Mandebvhu Talks “Zimbabwe”…

Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader says he wants to see justice in the wake of widespread political violence blamed on President Robert Mugabe’s police, soldiers and party militants.

Morgan Tsvangirai was speaking Saturday to a cheering crowd in an area of northern Zimbabwe believed to have seen some of the worst of the violence that prompted him to withdraw from a June presidential runoff. Mugabe claimed victory in the runoff, but the vote was widely denounced as a sham.

Tsvangirai has called in the past for truth-and-reconciliation hearings.

Mugabe and Tsvangirai signed a power-sharing agreement last month, but remain divided over who controls which Cabinet posts.

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It’s easy to forget that Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe was once seen as a liberator. Now his country lies in ruins.

“In the weeks after the election, as the political stalemate persisted, the value of Zimbabwe’s currency plummeted,” Jon Lee Anderson writes. “Before crossing the border from South Africa, I had exchanged a hundred American dollars for three trillion five hundred billion Zimbabwean - thirty-five billion to a dollar. Most of the cash was newly minted five-, twenty-five-, and fifty-billion-dollar notes, with pictures of giraffes and grain silos.

A few days later, the going rate was a hundred billion to one. Food prices tripled overnight, and many salaries were made virtually worthless. Cash was becoming nearly impossible to obtain; banks were allowing customers to withdraw the equivalent of only one US dollar per day.

The effect was a state of existential madness. Prices bordered on the fantastic, and ordinary people had to grapple with calculations in the trillions for the most prosaic transactions.

One day, I wandered into a supermarket to buy some water. The price for a half-litre bottle was $1,900,000,000,000. On a nearby shelf, I found a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for $83,000,000,000,000.”

Extract from: (Source)

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This year’s harvest in Zimbabwe has been the worst in the country’s modern history.

In Mashonaland West province, some people are trying to survive by eating wild fruit and digging for roots

“It’s very very bad. I’ve got 12 children and it’s hard to find anything to give them,” says a local village chief. “The whole of my village is struggling. No-one has food.

“There’s nothing left here. So there’s nothing I can do.”

Driving deep into Mashonaland West is a reminder that most Zimbabweans live in rural areas.

The area around Karoi - 200km (124 miles) north of the capital, Harare - provides an illustration of the suffering currently being experienced in the countryside.

Farmers are without seeds, fertiliser and fuel. Next year’s harvest is already being written off as a disaster as well.

As the political paralysis over the formation of the new power-sharing government continues, people are experiencing severe food shortages brought on by the catastrophic mismanagement of the economy and the virtual destruction of the country’s commercial agricultural sector.

School dropouts

Some Zimbabweans get by on one meal a day if they are lucky, but there is a growing sense of desperation.

One consequence is that thousands of children are said to be dropping out of school to look for food.

“In one district, 10,000 children of a population of 120,000 left school in a period of six months,” says Rachel Pounds, country director of UK charity Save the Children.

“There’s a lot of lost hope. Zimbabweans put up with things that get worse and worse, but you can see the despair in some of the poorer families in the villages.

“It’s causing a breakdown of the community when people have to leave in order to find food,” she added.

One villager in Mashonaland West pleaded for help before it was “too late”.

“If we don’t get help now, most of us are going to die. Nearly everyone here is starving.”

He showed me three tins of stored maize, but said that with seven children to feed, the supply would only last for a week.

Earlier this month, the UN World Food Programme appealed for $140m (£86m) to provide vital relief rations over the next six months.

The UN warned that more than five million people (45% of the population) could need assistance by early 2009.

In the meantime however, non-governmental organisations working in Zimbabwe have been hit hard by the economic collapse of this once prosperous country, and the resulting cash crisis stemming from levels of inflation that are now completely out of control.

But it is not just the rural population which is suffering.

Bizarre and depressing

In the towns and cities, food is also in increasingly short supply.

A walk around a suburban supermarket in Harare is a bizarre and depressing experience.

One store I visited looked as though it was in the final stages of a clearance sale.

Only two of the 19 check-out tills were operating, and most shelves were entirely empty.

There was no milk, cheese, margarine or yoghurt.

Some cabbages, onions and limp bunches of spinach were available, along with a few odd packs of frozen meat.

The aisles intended for household goods such as soap and toilet paper were empty and closed off.

The only fresh-looking food items in the shop were a few loaves of bread, priced this week at Z$30,000 a loaf (about $1).

However, Zimbabweans are only permitted to withdraw Z$ 50,000 a day from the banks.

Most people often cannot afford what little food is available.

Only those fortunate enough to have access to foreign currency can circumnavigate the shortages.

“We are distinctly aware that this is a food crisis that is growing,” says Karen Freeman, the director of USAid in Zimbabwe.

“The issue of urban vulnerability has never really been felt here before.

“You could go to the store and buy food in the past, but now you have no option.

“There’s no food in the store and there’s no food on the ground. The crisis now is one where you can neither buy food nor grow food.”

This is almost entirely a man-made crisis, created by President Robert Mugabe’s government, and his administration stands accused of having done nothing to help.

(Source)

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Zimbabwe’s militant war veterans today threatened to take action against opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and urged President Robert Mugabe to form a government without him.

Jabulani Sibanda, who chairs the militant grouping of the veterans of Zimbabwe’s war of independence, said the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader was stalling a power-sharing deal, which has hit deadlock over cabinet posts.

“He is leaving the people of Zimbabwe with one option: to take action,” he told the official Herald newspaper. “If he behaves the way he is behaving, this nation will take action to defend itself from him.”

The MDC, which has accused the war veterans of attacking its supporters, said on Tuesday Mr Tsvangirai could boycott power-sharing talks next week and that fresh elections may be needed to break the political impasse.

Mr Tsvangirai and Mr Mugabe have clashed over the allocation of powerful ministries, threatening a September 15th deal that Zimbabweans hoped would help the once prosperous country recover from a devastating economic meltdown.

Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF says Mr Tsvangirai, set to become prime minister under the deal, is stalling. But Mr Tsvangirai accuses the president of negotiating in bad faith and trying to seize the lion’s share of key ministries while sidelining the MDC.

Mr Tsvangirai’s frustration with weeks of fruitless talks boiled over on Monday when he refused to attend an emergency Southern African Development Community summit in Swaziland meant to break the deadlock, citing passport issues.

The summit has been moved to October 27th in Harare.

The MDC says pro-Mugabe war veterans brutally attacked its supporters in the run up to the June 27th presidential run-off, which Mr Mugabe won after Mr Tsvangirai dropped out in protest over the violence.

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The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Monday deferred a crisis meeting on the political instability in Zimbabwe to 27 October, after a key opposition leader failed to attend scheduled talks in Swaziland. SADC, which is brokering a power-sharing deal between the government and the opposition in Zimbabwe, had called a meeting of a special organ of the regional body dealing with politics, defence and security to discuss a deadlock in the implementation of the Kenya-style agreement signed by the two sides last month.

But main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai failed to travel to Swaziland for the Monday meeting, saying the government had refused to renew his passport.

He said the authorities gave him a temporal travel document Sunday, but this was only valid for Swaziland, yet he had to pass through South Africa, where the document was invalid, on his way to the SADC meeting.

Tsvangirai’s passport expired sometime last year, but the government has reportedly refused to renew it, to restrict his movements abroad.

The government and opposition have reached a deadlock in the allocation of ministerial posts in a proposed government of national unity, and appealed to SADC to intervene.

The opposition has accused the government of grabbing all important ministries, including defence, finance, home affairs, justice and information, and leaving it with peripheral cabinet portfolios.

The Swaziland meeting, presided over by the leaders of Angola, Mozambique and Swaziland representing SADC, was supposed to try and break the impasse.

But after Tsvangirai’s failure to attend, SADC deferred the meeting to next week Monday in Mozambique.

SADC, which appointed former South African President Thabo Mbeki to mediate in Zimbabwe’s long running political crisis on its behalf, sees power-shaing between the government and the opposition as the only viable way of ending the leadership squabbles in the country.

(Source)

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The power sharing deal between Robert Mugabe (brutal dictator for decades) and opposition member Morgan Tsvangirai was a bad idea when Thabo Mbeki created the arrangement and it’s no better today. Morgan Tsvangirai won the election but was forced into agreeing to a power-sharing deal with the man who has controlled every inch of the government. As long as Robert Mugabe has any connection to the government and is not prosecuted for crimes against humanity, nothing will change in Zimbabwe. Nothing.

Aid experts are warning that millions of Zimbabwe’s people face starvation as the country’s political leaders remain deadlocked over a power-sharing deal and the economy heads for total collapse.

While officials of the Southern African Development Community prepare for a meeting tomorrow in Swaziland, where they will try to persuade President Robert Mugabe and opposition leaders to resume negotiations, the United Nations World Food Programme has warned that the number of Zimbabweans needing food aid is expected to double by early next year, to just over five million. The UN has appealed for an extra $140m (£81m) to deal with the crisis.

Richard Lee, a WFP spokesman in Johannesburg, said the organisation was already giving emergency food aid to 2.5 million people in Zimbabwe after the failure of this year’s maize harvest. On top of erratic weather, which resulted in droughts in some areas and flooding in others, there were shortages of seed and fertilisers. The government, which buys all grain production, had also failed to set a price that would encourage farmers to grow more than they needed for their own families.

But the “worst thing”, the WFP official added, was the decision of Mr Mugabe’s government to ban all foreign aid work for three months earlier this year, during the violence-racked second round of the presidential election. The ban was lifted at the end of August. “This delayed the launch of our programme to feed some 1.7 million people,” Mr Lee told The Independent on Sunday. “They were more vulnerable as a result.”

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The deadlock in the Zimbabwe power-sharing deal is threatening to revive the messy diplomatic confrontation between Zimbabwe and its diamond-rich neighbour, Botswana.

After leading the onslaught against the ZANU PF government of President Robert Mugabe, Botswana has once again become the first southern African country to speak about the current crisis in Zimbabwe caused by the deadlock over sharing cabinet posts.

Botswana has publicly indicated that it is not happy about the disagreement between ZANU-PF and the two factions of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MDC) on the division of cabinet posts.

Last Friday, Botswana president Ian Khama fired a thinly veiled broadside at ZANU PF for causing the current impasse in Zimbabwe.

Speaking in the second city of Francistown near the border with Zimbabwe, Khama said that weeks after the parties in the Zimbabwe crisis signed a power sharing deal, the impasse still continues “due to what I consider to be selfish desires by one of the parties” an indirect reference to Mr Mugabe and ZANU PF.

Instead of former South African president Mr Thabo Mbeki, Khama has called for an immediate deployment of SADC, African Union and United Nations mediators to resolve the Zimbabwe impasse.

Besides, Khama, the spokesman for the Botswana Foreign Affairs Ministry, Mr Clifford Maribe has said that the deadlock is a grave concern to his country.

“Almost three weeks have elapsed since the agreement was signed and the parties are reportedly deadlocked over how cabinet posts should be divided among the three parties,” Mr Maribe said in a statement.

He called on the mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis, Mr Mbeki to assist the parties in the Zimbabwe dispute to reach an agreement.

Before Mbeki brokered a power-sharing deal in Zimbabwe, Botswana tough stance against the regime was becoming a messy diplomatic headache that threatened to suck in other countries in the region.

University of Botswana political science lecturer, Professor Bertha Osei-Hwedie feels that the confrontation between Botswana and Zimbabwe will be revived if Mugabe continues to act unilaterally. “The statement from the Botswana Ministry of Foreign Affairs is just the first rumble,” she says.

However, she feels that any new confrontation will not cause too much protocol problems in the region because after all, it is a quarrel between politicians and diplomats who always find a way of accommodating each other at international forums.

“Remember that Botswana has indicated that it is willing to talk to Zimbabwe about its crisis. Even during the SADC summit in South Africa, Botswana did not completely boycott because Skelemani went there,” Osei-Hwedie says.

Before Mbeki brokered the Zimbabwe deal, signs had emerged that Botswana’s decision not to recognise Mr Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe was causing diplomatic and protocol problems in the region.

While Botswana was shunning Mr Mugabe other countries in the region had accepted him save for Zambia and Tanzania. This means that Botswana was getting isolated diplomatically because it had started boycotting regional forums where Mr Mugabe was invited.

It was becoming increasingly obvious that it will be very difficult for Botswana to live with a neighbour whose president it does not recognise. But the power deal offered an easy way for Botswana to recognise Mr Mugabe and to end what was threatening to become an awkward diplomatic confrontation.

After the signing the deal, the state-owned Daily News of Botswana asserted that “a new dawn seems to be on the horizon for Botswana-Zimbabwe relations”.

After two rounds of presidential elections in March and June deepened the simmering socio-political crisis in Zimbabwe, Botswana publicly and frequently stated it does not recognise Mr Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe. Botswana went further and pressed for the suspension of Zimbabwe from continental and regional forums because it does not have a legitimate government.

(Source)

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Independent Zimbabwean newspaper editor Davison Maruziva says there’s plenty of freedom of expression in Zimbabwe.

Problem is: “There is no freedom after expression.”

Maruziva will appear in court next month on charges of publishing “false statements prejudicial to the state” because of an article written by an opposition leader that appeared in his weekly, The Standard.

Under Robert Mugabe’s 28-year autocratic rule, independent voices like Maruziva’s newspaper - one of three that are not state controlled - have little space. Printing presses are regularly blown up, foreign news organizations banned and journalists harassed, beaten and jailed.

One journalist was killed this year and scores have been arrested.

Hope for change was raised last month when Mugabe signed a power-sharing agreement with the opposition to end Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis. But politicians deadlocked over sharing Cabinet posts have yet to turn the September agreement into reality.

The accord promises to open up the air waves, allowing “as many media houses as possible,” and calls for public media to provide “balanced and fair” coverage of all political parties. Currently, there is only one state-run television station and no independent radio stations.
But many feel the deal did not go far enough to protect media freedoms and is unlikely to end the state’s propaganda machine.

“There is nothing to celebrate,” said Maruziva.

Media organizations are calling for repealing all laws that target the media, the withdrawal of charges against journalists and for the immediate granting of permission to foreign news organizations to work in the country.

“We were expecting to see something more radical,” said Takura Zhangazha, director of Zimbabwe’s chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa.

Zhangazha said the continued control of the state media by Mugabe’s party will not “build confidence” in the power-sharing deal.

Iden Wetherell, group editor of The Standard and its sister paper, the weekly Zimbabwe Independent, said there is a “hunger for news” in the country.

His papers offer criticism of Mugabe and his government not found on air or in the state-controlled The Herald, the largest national daily. The independent press also gives space to the opposition and doesn’t shy away from detailing the country’s economic decline.

“Our duty, our job is to tell it as it is. In that situation we do our best,” Wetherell said.

Running a newspaper in Zimbabwe, like running any business in a country facing an inflation rate of about 11 million percent a year, is tough. There is little advertising to rely on.

The Zimbabwe Independent costs 3,000 Zimbabwe dollar or between 70 US cents and US$2 depending on various rates. The Herald hiked its prices this week up from 1,500 Zimbabwe dollars to 3,000.

“Fewer people are able to read us because of the cost,” Wetherell said. He declined to reveal circulation figures.

The papers comply with media laws and its small staff of about 20 journalists are officially accredited. Yet the papers have been charged with numerous infractions.

The Daily News, which challenged the sweeping media laws in court and refused to register with the government, was closed down by the government in 2003. The paper boasted circulation of 800,000 and reached rural communities in Mugabe’s party strongholds and not just an educated urban population sympathetic to the opposition. Before its closure, it had offices bombed, staff detained and computers confiscated.

Zimbabwe Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu nonetheless insisted his government was commitment to a free press.

“I am an ally of the press. We are proponents of press freedom,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “We are waiting for an all inclusive government to be in place. You can’t just have an agreement and say that is the law.”

He accused the independent media of bias toward the opposition, while saying the public media were there to “serve everyone.”

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which has said it would repeal repressive media laws if it gained power, has accused the state of jeopardizing the power-sharing agreement by using the public media to denounce its rivals.

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Britain’s foreign secretary says European Union sanctions against Zimbabwe will be maintained until a new power-sharing government is in place.

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has yet to reach a deal with opposition rivals on forming a Cabinet.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband says that optimism following the initial power-sharing deal is “fast evaporating.”

Miliband says in a statement released Monday that EU sanctions will not be lifted until Mugabe and the opposition agree on a new administration. He says he will discuss the issue with other EU foreign ministers next week.

The EU imposed a travel ban and assets freeze on Mugabe and 171 people and four companies tied to his old regime.

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So let us note anew that Zimbabwe is going to Hell:

Zimbabwe’s central bank on Friday outlawed one of the last functioning parts of the country’s ravaged financial system, hampering businesses already brought to the brink of collapse by rapidly worsening hyperinflation.

Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and a close ally of President Robert Mugabe, suspended electronic transfers between banks on the grounds that they were “being used for illicit foreign exchange deals” and to charge excessive prices for goods and services. “We have no option but to take this drastic measure in order to maintain sanity in the financial system,” Mr Gono was quoted as telling state radio.

With cash scarce and card payments cumbersome, businesses have relied on transfers between bank accounts to settle transactions with suppliers and receive payments from customers. The transfers take a day to be completed, making them far preferable to cheques, which require a minimum of five days to clear - by which time their value has plummeted.

If the regime of Robert Mugabe purposely wanted to annihilate Zimbabwe, it could not do a better job than it is currently doing. His incompetence, and that of his supporters, is nothing short of staggering.

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