Zimbabwe goes from bad to worse...

[OFSO]

Extraordinary admitting that statues and monuments commemorating the invaders and usurpers are kept in good order while those of the locals and natives are neglected. Whose fault is that ? Catalans keep the symbols of their past in good condition despite Spain contributing nothing and even tacitly vandalising them.

[Capetonian]

Letter from Zimbabwe :

On the 21st of May the price of fuel increased to $4.97 a litre. So far no one has dared to protest, instead transport and food prices have shot up again and fuel queues have grown ever longer as rumours of another fuel increase are widespread.

The Zanu PF “New Dispensation” government’s response to this crisis and the devastating effect on the lives of all Zimbabweans is insulting to say the least. Ten days ago the Zanu PF Minister of Energy, Fortune Chasi, said Zimbabweans should become less dependent on fuel and use electric cars instead. Electric cars, we asked? Even if we could get them or had the US dollars to buy them after the government converted all our US dollar bank accounts to Bond dollar bank accounts, how exactly are we going to charge these electric cars? Must we add them to the list of priorities to do at four in the morning before the power goes off: ooops put the car on charge! This week the same Minister of Energy told us to “dump cars and buy bicycles.”

Sent this off to my eco-warrior liberal lefty son who replies :

Well obviously this is not the ideal context for electric cars…
But I can assure you that solar panels would help, however if they can’t even buy bread then I’m inclined to say they’re pretty **** already

I replied to him :

Yes, they are pretty ****.
That's what happens when a functioning and well run benign dictatorship is handed over to a bunch of howling savages led by a so-called Marxist.

He replies :

I think you skipped a few steps before ‘Marxist’ comes into play…

Of course he was correct, I filled in the steps I'd missed :

1) Rest of world condemns benign dictatorship because it does not give the blacks the opportunity to vote and self-govern.
2) Hypocritical scumbag politicians like Harold Wilson and Peter Hain posture and conspire to bring down RF (Ian Smith) government.
3) Ex-terrorists handed power as Rhodesia transitions to become Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and then Rhodesia
4) Ex-terrorist installed as President
5) Ex-terrorist fiddles elections and remains in power as a tyrannical despot for 29 years before being deposed by another equally malignant dictator.
6) Rest of the world turns a blind eye to dictatorship, tyranny, genocide, poverty, disease and nepotism
7) When it's too late and Zimbabwe is a ruin and millions of people are suffering, a few people wake up to reality that savages cannot govern themselves, which most people knew at Step 1 which is why handover was resisted.

The reply will be that I'm 'racist'.
Yep.

[OFSO]

Might ask him why he's flying from Girona to Brussels in a polluting 737 instead of taking the ecologically sound high speed train (one change in Paris).

At least one can't be accused of racism....

[Capetonian]

Because we have a lunch on Sunday and he has a meeting in BRU on Monday. He did want to travel by train.

[Capetonian]

As if needed, a reminder of the ongoing tragic decline of what was one of the finest countries in the world :

Dear Family and Friends,
As the sun slips into the horizon these winter evenings, we linger outside to soak in the orange splendor. A bird in silhouette flaps silently across the orange and gold sky and an owl emerges high up in a tree to survey the approaching night. There’s nothing tempting us to go inside in a hurry: no electricity which means no lights to switch on, no computer or TV, no hot bath, no batteries left for mobile phones, no fridge, stove, cooking, ironing. Without these distractions there is no choice but to contemplate everything that is going on in our country and wonder how on earth we are going to survive it this time.

We are again learning to live a completely abnormal life in Zimbabwe. A fortnight ago the Minister of Finance released Statutory Instrument SI 142 that banned transactions in US dollars and all other foreign currencies and announced that with immediate effect all trade was to be in Zimbabwe Dollars only. On that day the bank exchange rate was US$1 = Z$6.28. Until that day almost everything had a US Dollar price or the equivalent Zimbabwe Bond dollar price and you could pay whichever you could afford. We had been earning and trading in US dollars and South African Rand since February 2009, joined by ZW Bond dollars in 2015, in a multi currency system.

SI 142 came without any warning. With immediate effect it was illegal for me to buy my medication in US dollars for say US$10, now I had to pay for them in Bond dollars for whatever rate the pharmacist was using on that day. Assuming this was the bank rate (which it never is) the same medicines were Z$62.80 on the day SI 142 was promulgated. Every day since then the bank exchange rate for US to Bond dollars has gone up; as I write this letter it is US$1 = Z$8.68. So that same packet of medicines, a fortnight later, is now priced at Z$86.80. It is now illegal for that pharmacist to accept payment in anything except Zimbabwe Bond/RTGS dollars and because he can only speculate what the USD$:ZW$ rate will be in a week or months time, he pushes his prices up and up to protect his investment because every single thing he sells is imported using US dollars and has to be sold in ZW dollars. This one example can be extrapolated to every sector, every business, every producer.

Economic technocrats are popping out of the woodwork every day to bombard us with statistics and tell us that SI 142 is the backbone of a brilliant economic policy but they say nothing about 98% inflation; no confidence in the market in ZW dollars; Z$400 million Bond notes currently being printed by the government; the irretrievable loss of everyone’s savings and pensions in Feb 2019 when US dollars were converted to Bond dollars; the catastrophic damage of 15 hour a day electricity cuts to businesses and producers; the incalculable loss of man hours spent queuing every day for fuel. Worst of all the technocrats say nothing of the human factor: pensioners who can’t afford life sustaining medicines; teachers and nurses who can’t afford to get to work; doctors who have no equipment to perform operations; employees whose month’s salary only lasts 10 days; parents who can’t afford enough food for their families. Frankly we are left wondering which Zimbabwe these economic technocrats live in because it’s not the same one as the rest of us.

While all eyes and calculators have been on the reality and impact of SI 142 the following events have gone almost un-noticed in Zimbabwe:

There is a backlog of almost 300,000 passport applications and people are being told to come back to collect in 2022. There is no passport paper or ink for printing and no US dollars to import it. Tempers rise as desperate people wanting to travel to the Diaspora to earn money to send home to their families are now trapped here.

The Minister of Agriculture, Perence Shiri, announced that 15,000 hectares of farm land is to be prioritized for allocation to war veterans: 1,000 hectares in Manicaland, Mashonaland East, West and Central; 2000 hectares in Midlands and 3000 hectares in Masvingo, Matabeleland South and North. The Minister added: “in the event of land disputes, under no circumstances should a war veteran have his or her offer cancelled.” He did not say if it was a requirement that said war veteran knew how to farm or had the resources to do so.

The government banned the private sale and purchase of maize (corn). All maize now has to be sold to and purchased from the state owned GMB at a government stipulated price. A ban was also put on transporting more than five, 50kg bags of maize unless it is being taken to the GMB. This means that one family member may no longer transport more than five bags of maize to his starving relations and friends in another area of the country.

At the same time as the maize movement and sale ban, FEWSNet (Famine Early Warning Network Systems) issued warnings of a widespread food crisis in the country between July 2019 and January 2020. They say worst affected areas are likely to be: Kariba, Binga, Hwange, Gokwe North, Mbire, Mudzi, and Chipinge. FEWSNet issued a map of Zimbabwe with approximately 70% bright orange, indicating crisis, and 30% yellow, indicating stressed.

This is the state of Zimbabwe today: ORANGE. Orange for crisis, orange for the sunset that brings tranquility every evening, and orange for temper levels which increase daily as coping becomes ever more impossible. Until next time, thanks for reading this letter, now in its 19th year, and for supporting my books about life in Zimbabwe, love cathy 5th July 2019 Copyright © Cathy Buckle

[Ex-Ascot]

Thanks Cape. It will be interesting to see how our Zimmy friends are managing when we get back in 10 days. I bet the US$ is still being used on the black market. I also think that they will be getting supplies from Zambia.

[Capetonian]

That nice Mr Mugging-ape that the do-gooders of the west installed (where are you Peter effing Hain?) left under a cloud, and a few people were misguided enough to think that that nice Emmerson Mnangagwa would improve things, but he didn't - of course. In fact, the opposite happened.

Proving the 'racists' like me correct, the fact is that the savages have turned a well run and functioning country of plenty into one of the very worst and most deprived societies in the world, lacking even basic items for everyday living. If ever there were an argument for re-colonisation, and proof that these black savages cannot run a country, here it is.

'The children are going to school on empty stomachs': Zimbabweans face worst economic crisis in a decade

Zimbabwe is facing potentially catastrophic water shortages Credit: AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi

25 July 2019 • 10:10pm

Electa Zimondi looks back fondly to the time when her household would have running water at least once a week.

It's now been three months since the taps worked, the 65 year-old grandmother explains, as she queues to fill another plastic bucket at a private well in the township of Chitungwiza, 20 miles south-east of the Zimbabwean capital Harare.

"Even 2008 was much better because we had electricity and water. Now there is nothing," she says.

For Mrs Zimondi, and her 16 million compatriots, the worsening economic climate is bringing back memories of the hyperinflation crisis a decade ago under Robert Mugabe. Almost two years since he was finally ousted, Zimbabweans are now disillusioned with his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa’s promise of a "new dispensation". A senior government minister warned this week that 18-hour power cuts, catastrophic shortages of food, fuel, and water could last for three years. The warning came as the country’s largest mobile operator said it could face a communications blackout unless “drastic measures” were taken to address the fuel and energy shortage.

A perfect economic storm of inflation, food shortages, and water and energy blackouts has left the country on the brink of a disaster comparable to post-World War One Germany or Russia following the Soviet collapse. It is the worst economic crisis since that of 2008-2009, when hyperinflation saw hospitals run out of medicine and forced the government to abandon the national currency.

Zimbabwe’s government argues that recent austerity measures are the painful but inevitable remedy to decades of economic mismanagement under Mugabe. On paper, the measures are paying off: the country is running a budget surplus for the first time in years and has resisted the urge to print money that led to hyperinflation in 2008.

But the reforms have come at massive social cost. An initial hike in petrol and bread prices in January resulted in shortages of both and provoked a three day strike. The government responded by sending in the army, who killed more than a dozen people and indulged in a rampage of beatings and rapes through opposition-supporting working class areas.

Shortages then dramatically increased when the government reintroduced the Zimbabwe dollar and banned transactions in foreign currency last month. A rapid slide in the Zimbabwe dollar in the following weeks has wiped out the value of savings, massively increased the cost of imports, and left consumers struggling to find, let alone pay, for consumables from fuel to bread.

Prices can rise daily from 175 per cent inflation. Average monthly salaries of 500 Zimbabwe dollars (about £40) barely cover the staples.

“We are literally living hand to mouth. Two kilograms of sugar costs 15 [Zimbabwe] dollars. A sack of potatoes costs $45. A loaf of bread is $5 [up from $1 three months ago]. No one can afford that, but now we can’t get it even if we could. The children are going to school on empty stomachs,” said Pedzisni Kajokoto, 55. “The men do not have jobs. The only companies still working are the army and the police.”

Fuel prices have risen 456 per cent since the beginning of the year. Those who can afford to buy petrol, at 7.2 dollars a litre, must join lines of hundreds of vehicles, which form at any service station that has received a fuel delivery, with motorists queuing for hours and even overnight. A lack of electricity or fuel to power water pumps, and a shortage of imported purification chemicals due to the collapsing currency, has exacerbated a mild drought to leave many communities without running water. In Chitungwize, a stronghold of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, residents like Mrs Zimondi are relying on wells - some of them privately dug and at risk of contamination by waterborne diseases

“We are starving. We used to have water at least once a week, but there there has been nothing for three months," Mrs Zimondi says.

“The electricity goes at 3 AM and comes back at at 10 AM. It has been like that for the past two or three months."

Meanwhile, businesses needing to choose between running expensive generators or shutting down for 18 hours a day during the blackout have been forced to lay off staff. “You get phone calls every day from people asking if you have work, but if you’re going to burn 80 litres in a generator you can’t afford to hire anyone,” said one Harare-based businesswoman who asked not to be named. “But you can only get fuel if you have foreign currency. It is a vicious circle. Meanwhile in the shops they are putting up the prices every two hours.”

Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe’s largest mobile operator, suffered a major network blackout over the weekend and warned on Monday that the prolonged use of emergency diesel generators to power masts is “unsustainable and uneconomical.”

“If the authorities that oversee the industry do not offer quick and viable solutions as required in the current crisis, the business will will have no choice but the take drastic measure to ensure sustainable service,” the company said. The collapse of Econet, which has 11 million subscribers, would have major knock-on effects because Zimbabwean consumers and businesses have come to rely on its electronic cash service as hard currency lost value over the past few years.

Last week a union representing state employees called off a strike after agreeing to an undisclosed wage increase with the government.

But the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions said on Tuesday that it was preparing to take direct action in protest against the crisis - despite the violence in January. Peter Mutasa, the ZCTU’s president, told Zimbabwe’s Newsday daily: “If government does not have a solution to our problems it’s time to force them to come up with a solution.”

[Woody]

We could always send them Theresa , she’s not doing a lot at the moment

[Capetonian]

I wouldn't wish that on Theresa. Now if you had said Sillidick Khan, Jeremy Corbin, or John MacDonald, whose type are largely responsible for the tragedy, I would have agreed with you.

Or better still, those two odious oleaginous slimey loathsome smug gloating greasy permatanned pieces of excremental scum Bliar and Hain.

[Capetonian]

Africa|In Zimbabwe, the Water Taps Run Dry and Worsen ‘a Nightmare’

By Patrick Kingsley and Jeffrey Moyo

July 31, 2019

HARARE, Zimbabwe — It had been five days since water had stopped flowing out of the taps at Eneres Kaitano’s bungalow in southern Harare, Zimbabwe’s modern and tidy capital city. Five days since she had done any laundry. Five days since she had forbidden her children to use the toilet more than once a day. On the sixth day, she again rose at 3 a.m. to fetch water from a communal borehole. By the early afternoon, she was still waiting her turn at the tap with her six buckets and cans.

Much of the city had the same idea. More than half of the 4.5 million residents of Harare’s greater metropolitan area now have running water only once a week, according to the city’s mayor, forcing them to wait in lines at communal wells, streams and boreholes.

“It is causing us serious problems,” said Ms. Kaitano, a 29-year-old jeans wholesaler who was down to her last clean outfit last week. “We have to stop ourselves from going to the toilet.”

Zimbabwe’s acute water shortage is a result of a particularly bad drought this year, a symptom of climate change. Poor water management has wasted much of the water that remains. Two of Harare’s four reservoirs are empty from lack of rain, but between 45 and 60 percent of the water that’s left is lost through leakage and theft, said Herbert Gomba, the mayor of Harare. In Harare, more than half of households currently receive tap water only once a week, according to the city’s mayor.

But the water crisis is only a microcosm of Zimbabwe’s malaise. Years of mismanagement under Robert Mugabe, who governed Zimbabwe for 37 years until he was finally ousted in 2017, have left the economy in tatters. Residents are battling daily blackouts that last between 15 and 18 hours; shortages of medicine, fuel and bank notes; and inflation of more than 175 percent.

Zimbabwe has become a country of queues. In recent weeks, drivers have typically lined up for about three hours to refuel their cars with gasoline that has been diluted with ethanol, which makes it burn faster. Workers wait for hours in long lines outside of banks to receive their pay in cash, because of a shortage of Zimbabwean dollars. The price of bread has increased sevenfold in the past year, and some medicines are now 10 times more expensive, even as most wages remain stagnant.

“It is a nightmare,” said Norman Matara, a physician and board member of the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights, a medical watchdog. Some of Dr. Matara’s patients can no longer afford medication, while others take it “once every three days instead of once a day,” Dr. Matara said.

The shortage of water has become an annual problem in Zimbabwe, but this year’s drought is particularly serious because it has occurred earlier in the summer and affected even more people than usual. The level of rainfall this year has been about 25 percent less than the annual average, according to Washington Zhakata, the director of the Climate Change Management Department in the Zimbabwean government. A cyclone inundated the country in March, but it didn’t raise the water table and isn’t included in this year’s rainfall tally.

Although the field of attribution science — which studies how climate change influences individual weather events — is still evolving, it has been well established that global warming can make extreme weather events, including drought, more frequent and more intense.

Harare, a city of quiet suburbs with clusters of low-income tenements, all circling a compact central business district, has been hit hard.

“So much time spent waiting — it affects the productive part of the economy,” said Mr. Gomba. “It affects the whole cycle of life.”

President Emmerson Mnangagwa took over the country after leading the coup that toppled Mr. Mugabe. Mr. Mnangagwa had served as the former president’s right-hand man. Mr. Mnangagwa’s government says it is in the process of improving Zimbabwe’s economy, pointing to austerity measures that led to a rare budget surplus in the first quarter of the year.

“Zimbabwe is on a journey of reform,” the finance minister, Mthuli Ncube, wrote in a recent article. “We are heading in the right direction,” he added.

But the government has so far been unable to arrest spiraling inflation, currency devaluation and import costs. Its decision in June to ban the use of foreign currency, in an attempt to stabilize the value of the newly created Zimbabwean dollar, has instead made it even harder for firms to import goods from abroad.

“We had a window of opportunity when Mugabe left power,” said Kipson Gundani, the chief economist at the Zimbabwean National Chamber of Commerce. “But we missed that window.”

President Mnangagwa denies the fault lies with his own administration. In an interview, he blamed the water mismanagement on local politicians from opposition parties, like Mr. Gomba, Harare’s mayor. The national government is in the process of procuring a $71 million loan from the Chinese government to renovate the Zimbabwean water system, Mr. Mnangagwa said.

“When that is done,” he said, “the works will begin.”

But the authorities’ record is hardly promising. The construction of a new dam, first proposed during the early years of Mr. Mugabe’s rule, has been repeatedly delayed. Broken municipal boreholes are often left unreplaced. And excessive construction of informal housing at the city limits has led to the overuse of springs and wells by an influx of new residents.

At a spring in the scrubland on the southern fringes of Harare, the water this week had slowed to a trickle, forcing residents to wait for about three hours to fill their buckets.

This time last year, several residents said, the same process took just a few minutes. But since then, a municipal borehole in a nearby township broke — it has yet to be replaced — and several wells dried up, compelling more residents to trek to the farther spring.

“We always have problems with water shortages,” said Patience Chiwakata, a 35-year-old subsistence farmer. “But this year it is much worse.”

The most desperate scenes this week were in the more formal settlements closer to the city center, where the waits were far longer and where scuffles broke out after some tried to force their way to the front.

Residents said they were washing less, drinking less and relieving themselves less. Many take time off from work to make sure their families have enough water.

Ms. Kaitano, the jeans wholesaler, had only once been able to take her clothes to market since the taps last dried up, losing around a week’s income. Her friend, Susan Chinoda, allowed her three children just one cup of drinking water a day, and one toilet break.

“We’re seriously restricted from living our lives,” said Ms. Chinoda, 32. “Water is life.”

[OFSO]

Well, what can one say, other than that it's an interesting if unsurprising read. Combine endemic corruption with the inability to organise a piss-up in a brewery and Harare and other cities in Africa are what you get. And will continue to get. They wanted freedom from Colonial Days and now they can enjoy it,

[Capetonian]

Yes, hand over a functioning and successful country to a bunch of howling effing savages set up by the likes of Peter Hain and Slimy Tony and this is what you get. I wonder what those two scumbags are doing now to help to save the millions of people whose lives they were instrumental in destroying.

[OFSO]

I am watching the TV news right now. Army fighting insurgents in Nigeria, terrorist attack in Somalia. Thugs with guns, some military, some not, and bodies and parts of bodies strewn over the ground. Twisted remains of cars used as bombs, weeping women.

[OFSO]

Just seen on BBC News clip: five million people need food aid as Zimbabwe marches towards starvation..

[Ex-Ascot]

Just seen on BBC News clip: five million people need food aid as Zimbabwe marches towards starvation..

Yes the once food basket of Africa. We have many Zimmy friends here with families in Zim. The stories are horrendous especially dealing with cash. The manageress of the safari camp up river takes USD in their bar. She sticks it in an envelope and gives it to the overlander truck driver/guide on his way to Vic Falls where her mother meets him and the dosh is handed over. Not many folk have that luxury.

[Slasher]

I know members here have friends in Zim but I'm sorry I don't have any interest in that country whatsoever. After Mugabe's thugs siezed farmlands from seasoned experienced white farmers I knew they'd finally cut their own throats, and slowly bleed to death soon enough in the future. The assassination of the Mugabes should've been done then and there and the farmers have their lands restored. But of course that didn't happen.

The only countries in Africa I care about (for obvious reasons) are Seth Effrika and Botswana. The rest can go to Hell.

[OFSO]

Already there, judging by news clips on France 24 today. If insurgents or terrorists don't get you, Ebola will.

[Capetonian]

Rhodesia was a net exporter for many years under white rule, when people had jobs and hope. Since the savages took over, it is reduced to starvation, poetry, disease, and death. Blaming it on the drought is only part of the story.

The world doesn't care, as it is a black 'democracy' and as such nothing can be wrong.

More a two million Zimbabweans are on the cusp of "starvation", the United Nations food agency has said, launching a $331.5m aid appeal to help the southern African country recover from a devastating drought.

David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), said on Tuesday that 2.3 million people in rural Zimbabwe were in "crisis emergency mode" and need food aid now.

"We are talking about people who truly are marching towards starvation if we are not here to help them," Beasley said. "We are facing a drought unlike any that we have seen in a long time."

The El Nino-induced drought cut the maize harvest by half, and President Emmerson Mnangwa has declared it a national disaster.


The drought comes with Zimbabweans enduring the worst economic crisis in a decade - prices of staples such as sugar, cooking oil and rice have more than doubled since June, jacking up inflation to more than 175%.


Beasley said those in need of emergency food aid in rural Zimbabwe would increase to 5.5 million by next year.

The government estimates another 2.2 million people in urban areas also require food aid, bringing the total to 7.7 million, more than half of the country's population.

The $331.5m would be used for food aid, provision of water and sanitation and cash handouts to stricken families.

'Urgent action required'

In addition to food shortages, the appeal also targeted the humanitarian needs of victims of Cyclone Idai which tore through parts of eastern Zimbabwe earlier this year.

The cyclone, which also affected parts of Malawi and Mozambique, affected 570 000 Zimbabweans and displaced some 50 000 of them.

Mnangagwa, in a tweet on Wednesday, called for urgent action from the international community to help Zimbabwe deal with "the devastating Cyclone Idai and an El Nino induced drought".


As a result of the devastating Cyclone Idai and an El Nino induced drought, urgent action and much international cooperation are required. This morning, I met with David Beasley, @WFPChief, to discuss crucial drought relief assistance & support from the international community.

Mnangagwa took over from longtime leader, Robert Mugabe, following a military coup in November 2017.

He won disputed elections last year, pledging to revive the struggling economy, create jobs, attract foreign investment and turn the country into a middle income economy by 2030. But he has struggled to deliver on economic promises or usher in meaningful political reforms.

Zimbabwe is also experiencing its worst power cuts in three years, partly because the drought has reduced water levels at the country's biggest hydro plant, Kariba.

Amid rising discontent, the main opposition party said it was planning street demonstrations next week to protest against the government's handling of the economy.

[Wodrick]

Do you have an example of Zimbabwean poetry ?

[Capetonian]

Reading that Robbing and Graceless Mugape have died a horrible death would be poetry to me.