Zimbabwe - A letter from the diaspora

Dear Friends. Someone who knows I come from Zimbabwe said to me just yesterday, 'I don't know if it's my imagination but I think there's increased coverage of the situation in Zimbabwe over the last few weeks'. He was referring to the UK media, of course, and - as if to prove his point - the BBC's flagship news programme Newsnight covered the opening of parliament in Harare this week with a commentary to the effect that while Robert Mugabe rode in a Rolls Royce with all the pomp and ceremony befitting a Head of State, albeit a failed state, the Zimbabwean people were suffering shortages of even the most basic means of survival. That report was on Tuesday the 24th July 2007. The same story was covered in The Times and The Telegraph but, that apart, there has been a steady drip of news coming out for the last couple of weeks. Papers like The Guardian and The Independent, not noted for their coverage of Zimbabwe, have both carried stories about Zimbabwe and the steadily deteriorating situation in the country.

For three or four weeks now the media in this country has been concerned with the floods; the heaviest rains since records began with major rivers breaking their banks and thousands of people flooded out of their homes, without fresh drinking water or power. It was major news so it was quite a surprise that any other story should make it into the headlines but last night it was ITV who turned the spotlight on Zimbabwe in their 10.30 News broadcast that is watched by millions. Using a hidden camera ITV showed horrific pictures of the men and women beaten by the police for taking part in NCA demos up and down the country. We saw the demonstrators running, literally running down what looked like Samora Machel Avenue only to be set upon minutes later by the police and hauled away. The film then moved to the private clinics where the people were being treated. There were dozens of them and we saw them lying on the floor, too exhausted even to stand, while they waited to be treated for broken limbs, bruises and lacerations. There were men and women of all ages, ordinary people, many of them deeply traumatized by the experience. Their faces told the story, their eyes wide with shock at what had been done to them by brutal men with baton sticks, fists and heavy black boots.

I read today that the mothers were ordered to leave their babies at one end of the room at the police station while they lay face down on the floor and the police took it in turns to beat them and even to walk all over them while they lay there. For five hours it went on and the children wailed and screamed in terror as they saw their mothers being beaten and trampled on by men in uniform, men who are themselves husbands, brothers, fathers and uncles. And what was the reason for this savage brutality? These brave and wonderful ordinary Zimbabweans, armed with nothing more that their banners, had dared to demonstrate for a new constitution. They demonstrated not just in Harare but up and down the country they took to the streets in their hundreds to demonstrate the will of the people, zvido zvevanhu.

Watching the ITV coverage, I felt a deep sense of shame, a) that I was not there with my brothers and sisters sharing their pain and b) that I had ever doubted the courage of the ordinary people to bring about change in Zimbabwe. Time and time again it is the ordinary men and women of Woza and the NCA who have risked life and limb for what they believe in only to be beaten back by a ruthless regime armed with all the crushing apparatus of the state machine. But a machine needs men to operate it and it is those same men who are prepared to beat, torture and even kill their own people in order to keep Robert Mugabe in power. How do they sleep at night? How do they go home at the end of the day and look into the eyes of their own innocent children and answer the question Maswera sei baba? How was your day, Daddy?

Political analysts and learned academics may drone on and on, week after week, about the causes for all this mayhem; they may give us learned analyses of the political ramifications of this or that policy but the truth is that until they too find the courage to get out on the streets with the people this nightmare of repression and brutality in Zimbabwe will never end. We all know that the end will not come because of Thabo Mbeki's intervention; it will not come because of SADC's mealy-mouthed platitudes or the West's passive outrage or the AU's continuing inaction. The end will come when the people of Zimbabwe stand together, united in courage and determination to tell the dictator what sort of future they want for their children. Last night the British people saw that courage demonstrated by the brave men and women of the NCA. Of course, in Zimbabwe, the likes of Tafataona Mahosa and ZTV will ensure that ordinary Zimbabweans don't see the same footage but you can be very sure, the world is watching.
Ndini shamwari yenyu. PH

Friday 20th July 2007

Dear Friends.

In 1966 the great African writer Chinua Achebe published his superb comic novel A Man of the People. I'm re-reading it at the moment and I'm struck by the similarities between Nigeria then and Zimbabwe today, twenty seven years after independence. Achebe is of course writing about his own country, Nigeria, which gained its independence in 1960.

In Achebe's novel there is an election in the offing and suddenly the country is faced with an economic crisis, world coffee prices have collapsed. The coffee farmers are the backbone of the economy and are predominantly ruling party supporters. The Minister of Finance who has a Ph.D in economics gives the leader a detailed plan on exactly how to deal with the problem and his solution includes lowering the price paid to producers. Of course, that advice is rejected and the next day the Minister along with all those who supported him are sacked as 'conspirators and traitors who had teamed up with foreign saboteurs to destroy the new nation' Instead of following an economically sound and sensible policy the leader orders the national Bank to print millions of new notes.

The message surely is that politics and economics don't mix; once you start mixing in populist electoral gimmicks then sound economic principles go out the window. Zimbabwe has seen that fatal combination at work for years and particularly over the last three weeks. Looking at the situation from the outside what I see is Murambatsvina by another name. Once again it is the poorest members of Zimbabwean society who suffer. The real beneficiaries of Operation Dzikisa Mitengo are the people who have money, the middle classes and the Zanu PF heavyweights, the businessman and the wheeler-dealers who snap up goods at half price only to sell them on to the black market which is controlled by the Big Boys in the army and ruling party.

With elections just eight months away this Operation is yet another shameless attempt to bribe the voters back to the ruling party. The combination of bribery and violence once again demonstrates Mugabe's cynical contempt for his own people. He is so sure they will fall for this ploy and give him and the ruling party the mandate to rule for another five years. He has 'tamed' inflation he can claim; (it was surely no coincidence, by the way that the inflation figures had not been published for two months) he has seen off the foreigners who want to bring about regime change via the economy and he has shown himself once again, he believes, as A Man of the People whose only concern is his people's welfare.

Are the people fooled? On the face of it, the answer seems to be Yes! It looks as if the entire population has been taken in by this electoral con as the whole country goes on one gigantic shopping spree. But a phonecall last Sunday from my old hometown, right out on the edge of the rural areas in Mash East, gave me hope that perhaps there's more resistance than we hear about. My friend told me how the price enforcers were in action there too. It's a small place, no more than a 'growth point' really, but it has two or three supermarkets and the usual collection of small trading stores. It also boasts a Bata shoe shop and last week the slip-slops and 'ma tennis' were all half price after the Gezi Boys and cops beat the hell out of everyone in sight and the shop's entire stock sold for half the price it cost to produce! Result: One rural Bata shop closed perhaps never to reopen. And having finished there the Price Police moved on to the musika and the banana sellers. They didn't have quite such an easy job there; these banana ladies are tough cookies! They spend their every cent travelling to buy the bananas to sell at the musika; it's their only means of earning cash. Apparently the ladies gave as good as they got! One small step… It was the same in a little local butchery. The proprietor had used his own money, his own transport to travel out to the rurals to buy a beast. He had slaughtered it, jointed it and was selling it in his little shop when the Price Police arrived and ordered him to reduce the selling price by half. My informant, who was there in the shop at the time, tells me there was one very angry butcher telling the cops and Gezi boys to go to hell. ' Ah, so you're political' they replied with that strange Zanu PF logic which reckons that anyone who doesn't blindly agree with them must be the 'enemy', ' You must belong to the opposition' The butcher, absolutely enraged by this time snatched up an axe and threatened the lot of them. 'Politics be damned,' he said - or words to that effect - 'I'm a businessman. I bought the beast with my own money. I butchered the beast and I'm selling the beast at the price I determine and no one is going to stop me…so - off'! And they did, they left.

In the middle of all this buying frenzy came the 'News' of the good Archbishop's alleged adultery. Double page spreads in all the government owned papers and so-called pictorial evidence of his adultery with a secretary. Since when does African culture resort to such vulgarity? It was the presence of the TV cameras at the Archbishop's church that gave the game away for me. Their slogan is 'When it happens we'll be there' and when they are there you can be sure the government is behind it. I was reminded of the so-called 'discovery' of the murdered war vet's body. Zimbabweans will remember the story. The ruling party claimed the war vet had been murdered by the MDC and we were shown the body being disinterred by the police while the TV cameras whirred. That case ended two years later with an acquittal and some very harsh remarks from an honest judge - there are still a few of them left - about the disgraceful behaviour of the police.

Perhaps we will never know the truth about the good Archbishop's case but speaking for myself, his innocence or guilt makes not the slightest difference. To me, a sexual misdemeanour is a very trivial offence compared to the crimes committed by Robert Mugabe and his government which the good Archbishop so bravely brings to the world's attention.
Ndini shamwari yenyu. PH

Friday 13th july 2007

Dear Friends. 'It's like a lunatic asylum where the inmates have taken over'. This was one of the descriptions I read of the situation in Zimbabwe as the economic madness unfolds. Any Zimbabwean following the news from home this last two weeks from the safety of the diaspora must have wept and shaken their heads in utter disbelief at what they were hearing and reading. Gangs of armed police and Gezi Boys roaming around the towns and cities and forcing shop owners, often at gunpoint, to reduce their prices by 50%; top businessmen arrested for failing to comply and companies being threatened by the President with the words, 'Produce or we'll take you over'. I read somewhere that a lawyer acting for the businessmen and company directors said his phone was ringing every thirty minutes with desperate calls for help.

Of course, goods leapt off the shelves as the inevitable happened and the public descended on the retail outlets like a swarm of locusts, snapping up everything in sight convinced they were getting bargains whereas in reality they were being taken in by one enormous con trick. With absolutely no regard for basic common sense, the government had directed that goods must be sold at less than the cost of production. It was all beyond belief. My local Asian newsagent here has a cousin-brother who is a businessman in Zim and we often talk about things back home. I told him it would be like someone coming into his shop and ordering him to halve the prices on everything. He stared back at me, his face a study in disbelief, unable to comprehend what I was telling him but he should have remembered the ways of dictators: his wife's family had all been thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin.

The contrast between what is happening back in Zimbabwe and the 'normal' life we live here in the diaspora could not be more marked. As chaos engulfed the streets of Harare and Bulawayo and the other towns and cities, I sat in the summer sunshine at an open-air cafe drinking a cappuccino and chatting with my daughter who is visiting me for a few days. She was born and grew up in Zimbabwe though she hasn't been back for thirteen years. Like my newsagent friend she can hardly believe what I'm telling her. She has an MBA and runs a large organization so she knows about how businesses work in a 'normal' society. ' It's madness' she keeps saying, 'It can never work' but then you don't need an MBA to realise that, it's not rocket science as a one-time Zanu politician used to say!
As we sit there in the sunshine drinking our coffee and reading our newspapers, people walk past doing normal things like going to the shops or meeting friends for lunch and we are both remembering how life used to be back home when things were 'normal'. Now, everything has been turned upside down; all the things we used to take for granted have gone. In Zimbabwe, the abnormal has become the normal, a life of incredible hardship and suffering where every day is a struggle just to survive as Mugabe's government quite deliberately reduces the population to Stone Age scavengers.

Why is he doing it, why is Mugabe destroying the country he took over in 1980? The country that was described as 'the jewel of Africa' whose people had the highest literacy rate, the best qualified workforce and the brightest prospects on the continent? Can he who likes to be thought of as the father of the nation not see the suffering of his people, can he not hear the cries of the children?
I think about it as I sit with my daughter thousands of miles away from home and I wonder if life will ever be 'normal' enough to attract the millions of people in the diaspora to return to the beloved homeland. For myself, I know that when I left two years ago, I said I would never return while Mugabe and Zanu PF were still in power. I suspect it's the same for many of us in the diaspora. We count the months and the years and we wait while an octogenarian clings onto power and drags the whole country down with him, like a terrible vengeful spirit bent on destroying what he cannot have and leaving only ruin and desolation any future leader.

How long can Zimbabwe's agony last? How long before the pent-up fury of the Zimbabwean people bursts out in a storm of rage that will destroy everyone and everything in its path? Perhaps only then will Thabo Mbeki and the African Union finally understand that they should have listened to the cries of the suffering people instead of the serpent words of Zimbabwe's dictator.
Ndini shamwari yenyu. PH.

Sunday 8th July 2007

Dear Friends.

'Only Connect' said EM Forster the writer. He was talking about relationships and the need to reach out and make connections with different people, different races and cultures. By extension, I take that to encompass events in different countries and continents; it's all about making connections. Mugabe's regime would rather we didn't make those connections; he keeps the journalists out so that the world will not hear what's happening inside Zimbabwe but in these days of instant communications he cannot silence the flow of information. And once people know what's going on, they begin to compare and they make connections.

On July 4th, American Independence Day, Alan Johnston, the BBC journalist was released from his 16 weeks of captivity in Gaza. Johnston had chosen to live and work in one of the most dangerous places in the world, Gaza City.
He had been held in solitary confinement by a group calling itself the Army of Islam. No one quite knew why he had been taken or whether he would come out alive but after 16 long weeks he was released. There had been demonstrations all over the world calling for his freedom, not least by the people of Gaza itself where Johnston was held in high esteem.
The absolute dignity and compassion of Alan Johnston's first words struck a very particular chord for people all over the world who are held in captivity for unnamed crimes, victims of power-hungry dictators and unjust systems of government.
' You have to have been a prisoner to know how good freedom is, he said.' And later he remarked that it was ' as extraordinary a fourth of July as I could imagine.'

Far away in Zimbabwe, officials at the American Embassy were also celebrating the Fourth of July. As is customary, members of the diplomatic community gathered to celebrate America's National Day. This year though, there was a difference; the host country Zimbabwe was not invited. Ambassador Dell, you see, had dared to speak out very bluntly about the causes for the economic crisis engulfing Zimbabwe and had even predicted total economic collapse by the end of the year. As a consequence, President Mugabe with his usual cheap, populist rhetoric had nicknamed the Ambassador, 'Go to hell Dell'. The Ambassador had become Public Enemy No.1 and to show the regime's displeasure with him he had not been invited to Zimbabwe's Independence Celebrations back in April.
Undeterred by the lack of an invitation to the American Embassy, an official from Zimbabwe's Foreign Ministry gate-crashed the Fourth of July celebrations saying that he simply wanted an opportunity to respond to Dell's criticisms. The official commented 'It is always fair to have balance.' Coming from a government that has banned every source of balanced news reporting and comment in the country his comment must have raised some wry smiles among the hundred or so guests. The official went on to argue that if Dell was able to predict so specifically the time frame for Zimbabwe's collapse, then ' this leaves the impression that the meltdown is being engineered from outside Zimbabwe'. As I have said before, logic is not Zanu PF's strong suit! But the Ambassador had the last word; explaining why he let the Foreign Ministry official take the microphone at a US function in US embassy grounds Dell said it was because democracies believed in the historic adage, ' I may disagree with everything you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'

Hardly an adage Mugabe would have much connection with!

It took the UK Financial Times to make a connection even further back in history this week. The FT comments on economies around the world- those that are doing well and those that are spectacularly failing. Describing the absolute chaos that has engulfed the Zimbabwean economy this week following the government's decision to order the prices of staple food items to be halved in the shops, the FT takes us back to ancient Rome for the connection!

The year is AD 301 and a certain Emperor Diocletian renowned, says the FT, for his persecution of the Christan minority is in power. Rome is suffering hyperinflation so the Emperor orders all prices to be slashed by half. He sets minimum prices for all basic goods but in the meantime he keeps on minting coins and the population is reduced to bartering and scavenging as goods disappear.

The connection with ancient Rome is so close that it's uncanny. Zimbabweans will remember how Mugabe boasted that no one could have run the economy better than he had. Even now he is not admitting that any of the economic chaos is of his making. It's all being engineered by foreigners Mugabe claims; the Brits, the Americans or anyone else who dares to tell him he's making a terrible mess of things and his people are worse off than they've ever been. Mugabe doesn't want to acknowledge cause and effect; he doesn't want to see the connections.

It would be good to tell you that the Roman Emperor came to a nasty end after all the suffering he inflicted on his people. Sad to say, the FT reports that Diocletian survived the economic chaos he had created for another twenty one years and retired in his old age to grow cabbages in some distant outpost of the Roman Empire.

President Mugabe hasn't got an empire but he has his 'Look East' friends. Maybe there's a connection with his ancient Roman exemplar after all. Picture it, Mugabe in a toga, sweating and slaving over his makabichi on some distant Malaysian or Chinese field while Amai Mugabe struggles to cook sadza on a smoky fire for her 104 year old husband!
Punishment enough would you say?
Ndini shamwari yenyu. PH.