I woke up to a text message this morning telling me that Morgan Tsvangirai, president of Zimbabwe’s opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, had been arrested. Checking the news as I write this, I see he’s been released.  Tsvangirai was taken by the police for questioning, in relation to a demonstration which the MDC has planned for today. The state has banned the protest. Police were already on alert in town at 7 this morning when I went through, and I watched the water cannons roll out in anticipation.

Zimbabwe’s “harmonised” Presidential, Parliamentary, Senate and Local Government elections are likely to be held in March this year, despite protests from opposition parties and civil society organisations that March is too soon for an election to be held that would truly be free and fair. Some have hoped that, with amendments to repressive legislation such as the Public Order and Security Act, the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, and the Broadcasting Services Act, there is some potential for a genuinely democratic election – if only these amendments were given enough time to operate, so that people could operate in a more open social and political environment before the election.

But incidents like Tsvangirai’s arrest challenge this optimism. In theory, Zanu PF has an interest in making these elections seem more democratic – it would legitimate the victory that they’re certain to claim. So why not just let the MDC’s demonstration go ahead, as a sly show of good faith, and to muffle the opposition’s claim that the ruling party isn’t playing fair?

It doesn’t really matter whether the election is in March or June. The outcome has already been decided, and it won’t have anything to do with what people put on their ballot papers. The amendments to the above mentioned legislation are paltry. Journalists and media houses weren’t consulted in relation to the AIPPA amendments which affect their work directly. The amendments to POSA make public meetings sound marginally more possible. But as we’ve seen today, so much of law is in enforcement, not just legislation.

The machinery around this upcoming election makes it susceptible to rigging – there will reportedly be more than 16,000 polling stations. The opposition, and civil society organisations, will be looking to recruit monitors into every polling station to keep an eye on things. Even if they find enough volunteers, with shortages of everything from food to cash to transport to candles and stationery, how will they get them to their polling stations, and how will they ensure they’re looked after and can do their jobs?

And, of course, there are the far, far more subtle ways in which this election will be rigged. Those same obstacles which will make it even more difficult for the MDC to monitor the polling stations also make it hard to campaign. How do you get your flyers distributed if you can’t get cash for bus fare? And how do you hope to get participation at your rallies if people are too busy queuing for cash, bread, sugar, or mealie meal to come? You could try a spontaneous campaign at a shopping centre, to take advantage of the captive audience. But wait, that would also be in violation of POSA . . . .

Last Monday evening, a friend of mine heard that sugar had been delivered to the TM supermarket near his house. So he left home at midnight, and spent a mercifully dry night outside queuing for sugar with a host of others. He got to the front of the queue at 11:30 that morning, and gave it to his sekuru as promised.

Tuesday, he heard that sugar had been delivered to the Bon Marche also near him. So at 2am on Wednesday morning he went to the Bon Marche to spend the night. On my way to work, I went to find him and bring him a flask of (unsweetened) tea. He was delighted and, he reported later, my dash-it flask delivery services ended up entertaining the queue long after my departure. A hot beverage. And some light relief. Not bad for 7am.

When he’d arrived at 2 in the morning, he’d found himself number nine in the queue. Brilliant. At the time, he reckoned he’d be served and home by 10. But as dawn approached, there was a power cut. Bon Marche didn’t switch on their generator till after 11. When they finally opened their doors, the police came – ostensibly to impose order on the queue. But instead they disrupted the numbering system those waiting all night had established among themselves, and started accepting bribes from people to get to the front. My friend ended up far back in the queue. It dragged forward slowly, and when he was fifth from the front, the diesel in the generator ran out, and the super market closed for the day.

When I saw him that evening, exhausted from two nights outside, he looked fed up and worn out. He knew some people would be taking their sugar and selling it on the black market for four times the price or more. All he wanted was a bag for his family, and one to send back to the rural areas. He said if he went back to the shops one more time he might be among the lucky few, but he was too tired and discouraged to bother – rather, he figured, hold out for another queue.

The bad news is, among other things, that we’re being played. All that time spent queuing to exchange cash which is still valid? That money spent on transport to get to the banks to exchange the cash? The things people bought that they didn’t really need, but they didn’t want their cash to go to waste? To what end.

And, of course, we’re being played at a much larger scale. This whole cash situation is just one example. The largest denomination in circulation is the $750,000 bearer cheque. Never mind that they’re practically impossible to count – most of us aren’t very comfortable operating in base 75 – they’re also still completely inadequate to our needs. Is it any wonder the cash queues are still just as bad as they’ve been? The (state-run, Zanu PF mouthpiece, propagandising) Herald newspaper costs $900,000. A combi into town from a nearby suburb is $1,500,000. So if all you do is buy the paper and go in and out of town, you already need more than 5 of the largest bills. Granted, not everyone uses cash every day. And hey, with unemployment at 85% and 60% of the population living in the rural areas in a largely subsistence lifestyle, maybe Gono figures we’re all too poor to need pocket money – much less rent money, transport money, school fees money, uniforms money, food money, etc . . . .

But seriously. What self-respecting country has its largest denomination unable to buy a newspaper, or pay for local transport? Imagine if the United States announced tomorrow that all of their bills are out of circulation – it’s a coin only economy now and they’re not minting any larger coins?

Gono’s pleased with himself for ensuring that there’s $100 trillion in circulation. For a population of 12 million Zimbabweans, that works out to just over $8 million per person cash on hand. That’s return bus fare from Harare to Marondera (as of last week’s prices). It’s enough to buy almost three litres of cooking oil (at the newly gazetted prices, if you can find it). It’s a miserable, paltry, insulting amount, and if there’s only $100 trillion in circulation, no wonder we’re having such problems.

The thing is, to fix the problem Gono has to print more money. An increase in money supply spurs inflation – but not having enough money isn’t making prices go down – if anything, prices are going up as cash gets more and more expensive. And it’s not enough to just print more $750,000 bearer cheques. I don’t think there are enough hours in the day to print the volume of cash that would be needed if that’s as large as they get. If they’re not going to take off some zeroes, then it’s time to swallow our national pride and print the $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 million bearer cheques.

So, I’m not sure what it says about the Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono’s attachment issues, that he’s not willing to let go of a few zeroes in our currency and make all of our lives a whole lot simpler by introducing some new notes as part of his Sunrise II. But he’s not. Instead, we’re losing one note and gaining three more, all as part of his efforts to punish the cash barons – and in so doing, I fear, make things difficult for the rest of us as well.

But, one can only hope that these moves get cash back into the banks and into our pockets. If nothing else, it had better ease things enough that stories like this from Tichafa Nenzara (We’ll Die of Hunger), don’t happen again.

Here is just a small excerpt of the whole letter.

I write this open letter to you (Gideon Gono) with a lot of grief. No malice is intended and the experience presented herein is very true. My wife suddenly fell ill in the early hours on 3 December 2007 and needed immediate specialist attention. A well wisher rushed us to Harare Central hospital. After four hours of waiting for the doctor, my brother offered to foot the bills for a private doctor. He rushed into town and collected banking details from a well known private clinic and made a bee line for the bank to make an RTGS as the cut-off time drew nearer. Getting cash was out of the question. You are well aware of the severe cash shortage in the country. The private clinic insisted that no payment, no treatment. There was a winding queue at the bank for RTGS transactions. Just after 1200pm, my brother phoned to say he couldn’t beat the RTGS cut-off time. I could feel tears swelling in my eyes as I watched my dear wife writhing in pain, with my four year son looking at her confused at why nobody was interested in assisting her. I prayed and hoped that at least the doctor at the general hospital will at least turn up. He finally did and I was relieved. But it was short lived. He looked at my wife and wrote a couple of tests that were required urgently to diagnosed the real cause of the illness. All these tests could not be carried out at the central hospital because the required machinery was not working. He only recommended Paracetamol to reduce the pain. We were back to square one. The private clinic! But no cash, no treatment!

That day was the longest in my life. The following day, we were at the bank by 0330hrs but already there was a queue. When the bank opened its doors five hours later, pandemonium ensued and the queue became useless. My brother did however manage to submit the RTGS on time but I couldn’t get cash, so we left the bank and rushed to the private clinic. If we thought our misery was coming to an end, we were wrong! The clinic told us that they will only attend to my wife after the RTGS had cleared. Their contention being that some RTGS transactions were taking as much as 72 hours. My wife died the following day without receiving medical attention!

Burying my wife was not easy either. The funeral parlour also insisted on the RTGS clearing first. We couldn’t buy enough food for the mourners as the vendors at Mbare musika do not accept RTGS. It was the worst experience in living memory and the most traumatising ever.

We recently invited our SMS subscribers to send us their thoughts on how they can, and will make a difference in 2008.

Here are just a few of their replies:

Lets go out and vote out the regime.

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Lets copy South Africa. Say no to dictators!

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Facilitate on issues of peace, conflict, governance and human rights. Inform more friends about how to get SW Radio News. Distribute hand-powered radios if they are made available to remote areas. Participate in training elections monitors, etc.

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In 2008 I have to speak up against bad governance and share my views with others.

What are do you think? Is voting still a viable option? Are we so naïve we think these elections will be any different than the past three? Or can we think more creatively and develop strategies that demonstrate the power of people over politicians?

What are you going to do to make a difference in 2008?

A few weeks ago, I was reminded of a quotation I had first seen some years back. When I looked it up and found it again, I found it as beautiful and as compelling as I had when I’d first seen it.

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being ‘drawn toward’. Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf on women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds. For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called ‘love’. Love is a choice – not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity – a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life.
~ Carter Heyward

I was moved enough to do a bit more research on “lesbian feminist Episcopal priest” Carter Heyward. And what I found impressed me.

Among other things, in an interview with OutSmart, Heyward speaks openly about both her sexual and her spiritual journey, her personal history of pushing the envelope in seeking justice, and her commitment to her principles, despite the possible risks.

Heyward was involved in pressuring the Episcopal church to ordain women, over 25 years ago. She explains:

Those of us who planned and implemented the measure have really come to believe that without some kind of force, some kind of radical act, the church was not going to come through on the ordination of women any time soon, maybe not for 10, 20, 30 years. Sue Hiatt, the woman who really was the mastermind behind this thing, said the church would not ordain women until it’s harder not to ordain them than to ordain.

This struck me as a useful reminder for all of us engaged in struggles for social change. It’s sad but true – most of the time this change won’t happen unless and until not changing become more painful, difficult, or untenable than changing. Unfortunately for us in Zimbabwe, the more difficult things become for us here, the more we seem to turn inwards, focused on how to make sure that our families can get by. Maybe instead of rolling over and giving in, as has been our way, it’s time to think about how to make it harder for the regime to carry on along with its stubborn disregard, than it would be for it to change, so that finding a new course becomes the path of least resistance.