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Independent Online
29 September 2007

Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city and a stronghold of the political opposition, is literally drying up. If the summer rains don’t come early, it may do so.

One million people there only have water once every three days - at best.

Some are going for more than a week without water for ablutions. Some depend, even for drinking water, on the municipality’s ability to send in tankers to poor townships around the city.

The municipality is critically short of money because its major debtors, dirt-poor residents and the Zanu-PF government, in particular the Zimbabwe National Army, only occasionally pay their bills.

“It is disastrous. We fear a terrible disease crisis and the government won’t help us,” said the mayor of Bulawayo, Ndabeni Japhet-Ncube.

Japhet-Ncube and his council are members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) - which is aggravating the problem, some party members suspect.

Two dams, Inyakuni and Insiza, feed the city. Inyakuni is so low, offtake will be switched off towards the end of October. Unless rain, due mid-November, falls early this year, the city will have to depend entirely on Insiza dam which will be unable to match even the hopelessly inadequate present supply of water.

The Zimbabwe National Water Authority, Zinwa, wants to take control of Bulawayo’s water assets and distribution as it has done in Harare and in other towns - with disastrous results.

Harare’s dams have sufficient water, but about half the population in the ghettos go for long periods without because of equipment failure and lack of foreign currency to import water purification chemicals.

MDC MP for Bulawayo South, David Coltart, said President Robert Mugabe’s administration was “guilty of gross dereliction of duty, it’s a calamitous situation”.

Sunday Telegraph
23 September 2007
By Graham Boynton

I spoke to old friends in Zimbabwe this weekend. They sounded pleased with themselves, mainly because they’d managed to scavenge 25 chickens and a bottle of Teacher’s whisky from some unnamed connection.They’d shared the chickens among friends and, having had a few shots of Scotch, were barbecuing their catch and feeling relatively contented.Last week they’d killed a cow and set up an informal butcher’s shop for the neighbourhood in their back garden.

This is life under Robert Mugabe for people who were once entrepreneurs, teachers and traders. And they say they’re the lucky ones, because their connections and foreign exchange mean they can get hold of food and smuggle in alcohol from South Africa. Most of their fellow citizens are not so lucky – they are, quite literally, starving to death.

I grew up in Bulawayo, then a beautiful colonial town with avenues so wide you could turn an ox wagon in them and streets lined with majestic gum trees, kigelia trees and hedges of bougainvillea.

At the time it was run by a white colonial minority, who had carved a modern infrastructure out of raw African bushveld and created a thriving economy, benefiting both themselves and the black majority.

Of course, minority white rule could not last and when Ian Smith’s Rhodesia became Mugabe’s Zimbabwe it was a self-sufficient, prosperous economic success – a rare beacon of hope in Africa’s bleak 20th-century landscape.Today, the trees and the flowers remain but the city is in ruins. In less than a decade Robert Mugabe has torn the heart out of this lovely country and reduced it to the fastest-declining economy in the world.

The Sunday Times
September 23, 2007
Christina Lamb

A Harare taxi driver, Tafadzwa Nyatsanga, was negotiating fares with passengers outside an agricultural show when a policeman arrived and demanded to be taken somewhere for a fare of just Z$50,000, about 10p.

When Nyatsanga refused, pointing out that other people had been queuing for hours, the officer, Michael Masamwi, began beating and punching him, whacking him round the head with his truncheon.

There was nothing unusual about this in the Zimbabwe of President Robert Mugabe. But then something strange happened. Someone from the crowd stepped forward and told the officer that what he was doing constituted “a human rights abuse” and he should stop.

Masamwi laughed and hit him too. The man again told him that what he was doing was wrong as there were hundreds of people waiting. This time the crowd joined in, turning on the policeman and beating him.

The officer called in riot police. They dispersed the crowd violently and arrested the taxi driver, who is still in jail two weeks later.
A few days after the incident, however, Masamwi received a legal summons. Then last week about 500 people gathered outside his police station to demonstrate. This protest was also broken up by riot police and 11 people were arrested, but the demonstrators returned the next day.

Such unprecedented public action is the result of a new movement that has been launched in Zimbabwe to try to end police brutality by naming and shaming the most violent officers and taking them to court.

The Spectator

LLOYD EVANS
WEDNESDAY, 19TH SEPTEMBER 2007
Lloyd Evans reports from the inaugural Spectator / Intelligence Squared debate and finds that he is still undecided on the question of whether or not Britain has failed Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe – last in the dictionary and too often last on the agenda. The new season of Intelligence Squared debates opened with the motion ‘Britain Has Failed Zimbabwe.’ Moderator Richard Lindley set the scene by taking us back to Salisbury, now Harare, on November 11th, 1965 where, as a young journalist, he reported on Ian Smith’s announcement of UDI. Back then, everyone expected that within weeks British paratroopers would descend from the heavens and sort the country out. They’re still waiting.

Peter Godwin, a Zimbabwean journalist, opened in support of the motion with an unsettling quip: ‘If we were in Zimbabwe you wouldn’t be able to go to supper until till you’d voted the right way.’ Listing Britain’s historic failures he described how colonial disengagement was cooked up by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and in particular by its snobbish mandarins who looked down on the white settlers and didn’t believe them capable of governing themselves. The rushed process of decolonisation led directly to Ian Smith’s act of rebellion. And Britain’s neglect didn’t end there. Even while Mugabe’s mass killings were being reported in The Sunday Times (Godwin knows about this, he was the reporter) the dictator was being feted by the British establishment, given an honorary degree from Edinburgh University and, in 1994, a knighthood.

In reply we heard from John Makumbe, a Zimbabwean lecturer in politics. A large man with a quiet and powerful presence he outlined the achievements of British aid in Zimbabwe. He spoke of irrigation programmes, action on human rights and successful campaigns against sexually transmitted diseases. ‘This has made Zimbabwean women the top users of the female condom in Africa,’ he said. Pause. Twinkly smile. ‘I hope that’s not including my wife. She has no business using one. I’ll call her later.’

ABC
By Desmond Kwande of AFP
18th September 2007

With inflation at 7,500 per cent, Zimbabwe’s supermarkets have run out of food.

The latest report from the International Crisis Group has found Zimbabwe is close to complete collapse with four out of five people living below the poverty line and inflation running at 7,500 per cent.

The group is calling on the international community to close ranks behind South African President Thabo Mbeki’s efforts to achieve a political settlement.

Mr Mbeki is trying to mediate between the governing Zanu-PF party and the Opposition MDC Party.The independent think tank says the regional initiative is fragile as some Southern African leaders remain supporters of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.

David Coltart, an MP with the Opposition MDC Party, wants the United Nations to do more.”The UN attitude towards the Zimbabwean crisis has been pitiful,” he said. “We need a far more pro-active approach taken by the UN and in particular by the secretary general.”

The British Foreign Office Minister with responsibility for Africa, Mark Malloch Brown, says countries other than Britain need to put pressure on Zimbabwe to bring about change.”We will press but we can’t go it alone on this,” he said. “This has got to be Africa and indeed for that matter, Europe and the rest of the world, who together combined insist on change in Zimbabwe.

“Our voice is very strong, but in a sense this point about the fact we were the former colonial power, means for our voice to be heard, others must join with us in this appeal.

“Southern African countries should also enlist a panel of retired African presidents to persuade Mr Mugabe to accept reforms and retire next year.”
- AFP

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON, Sept 17 (Reuters)

The humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe has become the world’s worst but is still largely ignored by the international community, a member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said on Monday.

David Coltart, one of Zimbabwe’s leading white politicians and member of parliament for a mainly black constituency, said the crisis in the former British colony had far outgrown the ability of any single nation to tackle.

He accused United Nations food and health agencies of a gross dereliction of duty in keeping silent on the issue.”Zimbabwe is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis — but no one is talking about it in public,” he told Reuters on a visit to London. “It is absolutely catastrophic. The U.N. must act.

“Not only are people starving to death every day, but the collapse of the economy is starting to destabilise the region.”

Inflation in the country once known as the breadbasket of Africa is running at around 4,500 percent, unemployment is at 80 percent and price controls have stripped supermarket shelves bare.

Even staple foods like bread and maize meal are virtually impossible to get hold of and people have been reduced to scavenging.

President Robert Mugabe, in power since independence in 1980, blames the economic disaster on meddling by outside countries, including former colonial power Britain.They in turn deny the accusation and blame Mugabe and his ruling ZANU-PF party for incompetence, nepotism and corruption.

“What we need is a massive humanitarian relief effort. Mugabe is deliberately using food as a weapon,” said Coltart, who is secretary for legal affairs for a faction of the MDC.
“The trouble is that on the surface everything is quiet — it is in the hospitals and in the morgues that you see the truth,” he added.

I have decided that I need to write a short blog periodically which will be designed to convey some of my more personal thoughts. To that extent it will not be confined solely to political issues. I hope you enjoy it and give me feedback.

David
Bulawayo
16 September 2007

The Times (UK), 15 September 2007

Jan Raath in Bulawayo

It did not smell too bad and her family had not become sick, even after drinking it for the past two months. “Some people say it is sewage, but they may be making it up,” she said as she heaved a 25 litre drum up the slope and into a wheelbarrow. In any case she, like many of the poorest people in Zimbabwe’s second city of Bulawayo did not have a choice: no water has flowed through the pipes in some neighbourhoods since July. A water expert who accompanied The Times to one of several boreholes in the impoverished Cowdray Park area of the city said that the liquid at the bottom of the pit was indeed sewage that had seeped through the soil from a nearby treatment plant. As the level of ground water sinks, the thousands who come to find water are forced to dig their impromptu wells ever deeper. All around were puddles and holes.

Critics of President Mugabe say that he is using water as a tool of political repression. In the early summer heat of the semi-arid western provinces of Matabeleland, the city of about 800,000 people is fast running out of water. Three of its five main reservoirs have dried up. The fourth is expected to be empty next month and the last one will be able to supply only 16 per cent of the city’s already tightly rationed needs.

“If we have even a mediocre rainy season this summer we are faced with the spectre of Bulawayo literally shutting down,” said David Coltart, MP of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. The water crisis is a dangerous extra strain on Bulawayo, which is already reeling from the country’s hyperinflation, critical shortages of basic food and electricity supplies, and the political repression witnessed in the rest of the country.

Join us in the great Intelligence2 debate

By Matthew d’Ancona of The Spectator

Civilised debate is the essence of The Spectator: it is what animated ‘the little Committee of Politicks’ that Joseph Addison encountered in the St James’s Coffee-house and described in the magazine in March 1711. Three centuries on, it is the desire for a cheerful rhetorical punch-up, in print or in person, that still excites us most at 22 Old Queen Street.

Rod Liddle, Jeremy Clarke, Deborah Ross, Taki, Fraser Nelson: these are only some of the verbal pugilists who form the ‘little Committee’ in our own happy, cacophonous republic of letters.

So it is with the greatest pleasure that we are launching in this issue The Spectator’s new alliance with that much younger but already glorious organisation Intelligence2, the brainchild of two media entrepreneurs, John Gordon and Jeremy O’Grady.
If you don’t know about it already — and the chances are that you do — Intelligence2 is one of the intellectual phenomena of the age. Founded in 2002, it stages debates that address the most stimulating, provocative and topical issues of our times, events that fill the capacious Royal Geographical Society in London with ease.

There is plenty of philosophical fudge around these days: ‘round table discussions’, consensus politics and vapid chat shows. But Intelligence2 relishes its adversarial character and celebrates the gladiatorial force of the human intellect: the participants want to win the argument, and the votes of the audience. In the course of a debate, the advantage see-saws from one side to the other, and back again, as facts are marshalled, Ciceronian rhetoric deployed and wit turned to the combatants’ advantage.

From Times Online
September 11, 2007

By Jan Raath, of The Times, Harare

Archbishop Pius Ncube, one of the most vocal opponents of Robert Mugabe, announced his resignation today as a result of an alleged sex scandal.

The Archbishop came under fire in July after images emerged in state-controlled media allegedly showing him naked in bed with a series of women.

In a statement today he said he had made the decision to resign “to spare my fellow bishops and the body of the Church any further attacks” from Mr Mugabe. There were a few, he said, “who will be delighted, seeing their mission as having been accomplished.” But he pledged to continue speaking out against the Government, saying: “I have not been silenced by the crude machinations of a wicked regime.”

Archbishop Ncube was summoned on July 16 by a lawyer — accompanied by a string of journalists from official media — to answer allegations of adultery with a woman employed at his office in the western city of Bulawayo. The accusations emerged after he was filmed by a secret camera in his bedroom, which the state-owned Herald newspaper claimed was set up by a private investigator hired by the woman’s husband to secure evidence of the alleged adultery.

The husband is now suing the Archbishop for 20 billion Zimbabwe dollars. State-run television also ran footage purporting to show him with other women.

Archbishop Ncube’s lawyer previously described the case as an “orchestrated attempt” to embarrass him, but the Archbishop himself has been largely silent on the matter.

“It is my feeling that I should face this case in court as Pius Ncube, an individual, not that the . . . Church should seem to be on trial because I am its head,” he said today.