Bloody Mugabe

In my first post, I made a smug aside that given Mark Latham was a fellow Aquarian, he was a winner as leader of the Opposition. To mind, come other recent Aquarians leaders of note. Namely, cowboy Ronnie Reagan and peace-maker, Olaf Palme.

On the other side of the ledger, of course, are Aquarian characters such a Kim ll Sung and Robert Mugabe. Of mad Dill Sung we know enough, but of syphilicit old Bobby, we need to know more. Mugabe is the man whom the Zimbabwean people trusted with his grand vision, yet has allowed in 20 short years, a modern tragedy to unfold.

This social visionary, now presides over the ex-jewel of Africa, reduced to such conditions as,

-- life expectancy has fallen from 55 in 1980 to just 36 in 2003
-- Mugabes land grab is feeding a 3 year famine
-- aid only goes to Mugabe supporters - we're talking genocide
-- hospitals use curtains for bandages
-- with no rule of law, disco managers steel the coloured traffic lights in downtown Harare !

Everyone dreams of the 'ol colonial days, and waits for a revolution, that never comes.......

From The Times (UK), 26 January
Mugabe's land grab feeds famine in Zimbabwe

From Jan Raath in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe

Oscar Moyo's swollen head is so big that his neck muscles cannot support it. When the nurse raises him to a sitting position, it lolls backwards and he falls over wailing, his mantis-thin limbs flailing about. Oscar is 16 months old and weighs 13lb 10oz, well below what his weight should be. His hair is soft and has turned a pale ginger. Precious Mkandla, an Aids orphan aged 3, weighs 3.5oz less than Oscar, although she is twice his age. She has a healthy twin sister at home, who carries her around strapped to her back. Both are showing the telltale signs of starvation that is overtaking this area. The hair colour and the swollen head, indicating water on the brain, are signs of kwashiorkor, which indicates protein deficiency. "Usually the wards are full," a hospital nurse said. In September the hospital started a United Nations Children’s Fund feeding programme to treat severely malnourished children with nutrient and vitamin-enriched fluids. So far, 147 have been treated and eight have died showing Aids symptoms. "Most of them gain weight quickly and we discharge them," she said. "But they go back home where there is nothing to eat. Two months later they are back here."

The hospital, which The Times was asked not to name, is in southwest Zimbabwe, one of the regions worst-affected by a national famine that is in its third year. The famine is partly caused by drought and partly by President Mugabe’s land reforms that have all but destroyed the country’s previously robust agricultural base. Mr Mugabe’s secret police, the Central Intelligence Organisation, and the army’s notorious Five Brigade are held responsible for commiting genocide in the western provinces of Matabeleland in the mid-1980s. The World Food Programme, the United Nations’ famine relief agency and charities are expecting to feed 5.5 million people in March with 340,000 tonnes of grain donated by Western governments. There is ample evidence that this costly international effort is often frustrated by the ruling Zanu PF party’s deliberate policy of starving supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change.

In Ntanye village in the Gwanda district, an arid region of thorn scrub and boabab trees, the heap of cattle skulls, ribcages and assorted bones behind Jane Dewa’s hut is almost her sole source of income. There is a market for powdered bone as a component in ceramics manufacturing. "Those are my 60 cattle that died in the drought last year," she said. This year’s rainy season is now two thirds over, but the first showers came only last week. The small patch of sorghum that she planted shrivelled before it was knee-high. "Now we depend for everything on World Vision (an American-based famine relief charity)," she said. Every month World Vision gives her six-strong family 44kg (97lb) of maize, cooking oil and beans, but it is not enough, because her two able-bodied teenage sons are not eligible for rations, even though they have no means of support. The paucity of Mrs Dewa’s pantry could be made up by the Government’s erratic famine relief operation, which sells grain at subsidised prices.

However, the local headman responsible for drawing up lists of the needy in the area is under instructions to exclude Mrs Dewa and all other MDC supporters. "We are always told: ‘You cannot oppose the Government that feeds you,’ " Mrs Dewa, 43, said "Only Zanu PF supporters are allowed to buy." The Government also runs a food-for-work programme, paying villagers in grain for manual labour on the roads. "That is also politics," she said. "We are kept out." Mrs Dewa wanted to start a soap-making project with her neighbours to raise income, and the dozen Jatropha trees - a source of natural soap - she planted around her home survived the drought thanks to her constant watering. "I was supposed to mobilise the other woman in the ward, but the council says I can only do it with their permission. They stopped me," she said. "You can’t complain. There is a youth militia camp a few kilometres from here. They will be sent to beat us."

From The Sunday Telegraph (UK), 25 January
Welcome to Zimbabwe's NHS: where the hospital curtains are used for bandages and Anadin is often the only drug left

A rare glimpse behind the scenes in hospitals reveals a deepening crisis in a country where life expectancy has dropped to just 36. Anne Wayne reports from Mutare

Save for a couple of lounging Green Bombers - soldiers loyal to Robert Mugabe and notorious for their brutality - the long corridors of the Parirenyatwa hospital are eerily deserted. Most of the beds lie empty. One man squeaks past in a wheelchair, his foot in bandages. "I came to the hospital on December 22 after I shot myself," he explains in Shona, the main African language of Zimbabwe. "But there was no one here to treat me so I lay in bed for two weeks. Finally, a nurse came and gave me some medicine." This patient was one of the lucky ones - lucky to have received any treatment in the ruins of the country's health system, once considered a model for the rest of Africa but now, like farming and the rest of Zimbabwe's economy, brought to the brink of collapse by the corrupt and murderous Mugabe regime. According to the World Health Organisation, life expectancy in Zimbabwe has fallen from 55 in 1980 to just 36 in 2003. Few patients can afford hospital treatment. Even at state hospitals such as the "Pari", one of the biggest in Harare, the capital, patients have to pay for all necessary equipment and medicine before they are admitted. Yet with inflation at 650 per cent and a shortage of foreign currency, the price of even basic supplies has soared so steeply that most people cannot afford them. Ambulance crews demand money before they will answer a call. Doctors are forced to turn curtains into bandages and there are no gloves to be worn when treating Aids patients. A syringe, and one without a needle at that, costs 8,000 Zimbabwean dollars - more than twice the monthly wage of a domestic worker. One woman recently died in the Pari's casualty unit for want of a bag of saline, which costs about 17,000 Zimbabwean dollars. "We had no saline to treat her with," says Dr Phibion Manyanga, president of the Hospital Doctors' Association. "She was diabetic and needed rehydrating but her relatives could not afford to buy any more. She died the next morning. Doctors are having to work without the most basic supplies, in conditions that endanger both themselves and their patients."

A spokesman for the Community Working Group on Health, an alliance of health and civic groups, said: "Harare has advanced labs, pharmacies and CAT scanners, but no money to work them. They are trying to practise First World medicine under Fourth World conditions." In the regional hospital of Mutare, Anadin is the only drug left on the shelves. In the private sector, drugs and doctors are in better supply but patients are charged two million Zimbabwean dollars (£200) for an overnight stay in hospital.Thousands of Zimbabweans who paid premiums to the Premier Service Medical Aid Society, one of the country's leading medical insurers, have discovered that their money has been wasted. The company allegedly settled bills several months late, and its bookings are no longer accepted. At the private clinic in Chitungwiza, a township far from the centre of Harare, sick people huddle on the doorstep, as if hoping that the proximity to medicine will heal them. Inside, rows of empty beds are made up with fresh linen and nurses slump on stools, waiting in vain for a patient who can afford treatment. "I feel so helpless," said one nurse. "You cannot treat people without tools and medicine." The situation is even worse in rural areas. The CWGH reports that rural clinics often lack electricity, food, bedclothes and even paper on which to record a patient's medical history.

In an attempt to force the government's hand, nurses and doctors went on strike last September, citing poor wages - about £27 for doctors - and long hours: stories of 115-hour working weeks are commonplace. The government responded with promises of a 250 per cent pay rise - which compares unfavourably with the inflation rate - and threats. In December, Constantine Chiwenga, the Zimbabwe Defence Forces commander, told the doctors: "If you refuse to co-operate, we can take you to the army barracks and detain you, and you will see what will happen." Eight doctors were arrested and charged with taking part in an illegal strike, but a judge ordered their release two weeks ago. Some medical staff have since returned to work, but many others are holding out for negotiations. According to Zimbabwe's ministry of health and child welfare, a quarter of Zimbabweans are infected with HIV. Up to 3,000 people die of Aids each week, the CWGH says. There are few nurses left to treat them. Although the government refuses to release statistics, CWGH estimates that 2,000 nurses a month deserted Zimbabwe last year. Some ended up in Britain, although most head for South Africa and Namibia. Medical staff left behind struggle to make up the shortfall. At Harare Central, the city's main teaching hospital, only two of the six wards are open. Instead of 32 instructors to train nurses, two remain. Out in the townships, acrid black smoke hangs in the air. People are burning rubbish that has not been collected for weeks. It festers by the food stalls and water supplies. Levels of tuberculosis, dysentery and malnutrition are growing. The doctors can do little but sit in their empty hospitals and stare at their empty shelves.

Comment from the Mail & Guardian (SA), 26 January

The renaissance of jungle stew
John Matshikiza

But to resume. Yes, Harare has become a shadow of its former self. I don’t know how important this is to our leadership, who enjoyed some of its splendours in exiled times gone by, and now seem to find nothing wrong with the desolation that it has become. But this is an election year - just as it is in the United States. Grand gestures must be made. Flesh must not just be pressed, but be seen to be pressed. A hug and a grin for President Robert Mugabe, doves of peace and battleships in the chaos of Haiti, and a pat on the back for President Joseph Kabila, unelected leader of the vast, hungry, debatable entity called the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s irregular heartbeat, the eternal question mark over the whole post-colonial agenda. What has it all come to? Why are we not being told?

But to return to the striking, unforgettable images of Harare. So many things stand out. I am sitting with friends of old on the veranda of their picturesque house, my home-from-home, always the same, always welcoming, always perched just above the impending mudslide of the beautiful, treacherous savannah. Always there. "Where else would we be able to have a lifestyle like this?" they say to me, as we all stare out into the beautiful gloom and listen for the sounds of an incipient revolution that will never come out of the night. The subtext is that we are all strangers, interlopers here. What right do we have to be here? But, heck, here we are. It is daylight now. We jump into the car, making the unnatural assumption that there is still petrol in it. The Libyans have lost patience with this revolution that never comes, and have pulled out their oil pipelines and gone on to look for greener pastures in the north. (These used to be very green pastures, by the way. But I digress.) But amazingly, surprisingly, petrol there is, the gas tank is tanked up, and so we drive into the remnants of the town that we were not involved in building, but now have every intention of owning, possessing, inhabiting, using up in any way that we like and generally controlling at the behest of our fickle whims. We drive, in a word, into Harare.

It’s a funny feeling. Something is wrong. There is hardly any traffic on the roads. But then again, what right do we have to expect traffic: cars, buses, motorbikes, kwela-kwela wagons loaded up with all the usual suspects and trucks (apart from various prangs that one sees, including a juggernaut that had fallen over on its side while trying to negotiate a perfectly simple, right-handed corner and spilled its load of precious bags of mealie meal on to the unsuspecting sidewalk- and nobody had tried to loot it for a whole two days)? Why shouldn’t the African bush be simply allowed to take over again, without our ludicrous expectations of righteousness, good governance, automatic wealth and empowerment? What right do we have to expect Harare to look like it did in the good old colonial days? Why, in fact, should the grass still be green and the jacaranda trees still have dizzy, foreign, purple buds like they did before? What business is it of ours?

And so we drive on into the deserted town. We get stuck at a significant crossroads where there is, for once, some traffic blocking our progress as we try to make a right turn towards the central business district (which is where they formerly did business). We get stuck for an indefinite period of time because the robots are not working. Actually, I exaggerate. The robots are not working because there are no robots there at all. The tall, yellow metal stalks that used to hold the robots in place are bent at a peculiar angle, and the red, amber and green lenses that used to control the intersection like cruel, silent policemen have long since disappeared. There is no longer any kind of long-distance regulation from an unseen point in the depleted city that tells drivers when to go, when to stop, or when to just get ready to do one of the above.

No more robots. I swing my head towards my friend behind the wheel with an unasked question. "The discos," he says, without waiting for me to articulate my unspoken thought. "What discos?" I say. "Managers from the discotheques come out in the middle of the night and steal the lights in the robots so that they can have coloured lights in the discos." "Oh." And there you have it. The jungle has taken over, you see. What right, indeed, do we have to expect working traffic lights at critical traffic intersections when people want to go to discotheques at night? When there is no further rule of law, in the accepted, biblical, colonial sense, why should we still expect the former things to function as they functioned before? Who are we to question Uncle Bob’s infinite wisdom in allowing the whole thing to simply degenerate into its own chaos, chaos that makes more sense, in the African sense, than all this Europeanised nonsense that we don’t seem to be able to eject out of our heads? The idea that there are still discos in Harare, and that there are still people who are able to get to them, hardly comes into the equation. In the scheme of things, nothing is working, but everything still works. You have to try and see things from the other guy’s perspective. What looks like total collapse in Western eyes might be an extraordinary renaissance from the other point of view. Or at least I hope that is how our president is seeing it. Bite the bullet. Press the flesh. You just never know.

Comments

[r]

yes, maybe humans would be better off hanging from the branches with the birds. The problem is large masses of people in small areas (cities) neeeding centralized water, sewage, food systems. It's not a white vs. black thing - but a reality & much bigger than robots