From the news: Water outages hit fire tenders, woes mount in Zimbabwe

From Associated Press, 27 January: Water outages hit fire tenders, woes mount in Zimbabwe

Harare - Fires caused by candles during Zimbabwe's frequent power outages have destroyed homes because firefighters have also been unable to find water, the state Sunday Mail reported. In one incident, in suburban northern Harare, a candle set curtains alight and an occupant tore down them down and threw them outside, onto drums being used to store gasoline. The house was gutted, with only a bed recovered from the ruins, the paper said. In the second, gasoline was being sold from a house occupied by four families in a western township and caught light when a candle was lit during an electricity cut, it said. All the occupants escaped without injury. House owner Sothini Chiravasa told the newspaper by the time fire tenders began drawing water from a neighbor's swimming pool the blaze was out of control. «How could they come to put out a fire without water?» she was quoted as saying. Zimbabwe is suffering daily power and water outages along with chronic shortages of gasoline that have forced many householders to store supplies in containers despite constant warnings by the fire department of the dangers. Amid the shortages, gas prices have soared, crippling public transport services and putting regular fares out of the reach of many workers, many of whom have resorted to walking to their jobs. ....

Ask a Zimbabwean for tips on power cuts

Comment from The Sunday Independent (SA), 20 January: Ask a Zimbabwean for tips on power cuts

What an incredible fuss you South Africans make about a few power cuts. I happened to lie down next to my battery-operated satellite radio for a nap this week after the season's only two hours of summer whacked me out. I heard the likeable David O'Sullivan sounding unlikeable. Okay. He was in a rage, so angry he sounded as though he might burst an artery, or the membrane holding his brain in place. About Eskom. I couldn't believe my ears. As far as I can remember, in this past week there were only about six cuts, and none longer than five hours. Same thing at the pharmacy: moan, moan, moan. Then it struck me - for the first time in my life I had really useful knowledge. I do know about electricity cuts and what to do about them. I know about boilers, paraffin fridges, wicks and lighting the lamps by pumping them hard at 5.30pm.

Please, South African householders, unless you live on more than an acre, don't get a generator. There will be murder in the streets of Parkhurst, the Berea in Durban and Obs in Cape Town if home owners on tiny bits of land all have generators farting rhythmically through long days and dark nights. Even small generators use 1 litre of diesel per hour. And they get stolen easily unless cemented in and you need monster ones to do fridges and stoves. Leave generators to Raymond Ackerman and his ilk. First rule for survival: get a solar panel on the roof, which is connected to an especially large car battery in your house, which is then attached to an inverter, which in turn has a switch that lights up the world. This system keeps a TV, DSTV encoder, DVD player, mobile and laptop chargers going. And it costs nothing to run. The bigger the battery, the more lights. (Ditch desktop computers today.) It doesn't do fridges (more about fridges later) and it doesn't do electric stoves.

Go for gas. Mozambique has 300 years of gas, and the ANC government - even though it chose to do the arms deal instead of electricity - did put in a pipeline for gas from Mozambique. If you live in the older suburbs of Johannesburg phone up the angels (seriously) at eGoli Gas and they will look on the map to see if you have a gas pipe in your street. If you have, then get connected. Gas geysers also work at a fraction of the cost of electricity if you don't go for solar-heated water. Refrigerators are another thing altogether. If you keep the doors shut, a tall one will keep food from going off during a power cut of about 30 hours. A deep freeze lasts about 2,5 days if you don't open it. Longer than that and the food goes off. After all, you can shop daily in South Africa. Raymond Ackerman is going to keep the generators running.

Most Zimbabwe-owned supermarkets shut down during power cuts. Only foreign-connected ones such as Spar have generators, or those owned by Zanu PF chefs (political elite), as they get cheap fuel. You must conserve power. You have a chance to do this because you still do have commerce and industry. We lost our industry over the past few years, so that sector can't really help much. We have more or less given up mining. Except, except, and think about this: your mining houses can buy power with foreign currency directly from Cahora Bassa and pay in US dollars, as they are doing in Zimbabwe now. It is a bit more expensive than Eskom, but it keeps the platinum pouring out. We also don't have any robots left in our streets, and little traffic, so we don't have the kind of traffic jams I saw along Jan Smuts Avenue in Jo'burg on Thursday during a power cut.

We don't kill each other in fuel queues, and we don't have road rage as our roads are mostly gone. Nor do we kill each other in banks, even when there is no money there, or in supermarkets. Well, only very, very occasionally, and only once, over sugar and that was in Bulawayo, which is very far from town. So bear up, improvise and go get the solar, inverter, battery alternatives, and gas. And you will all survive until you have enough new power sources within eight years, so I hear, and you are not going to be nearly as short of foreign currency as Zim, so can import some power. But Zimbabwe will recover sooner than South Africa, because our population is in Hillbrow.

new notes

http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,529587,00.html

they even take notice of this in Germany!

From The Independent (UK), 15 January: John Simpson: The abject poverty in a country where everyone is a millionaire

Travelling undercover, the BBC's World Affairs Editor, discovers a nation running out of patience with Robert Mugabe

In Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, everyone is a millionaire. You have to be: a loaf of bread costs a million Zimbabwe dollars, a newspaper costs two million, and a decent joint of beef costs a hundred million. The only problem is that the average wage is 20 million dollars a month. They're called Mugabe dollars and it isn't a term of affection. Everyone queues here: in the supermarkets, at the petrol stations and in the banks, in order to draw out the money to buy anything. Inflation is so high that items which cost a mere20 million dollars yesterday are likely to cost double that by tomorrow. For some reason, the government refuses to print million-dollar notes; perhaps it thinks it would look bad. The highest note is for 750,000 dollars, and doing the maths is horrendous.

It's extraordinarily difficult to find anyone here who supports President Mugabe. He is loathed in the Harare slums. In Mbare, where two years ago his thugs bulldozed the shanties housing thousands of opposition supporters, small children shouted anti-Mugabe slogans as we drove past. Shopkeepers, domestic workers, hospital staff, Aids patients, people selling handicrafts in the street – they all hate him. A very senior Zanu PF figure, a man who sees himself as a king-maker, met me clandestinely in Harare. He hated Mugabe more than any of the others. I am in Zimbabwe undercover, together with two colleagues. The BBC is banned, so it felt particularly good to broadcast live from here for last night's Ten O'Clock News. It's the first time any British television news organisation has broadcast from Zimbabwe since Mugabe refused to let foreign journalists come here.

The biggest problem is that BBC World, our international television news channel, has a big following here, especially among the political elite. There's a real danger of being recognised and arrested. Back in London a make-up artist fitted me out with a beard, to make me look like an Afrikaans farmer. But it had a habit of coming loose in the heat and, if we were caught, it seemed unwise to wear a disguise. So I've just worn a baseball cap to cover my untidy white hair. I look pretty awful, but not as bad as I looked in the beard. The disguise has worked pretty well. We have been in Harare for a week, and have spent a lot of time driving and walking round the city, the suburbs and the slums. Recording what is known in the trade as a "piece to camera", walking down a main street in Harare apparently talking to myself, was the tensest moment. I had to do it a couple of times, regardless of the onlookers and the police stooges.

So far I have been recognised three times. Once was in an expensive restaurant, where we were filming how the Mugabe elite live. Our own meal came to 290 million dollars; I left a 10 million dollar tip (about £2.50). Once was by a senior opposition figure whom I wanted to interview anyway, since he had recently been tortured by Mugabe's secret police. And once was in a shop where I wanted to find a pair of Zimbabwe's famous Courtenay boots. Yet unpleasant though Mugabe's Zimbabwe is politically, it isn't Idi Amin's Uganda. There is still a certain degree of personal freedom here. People can be tortured for their political beliefs but it's rare for anyone to be killed. The murders of white farmers eight years ago have not been repeated. But there are spies everywhere. One attached himself to the BBC's cameraman Nigel Bateson as he finished some clandestine filming in an empty supermarket.

"I would so much like to be your friend," the stooge said. "Won't you give me your name and phone number?" "I couldn't do a thing like that," Nigel replied, "I hardly know you." And because Mugabe is so unpopular, it has been easy for us to find people to shelter us and help us. For them, I suspect, it's a quiet act of resistance. The BBC has called me on three different occasions to warn me of rumours that we were in Harare. Each time the three of us discussed the possibility that we might be caught and sent to a Zimbabwean prison. Each time we agreed to stay on and finish the job. That job is almost finished now. We have established that there is a major split within the ruling Zanu PF party, and that a former finance minister, Simba Makoni, is being put forward by a powerful grouping as a candidate to challenge Mr Mugabe for the presidency. The high-level Zanu PF figure who briefed us in secret was certain that 2008 was likely to be the year Mugabe's hold on power was either weakened or ended.

But he won't be brought down by a popular revolution. A combination of a new and tougher approach by South Africa, the worsening economy, and a palace coup may do the job. But Mugabe is clever and resourceful. Even now, it is too soon to write his political obituary. As for us, we will be crossing the Zimbabwean border about the time this article appears. After so many years of being banned, it's been a real pleasure, if slightly nerve-racking, to spend a week here again. This is a magnificent country. It just deserves to be governed better.

From Associated Press, 10 January: Zim election observers report problems

Angus Shaw

Harare - Impoverished Zimbabwean farmers have to show they are loyal members of the ruling party if they want free equipment that the government is offering, and opposition supporters have been threatened with dogs, independent democracy monitors said on Thursday. Thursday's report by the Zimbabwe Election Support Network three months ahead of planned national elections also outlined problems with voter education and registration. The report underlined concerns by the main opposition party about the fairness of the poll. There was no immediate response from the government, which has insisted that the elections will be open and democratic. Instead, a government newspaper equated election monitors with United States spies. The support network, in its latest election bulletin, said it deployed 120 observers throughout the country and based its findings on information from members of the public attending its community workshops. Observers in the Masvingo district in southern Zimbabwe reported that ox-drawn plows being distributed by the government were allocated only to people holding cards showing they were dues-paying members of the ruling Zanu PF party and who could chant three party slogans. The local governor said that donated plows would be taken away in districts won by opposition candidates, the network reported. In the central district of Gokwe, villagers were told they would not have to pay for plows as long as the ruling party won the March polls, the report said. The distributions were part of a Reserve Bank programme begun in November to get 120 000 plows, tens of thousands of donkey carts, seeds and other equipment into farmers' hands to revive crop production and end acute food shortages in the former regional breadbasket....

Comment from The Nelson Daily News (Canada), 7 December: Zimbabwe experience

André Carrel

All personal secrets have the effect of sin or guilt - Carl Jung

Why do they put up with it? Why are Zimbabweans not protesting in the streets by the thousand? Why is there no sign of a popular revolt against Mugabe? I was hoping to find answers to these questions during my visit. Zimbabwe has elections, but it is not a democracy; it is a dictatorship. ….. During this last visit I was given a copy of a banned report, published in 1999 by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and the Legal Resources Foundation. This report, titled Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace, is a summary of a much larger report documenting the terror Mugabe unleashed on his country in the 1980s. The report recounts how, a few months after his first election, Mugabe made a deal with North Korea’s Kim Il Sung to train a special security force. The report describes the physical torture, deprivation, psychological torture, and disappearances Mugabe’s special force inflicted on civilians in the provinces of Matabeleland and Midlands.

The Fifth Brigade, as this internal security force was known, operated independently of the army, police, and the Central Intelligence Organization. The Fifth Brigade was not accountable to parliament. It took its orders directly from Mugabe, and the atrocities it committed are of the kind associated with the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. The difference is merely one of scale. Mugabe’s torture victims number in the tens of thousands, not in the millions. When Mugabe disbanded the Fifth Brigade, he integrated its members into the regular security forces. Nobody has ever been held accountable. To this day Zimbabweans are afraid to talk about the activities of the Fifth Brigade. A disillusioned former guerrilla fighter, who bitterly claimed that what is happening in Zimbabwe today is not what he fought for, told me that he believes that Mugabe clings to power because of the legacy of the Fifth Brigade: Mugabe fears losing his immunity as head of state. The banned report is on the internet, but few people in the communal lands in rural Zimbabwe have access to the internet.

They learned about what happened in the province of Matabeleland in the 1980s by word of mouth. People in every community of every province now know about Mugabe’s capacity for terror and brutality from first-hand experience. What is happening in Zimbabwe today is not new; it is consistent with Mugabe’s rule since his first election in 1980. For a quarter century Mugabe’s obsession with secrecy in the name of state security has served as a cover for his corruption and his state-sponsored lawlessness, thuggery, torture, beatings and killing, and the indoctrination of youth gangs to act as agents of terror. Foreign embassies and their intelligence services must have known what was going on in the 1980s. Yet many developed countries, Canada included, praised Mugabe’s government while they poured millions of dollars into the country. I was one of many ignorant Canadian volunteers (all expenses paid by the federal government) holding to the naive belief that Mugabe’s government welcomed our efforts to help develop open and accountable local government in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabweans do not believe that the world will come to their assistance if they rise up against Mugabe. Having read the banned report, I understand their mistrust of the outside world. How could I have explained to my friends the decision by Queen Elizabeth II, our Queen, to bestow on Mugabe an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, a British order of chivalry, after all the atrocities of the 1980s? How could I have explained to them the equally despicable decisions by several prestigious European and North American universities to reward Mugabe with honorary doctorates? The combination of government secrecy and willful blindness is fatal to democracy. We betray democracy with our silence. When we accept anything short of full public accountability and disclosure from any level of government in cases such as Maher Arar, the tasering of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport, and the arrest of war resisters in our communities, we betray democracy, and we do so at our own peril.

to be continued...