Zimbabwe - A letter from the diaspora

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19th December 2008

Dear Friends.
This will be my last Letter from the diaspora for 2008. It has been a truly terrible year for Zimbabwe culminating in the cholera outbreak that is now sweeping the country, creating a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions. It is unutterably painful to be here in the UK and see the collecting boxes out in the charity shops and realise that Zimbabwe has fallen so low that it has now become the subject of public charity. Somalia, Dafur, the DRC have all been on the list of failed states requiring charity for their suffering people. Now we have Zimbabwe, the once 'shining jewel' of Africa' added to the list. Starvation and disease, state violence and political repression now reign supreme where once was peace and plenty. The truth has been subverted for lies and propaganda as greedy, power-hungry men and women prey on the nation and leech on its human and natural resources. It seems on the face of it that all that is good and fine in our African culture has been devoured for the sake of short-term gain for the few.

But hope is not lost. Listening to stories from inside Zimbabwe, I am constantly struck by the way Zimbabweans, black and white, help each other out in the incredible hardship of everyday living, sharing the little they have with each other. Away from the media and the glare of publicity, neighbours look out for each other, mindful that they are all in the same situation. While government ministers sound increasingly demented and deranged in their pronouncements about how it's all the fault of the Brits or the Americans, ordinary people get on with their lives as best they can in the nightmare of poverty and near-starvation that Mugabe and Zanu PF have created through sheer bad governance and lack of leadership.

Sadly, what 2008 has shown us once again is that the Zimbabwean people can expect no help from the AU or SADC. Their only interest appears to be in protecting Robert Mugabe and attacking the west's racism and 'neo-colonial intentions' South Africa, which might have been expected to be more than a little concerned about the flood of refugees crossing its borders - not to mention the spread of cholera - says nothing about the brutal abduction of Mugabe's political opponents or the disappearance of journalists. Instead, the Secretary General of SADC announces that SADC will investigate Patrick Chinamasa's claims of 'compelling evidence' that the MDC has training camps in Botswana for what he calls 'opposition rebels' preparing for war in order to bring about regime change. The hypocrisy and double-speak of the South African government is breath-taking. Once again they block any move to censure Mugabe at the UN yet continue to push for the formation of a Government of National Unity in the apparent belief that the political crisis in the country will be solved by Mugabe's virtual retention of power. Zimbabwean soldiers are fighting and dying in the DRC and South Africa utters not one word of condemnation of Mugabe's intervention in a war which is none of his concern unless it is to protect his diamond mines and ensure that he keeps his generals sweet.

Zimbabweans are a deeply spiritual people and the events of the last two weeks:- the death of Elliot Manyika; the shooting in mysterious circumstances and the motor accident which has put Joseph Chinotimba is hospital - have not gone unnoticed or unexplained. The spirits are angry and those with innocent blood on their hands are paying the price.

As we move into 2009 and resistance to the Mugabe regime mounts as it surely will, there will no doubt be more innocent blood shed. Mugabe 'threatens' the country with an election and we all know what that entails. He is fond of telling people that the liberation war was won through the barrel of a gun- nderopa, through blood but as he becomes increasingly isolated in his paranoid delusions he would do well to remember that he too is just as mortal as the rest of us. Despite what he may claim, Mugabe has not been granted the gift of immortality; Zimbabweans are a patient - some might even say passive - people and Mugabe takes full advantage of that. He 'knows his people' he would say, but he would do well to remember that the people's patience is not endless. They may be slow to anger but fearsome when the anger boils over. The Old Man needs to make his peace with the ancestors before it is too late.
Yours in the (continuing) struggle PH.

12th December 2008

Dear Friends.
Perhaps it is the tinted glasses that Mugabe is wearing these days that blind him to what is going on in the country he purports to rule. His declaration that "Cholera has been arrested" - nice choice of words there! - flies in the face of the facts. "If anything is certain in the chaos of Zimbabwe today it is that the cholera outbreak is not under control" says Save the Children Director. As the WHO announces the death toll from cholera at nearly 800, Mr Mugabe blithely assures the crowd gathered for the funeral of Elliot Manyika - another 'Hero' for Heroes Acre - that the cholera cause doesn't exist anymore. What is more he claims, it is his government, his doctors who have worked this miracle with the help of WHO. But it is not the appalling suffering of the people that is of paramount concern to Mugabe; what is really worrying him is the threat of military intervention. No cholera, no cause for invasion goes his argument.

Zimbabweans would not have been surprised by Mugabe's rhetoric at the funeral for the late unlamented Manyika. All week long his side kicks in government have been telling anyone who would listen that the situation was under control. "We have enough chemicals to purify the water. We have got enough foreign currency to buy pipes" announced Sikhanyiso Ndlovu on Wednesday. If that is true then why don't they just go ahead and do it we wonder? Why was the regime trying so hard to conceal the terrible truth of the cholera outbreak from the world. They know only too well that once the pictures of children playing in raw sewage and cholera victims with drips attached in dirty clinics and hospitals were beamed round the world, the international community would respond. It was not compassion for the victims, not pity for the dying children that the regime was concerned about, it was the world-wide call for military intervention that had the Mugabe regime rattled. With the usual breath-taking Zanu illogicality Ndlovu went on to claim, "After squeezing and strangling the country with sanctions and contaminating it with cholera and anthrax, the west is seeking to use the window of opportunity provided by the disaster to justify military intervention." Ndlovu was simply laying the ground for his master. Even the eventual declaration of cholera as a National Emergency had little to do with stopping the people's suffering; above all it was a way of getting the international community to fund the government's absolute failure to care for their own people. Cholera does not respect political divisions, it does not discriminate between Zanu and MDC supporters' it targets the poorest of the poor, the malnourished, the already sick from Aids and above all the children. Yet Mugabe says nothing of them; it is the attack on his own power base that worries him when the call goes out for military intervention. Watching him speak at Heroes Acre, seeing the banners proclaiming 'Brown's Cholera' it was not hard to sense his terror at what it would mean for him if the west carried out their threats. The very real prospect of his own downfall is staring him in the face; compared to that not even the prospect of hundreds of cholera deaths matters. He is fighting for survival and like a cornered rat he becomes ever more vicious as the end comes nearer.

Mugabe's problem is that no matter how hard he tries he can no longer conceal from the world the depth of the suffering his regime has wrought on the Zimbabwean people. Not a day has passed this week without the world's media covering some aspect of the Zimbabwean tragedy. The plight of the missing MDC activists and Jestina Mukoko in particular has featured in mass appeals to human rights activists around the world to raise their voices in protest at Mugabe's appalling human rights record. His regime may ignore court orders to the police to mount a search for the disappeared; the ZTV may ignore a court order to flight adverts showing Jestina as a Missing Person but he cannot hide the tragedy from the world. Only last night on British TV we saw Zimbabwean lawyers marching with their banners to protest the political abductions. We saw the brave Woza women once again demonstrating in Bulawayo and Harare where they managed to surprise the police who arrived too late with their water canons. Water! Now where did that come from we wondered and had the water been treated or was this yet another diabolical plot to rid the country of these troublesome Woza women. Imprisonment doesn't stop them from coming out on the streets, why not spray them with cholera infected water? Is that possible even for Zanu PF, I wonder? I keep thinking about Didymus Mutasa's words when the SADC Tribunal found in favour of the 75 white farmers . "There is nothing special about the 75 farmers" he said. But there is something special about them, not because they are white but because they are human beings. It is that basic humanity that seems to have been lost in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe where people have become no more than pawns in his political power games and not even children are exempted. What other explanation is there for the government's decision today, Friday, to refuse visas to a group of French water specialists if it is not that President Sarkozy has joined the chorus of world leaders calling for Mugabe's ouster if necessary by military means?
Yours in the (continuing) struggle PH.

5th December 2008
Dear Friends.
Come January 2009 there will be an African American in the White House. Africa's response to this momentous development has been more than a little ambivalent. In Zimbabwe, for example, apart from the standard letter of congratulations from one so-called Head of State to the new President elect I have not read or heard anything that suggests that the political elite are aware of the possible implications for Africa of Obama's election. Perhaps Zimbabwe's 'Big Men' are too worried about what it will mean for their own narrow self-interests as Zimbabwe slides even further into complete meltdown. Developments this last week have provoked inches of international media coverage about how the end must be near for Mugabe with rioting soldiers on the streets for three days and running battles between police and soldiers. Echoing this view, a British friend of mine commented excitedly that the end could not be far off for the dictator. When a dictator cannot pay his army this must mean that he is in great danger of being overthrown, she argued. But in Zimbabwe things are never what they seem. I tried to explain that it was the failure of Gideon Gono's pernicious limit on bank withdrawals that was causing the problem; the money is there but the soldiers can't get at it. Their anger boiled over into looting and violence but despite all the journalists' assumptions of Mugabe's imminent collapse, I for one, am not convinced that the soldiers' action was really a manifestation of anti-Mugabe sentiments. Nothing is ever quite what it seems to be in Zimbabwe; to the outsider the latest developments may look like the death throes of the regime but we have been here so many times before and always the crisis has been defused either with state violence or pay increases. And the demonstrators, tired and beaten go home to lick their wounds and - sometimes - live to fight another day. The difference this time is I believe that Zimbabwe's financial collapse has never been so sharp and so country-wide in its effects. The sight of Gideon Gono's new notes emphasises that very point for me. A friend just arrived from home showed me the new 100 Million Dollar note and it was like looking at the make-believe money that my children used to play with. Zimbabwe has become totally unreal and what is clear is that Mugabe, Gono and all the other Big Men learn nothing from the past. They go on making the same mistakes over and over again. Knocking ten noughts of the currency is Gideon Gono's answer to inflation, yet despite repeating the 'noughts' exercise twice now, inflation soars every time he does it. Prices go up through the roof and into the stratosphere. The reappointed Gono and his master Mugabe learn nothing from their own mistakes.

That brings me back to president-elect Obama. His cabinet appointments have been made to widespread approval and what it shows Africa and the world is that he is not going to surround himself with 'Yes' men and women. He wants a cabinet of people who will challenge him, men and women of different opinions in the belief that stronger and more effective government will result if a leader is surrounded by people who will challenge him. He is learning from past presidents of the United States and in particular from President Abraham Lincoln whose biography Obama has been studying. What Limcoln did was to include all shades of opinion in his government, even potential rivals. So Obama has chosen to surround himself by highly intelligent people who will challenge his decisions. The test now will be to see if Obama has the vital qualities of leadership that enable him to know when, after listening to all the different opinions, he will be able to say, 'This is how it will be done.' With such a man in the White House - and an African American too - there is hope that the world will be a better place. Africa and the world may well have much to learn from his example. Dictators like Mugabe should be afraid, very afraid, that the end may indeed be very near for men like them.
Yours in the (continuing)struggle PH.