Home

Blog

Bio

Byo South Develop.

Photos

Reports

Archives

Links

Subscribe

Contact

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.