The Zimbabwe urban transport system has had touts for the past donkey years and all these years the authorities have known of their existence as well as the fact that they are illegal elements of society but they did not take any action against them. The authorities wake up one September morning and the touts are beaten like hell and rounded up in army vans and it’s headlines everywhere. It’s like these touts are aliens that have just landed in Zimbabwe from some far away planet and we are all amazed about them. The Harare City Council says it now wants to control kombis and one wonders why they have, for all these years, let touts control the kombi ranks.

Two (2) internships: Local NGO
Deadline: 17 September 2012

A local non-profit that is involved in citizen participation, governance and capacity building programmes mostly at the grassroots level is seeking 2 interns for 1 year internships starting in October 2012.

Specific tasks and duties
The successful Interns will work under the direct supervision of the Senior Programmes Officer (SPO) in the implementation of peace-building and governance programmes. The interns will support Programme Officers in project implementation.

The Interns will be required to perform the following tasks:
-Facilitate dialogue between different stakeholders including civic/community leaders, residents, women & youths
-Conduct field visits, liaise with our local-level structures, Community Working Groups and compile field information
-Compile monthly and quarterly reports for partners and the Board
-Collect most significant stories of change and photographs for sharing with the organization’s publics
-Liaise with Community Working Groups and provide information on the political context
-Monitor project implementation at the field level in line with agreed work plans and M & E frameworks
-Advise on capacity building and training needs of project participants
-Play a lead role in capturing, organizing and storage of project information

Skills
-Must have a professional, courteous and analytical penchant
-Must be proficient in English, Shona and Ndebele
-Gender and cultural awareness and sensitivity
-Flexible, adaptable and ability to work long hours including weekends
-Works well to deadlines

Qualifications
The internship programme is open ONLY to students currently registered for BA/BSc (Media/Sociology/ Political Science/ Development Studies) or LLBs at a reputable local university.

Applications
All applications to be accompanied by a detailed CV showing the courses completed and grades obtained in 1st and 2nd years of study. If interested send your application by email clearly marked ‘Internship Programme’ to: director [at] ccdz [dot] co [dot] zw

King Mswati III has got his priorities all wrong.

Wheeler dealer

Relative to the number of roads in his tiny southern African country, King Mswati III has a surfeit of horsepower. Then again, with 13 wives, each of whom has her own palace the king of Swaziland has a lot of royals to transport: his 27 children must be taken to school everyday.

In 2004, after media criticism of the 44-year-old monarch’s purchase of southern Africa’s only Maybach 62 (estimated cost: €325,000), the king banned newspapers from writing about his cars. Since then, Mswati has been seen arriving for the opening of parliament in a six-door Mercedes Benz S600 Pullman limousine.

Mswati head of an army that has never fought in a foreign conflict, only crushed internal dissent; as such, he has made surveillance, logistics and crowd control his priorities. The Umbutfo Swaziland Defence Force has three Alouette 3 helicopters, one IAI Arava transporter plane and seven RG-31 Nyala Mark 5E armoured vehicles, all bought from South Africa.

In 2002, Mswati paid a €2.6 m deposit on a Bombardier Global Express 19-seater; however, donors disapproved and the deal was off. This year, a mysterious “development partner” gave him a 36-seater McDonnell Douglas MD-87 which had a VIP conversion at Goderich Aircraft in Canada. The jet, worth up to €16m, was delivered for his birthday n 19 April.

Source: Monocle

There hasn’t been any water at our office block since Wednesday last week, and the toilets are beyond disgusting.

On Friday, the building manager organised for a bowser of water to come, and everyone filled up as many tanks, drums, bins and buckets as we could find.

For a few days, things were clean and hygienic again, but now that water has run out and the situation is worse than before.

Now, we’re being asked to bring in water from home – not just for office use, but to donate for the toilets which are shared across all tenants. This is because the bowser contacts the building manager has been phoning are too busy to come and deliver.

In other words, all over Harare, water is so scarce that so many companies are placing so many orders for water deliveries that the water companies can’t keep up. This is without even getting into the bigger question of where these water companies get their water from (sometimes residential boreholes and by pumping directly out of city rivers and streams). In the rural areas, the problem is even worse.

September has only just begun, and it’s another two months until the rains start to recharge the city boreholes and water table.

If water is already scarce, how will offices and high density areas in particular weather the water crisis that will only worsen?

Aloes at Hillside Dams

There is something human about aloes.
They smell  -  and feel, if you probe the slimy
parts – like sex.  They have cuticular roots
and they object to being planted in rows.
Their welcome is arm-like, sometimes grimy
with white scale, sometimes polished absolutes.
Their process of dying is shameless: top
down (or bottom up).  In their multitudes
they elaborate these Dams, not, somehow,
as genus, or variety, or crop,
but as comrades, citizens, darlings, dudes.
Their spaced teeth are not vicious.  Then and now,
past and present, something human. The name
invites a greeting… all winter… aflame.

John Eppel