England.
At this passage of time, it is almost
possible to defend the British in
Rhodesia. Their greatest gift, I sometimes
think, was not democracy, law,
literacy or religion, but the golden maize
they brought with them in 1890,
which replaced rapoco, a low-yield grain
grown in the region. Maize was
produced in such abundance in Zimbabwe,
before President Robert Mugabe
destroyed the commercial farms, that it was
exported throughout southern
Africa.
Now the breadbasket is
empty, and children sift through roadside gravel for
corn kernels blown from
trucks. Would that I could fix my scale to a tree
and weigh out a plentiful
measure for those children, who are no older than
I was, when I was the
quartermaster in another time.
http://www.voanews.com
By
Martin Ngwenya
Gaborone, Botswana
01 January
2009
Civic organizations in Botswana recently presented a play
highlighting the
human rights abuses and violations Zimbabweans in the
country are subjected
to. It focuses on the plight of Zimbabweans in the
Diaspora, as they
continue their search for better opportunities. Martin
Ngwenya saw the play
and filed this report.
The play is titled "Voice
of the People". Its main theme tackles the dismal
lives and problems
confronting Zimbabweans in the Diaspora, including
xeonophobia.
The
play features both Zimbabwean and Botswana actors. It's a frank account
of
the hardships endured by immigrants in a new environment. In particular,
it
zooms in on the suspicion and mistrust with which Zimbabweans are often
viewed in countries like Botswana and South Africa.
The opening scene
portrays a post on the Zimbabwe/Botswana border.
Immigration officials are
seen abusing and belittling Zimbabwean immigrants.
Their journey then
continues to the streets of the capital, Gaborone, where
foreigners scramble
for odd jobs.... only to attract the scorn and wrath of
locals. Police
harassment is the order of the day. The play questions the
attitudes of law
enforcement and government officials.
Meanwhile, the Zimbabweans yearn
for the day when they'll be able to return
to their homeland. At the end,
the main characters appeal to the leadership
to listen to the "voice of the
people".
One Zimbabwean actor, who requested anonymity, says the drama
reflects the
views and tribulations of ordinary Zimbabweans in
Botswana.
He says the play is the result of extensive interviews with
Zimbabweans both
in Botswana and South Africa.
"What we are
reflecting," he says,"are the real issues raised by the people.
We carried
out interviews before we came up with the show and we want
ordinary people
to say yes, these are the issues that affect us. Leaders are
not affected;
it is the ordinary person who is suffering. We hope that at
the end of the
day, the leaders can hear the voices of the people on the
ground."
The play was part of a series of activities specifically
lined up to focus
on human rights abuses.
Other events included a
photo exhibition by Amnesty International featuring
images of Zimbabwe in
the run-up to the March 29 elections and the violence
that followed.
http://www.smh.com.au/
Peter Roebuck
January 2,
2009
SOUTH AFRICA needs to rethink its relationship with the spiteful
crooks
running Zimbabwe. Likewise in this euphoric hour, Cricket South
Africa ought
to cut its close ties with the charming creeps plundering
Zimbabwean
cricket. As could be told from the spirited performance these
last few
weeks, CSA is doing an awful lot right. All the more reason to cast
aside a
bloated and benighted Zimbabwe board with money in its pockets and
blood on
its hands. Some of the leading lights at CSA stood firm against
apartheid
and now must reject the tyranny of Zanu PF. In both cases, the
common man
was crushed by a ruthless elite.
Over the years, CSA has
backed the Zimbabwean rulers to the hilt. Black
Africa has produced some of
the greatest leaders the world has known but
cricket fell into the hands of
lesser men. The late Percy Sonn started the
rot by blithely backing Zanu and
ZC in the face of mounting evidence of
their greed. Nobody is so blind as
the zealot. Sent as an observer, Sonn
declared legitimate an election every
sane person knew had been rigged, and
in his cricketing capacity supported
ZC's senior officers, Peter Chingoka
and Ozias Bvute, wealthy thugs whose
fondness for whisky matched his own.
This unholy trinity came to be called
the Black Label Brotherhood. Nor did
Sonn spare his own country, once
intervening to demand the inclusion of
Justin Ontong and the omission of
Jacques Rudolph, thereby scoring a
political point and harming the careers
of two promising players.
Sonn's death merely paved the day for Ray Mali,
a man with many of his
faults and none of his intelligence. Already
compromised by his antics in
one of the homelands set up by the apartheid
government, Mali forged a
friendship with the ZC elders, paid them a visit,
drank their grog, took the
guided tour and returned to say that Zimbabwe was
well on its way to taking
first place in the ODI rankings. It was a betrayal
of underpaid and
intimidated black cricketers and honest officials.
Presumably, he fell for
the spiel about ZC trying to make the best of a bad
job. And so he seemingly
ignored the suffering and sided with the
tyrant.
Norman "Stormin" Arendse was CSA's next senior officer, a
forthright,
clever, outspoken, well-connected lawyer whose firm had done a
lot of work
for ZC. Against expectations, Arendse led CSA away from its
close links with
its neighbour across the Limpopo. By then ZC's finances
were coming under
closer scrutiny, as was its legitimacy and ties with a
despised government.
Pictures had been published of overgrown grounds,
reports had spread of
unpaid bills and wages and jobs for the boys, with 14
officials accompanying
the last under-19 tour and so forth. Where had the
tens of millions provided
by the ICC gone? Meanwhile, Chingoka invested
millions, built a house in
Cape Town and kept his family in London. Bvute
spent most of his time in New
York and bought a house in the richest suburb
in Harare, not far from the
47-bedroom house recently built by the governor
of the country's reserve
bank. Perhaps, too, Arendse had heard about the
threats to Tatenda Taibu
that caused him to flee the country. Now Taibu is
fighting ZC again,
demanding that the accounts be presented in court as a
way of proving that
the assault case mounted against him is nothing more
than a ruse to silence
him.
Under Arendse, CSA stopped inviting
Zimbabwean teams to play in its domestic
competitions. Previously, it had
allowed Zimbabwean squads to attend its
high-performance centre in Pretoria
and arranged A-team tours. Obviously,
the players were not to blame.
Eventually, it realised that cricket and
politics could not so easily be
separated. ZC has lent broadcast vans to
Zanu at election time, and Chingoka
is a business partner and close ally of
Solomon and Joyce Mujuru, a ruthless
pair who have risen to eminent
positions in Zanu's military and political
establishment.
But Arendse clashed with his chief executive and handed in
his papers. He
has been replaced by Dr Mtutuzeli Nyoka. By all accounts, the
newcomer is
capable and careful so it was discouraging that in his first
pronouncement
he sent an olive branch to Chingoka, thereby following in the
footsteps laid
by numerous Indian officials. India's position on Zimbabwe is
cynical and
pathetic. If sporting boycotts were valid in the apartheid
years, they are
valid now.
Despite Nyoka's opening remarks, CSA has
not restored full links with ZC.
Elsewhere the world is slowly waking up. As
someone assisting 36
impoverished Zimbabwean students, I have long been
aware of the collapse of
hospitals, justice, free speech, schooling and
hope. Bright girls have been
forced into prostitution, brilliant students
sweep streets to avoid
starvation, critics are killed and all the while the
corpulent cats widen
their girth.
Australia's new government has
added Chingoka and Bvute to its banned list;
England banned them ages ago.
Far from protecting them, CSA should seize
their houses and funds and
distribute them to struggling cricketers and
their dependants.
CSA is
right. Cricket must become a truly African game. All the more reason
to suck
out the poison.