Newlands Shopping Centre in Harare used to be a fairly happening kind of place. There was a buzz, parking was hard to find, vendors were hard to side-step – healthy signs of life. These days its pulse is flickering and fading. At least 5 shops, including one of Zimbabwe’s best brand names, Bata, have closed down. The stalwart of Zimbabwean restaurants, The Sitar, now closes on Tuesdays after being renowned for non stop curry 7 days a week. Tracks, the bar/cafe that used to be pom pom full most days has been boarded up for possibly a year. The three telephone booths outside the post office are derelict. Rubbish bins are overflowing and seldom cleared out. Holes in the pavements aren’t fixed and get filled with passer-by debris.

In my office block there’s seldom power from the Zimbabwe Electricty Supply Authority (ZESA). If it wasn’t for the largesse of a major international NGO that installed a generator to service the whole building we’d all be up shit creek. Ground floor shops that used to sell something are closing. One of these shops has had a woman sitting at a desk in the middle of it looking bored out of her skull. Occasionally she sits in the front window – a living but barely breathing human mannequin. A book store has an array of what looks like 1970 Home and Garden magazines for sale; they’ve been laying on the walkway outside the front door for what seems like the last 6 months. At Alberto’s Hairdressing Salon you don’t have to make an appointment anymore. It’s clear that business is slow because often his hair washers and trainee stylists are in the chairs themselves whiling the day away with experiments in all things hair and beauty. A waiter at Libby’s restaurant pulled me aside yesterday and asked me if I had a job for his son who has a degree in engineering; anything will do was the refrain. Meanwhile a young boy who looks no more than 16 has lethargically started to sweep the steps because the two brother janitors who used to clean the place have both died in the last 8 months. Most likely from AIDS but lack of food and low wages clearly didn’t help.

In our own way we try help. We called in The Garbage Guys to try and get a business to clean up because the City of Harare can’t, or won’t. We support local shops. We contribute to funeral funds. We share information. We give out clothes. We join community initiatives to look at ways of stablising power supply.

As I write this email the security guard for our office block is walking up an down each floor ringing a bell warning us that the fuel is running out and the generator is about to be switched off.

It’s not a pretty picture is it? This is the reality on my little patch of ground and there are other far worse examples.

Morgan Tsvangirai has been spouting rhetoric rather than the truth on his recent world tour. How soon before we all start saying that he’s seriously out of touch? A bit like how we’ve been describing his small friend Mugabe for so long.

Hello Zimbabwe!

Soon Kubatana will be launching an audio magazine available over mobile phones and landlines. You add – we multiply! We’d like you to join the conversation and get talking and share your views on various topics. When we launch our audio magazine we’d like to launch it with You . . . members of our very broad and diverse network. So, how about leaving us your opinion on one of the following issues:

Africans are the most subservient people on earth when faced with force, intimidation, power.
Africa, all said and done, is a place where we grovel before leaders.
- Kenyan corruption buster, John Githongo

Facebook / Sexbook
Some people use Facebook to meet sexual partners. In the age of HIV, is this a smart or reckless way of using the Internet?

National healing begins, the newspaper headlines read. But politically motivated arrests and assaults are still happening. What should Zimbabwe’s reconciliation process look like – and are we ready for it?

Be heard: get your digits dialing . . . call +263 913 444 321-4 and give us your point of view. If you leave us a compelling message we might share it with the rest of Zimbabwe so please tell us your name and where you’re from.

The lines close at 4pm Friday 26th June.

Morgan Tsvangirai was heckled off the stage at an address in the UK recently. Many people are saying thats a good thing. Slowly but surely criticism has been building about MT’s glib comments on land invasions as well as his rather too chummy embracing of the man who ruined Zimbabwe: Mugabe that is, in case anyone had any doubt.

Of course I can see why MT is urging Zimbabweans to come home and rebuild the country. We are sorely bereft of new energy and creative ideas, those of us left here have in our many and varied ways, taken a battering. Which is not to say that life in the Diaspora is a bowl of cherries with Zimbabweans working sometimes 3 jobs to keep themselves and their relatives back home afloat on remittances – also known as the Diasporan Pension Scheme.

But asking Zimbabweans to come back home is rather premature in my book. MT might be flush with optimism in his small house position as PM but in reality whilst the supermarkets might be full, the prices are high and the majority of Zimbabweans are unemployed. Schools might be open but they’re teetering on the verge of closure. The media environment is backward and repressive. The list is pretty much endless but MT seems to be ignoring the fact that on the ground, where his feet clearly are not planted, not much has changed.

But at Kubatana we get a variety of opinion of all shades and spirit and I quite liked how passionate Arkmore wrote about MT’s recent booing in the UK. He emailed us a piece entitled Backward Diasporans . . . here’s Arkmore

I was part of the group that attended Prime Ministers address at Southwark Cathedral, London, on 20 June 2009. The Diasporas were not impressive. They are still politically backward.

They viewed the Prime Minister as an opposition leader, and therefore expected him to deliver an opposition speech, which he didn’t. In fact, an MDC rally than a Prime Ministers address was envisioned. He was expected to lambast President Mugabe; denounce state institutions such as the police and the absence of the so called rule of law. In particular, they expected him to say: ‘stay here in the UK; things are still bad in Zimbabwe’. The Prime Minister said none of the above.

On the contrary, he nicely persuaded Diasporas to go home and help in rebuilding Zimbabwe.  Most do not want to hear this. They tend to scratch for negatives and ‘but’ to justify their stay. When the Prime Minister told them basic commodities are now available and schools are now open, they said: ‘but’ they are not affordable.  When he said the security situation in now almost conducive for reconstruction, they said: ‘but’ Dr Mushonga was beaten!

Violence should not be condoned, but whenever there is a transition, there are always unruly elements that oppose it. Zimbabwe, like any other country, is diverse and cannot be expected to be as peaceful as heaven. Recently, there were attacks on Romanians in Northern Ireland, but I don’t think a native Irish could claim asylum in any country because there is ‘no rule of law’ in Northern Ireland. There are situations that can be ‘part of life’ for some time, but would be swallowed by the evolutionary processes. The inconvenient truth is that sporadic waves of violence in Zimbabwe are no longer powerful enough to justify our staying in Diaspora!

Of course, some Diasporas are no longer interested in going back to Zimbabwe. Their stay – visa and asylum applications – is based on ‘violence’ in Zimbabwe. There are also psychological and social challenges.   The Diaspora wave of early 2000, forced many to sell their assets – houses, household goods and vehicles – to obtain capital for new life in the UK.  Expectations were high: well paying jobs enabling asset rebuilding back home, or even double the initial.

This has not been the case. Jobs are not easy to find here. Besides, UK is a capitalist country and what a worker gets is just slightly above subsistence.  How then do we expect someone who sold everything that he or she owned in Zimbabwe to go back empty handed? It’s just embarrassing! Even if they agree to go back, there is no life starting formula.

As the Prime Minister rightly puts it, a revolution did not take off, and the only way out of Zimbabwean crisis is through an evolutionary process, namely the GNU. This may not be easily acceptable to Diasporas mainly because they have participated in and probably read about the Zimbabwean struggle, but many did not and are not feeling and experiencing it.  It has been, and is still, a painful process, with loss of limbs and lives, which challenges us to utilise this rare opportunity.

I’ve been watching the unfolding events in Iran with quite some envy. The protests following what is regarded as a stolen election are impressive, more so because they’re taking place in Iran which is consistently described as repressive. Footage being shown on major news channels show what riot police are like the world over – vicious and uncompromising. Yet, 6 days on, protesters are still going out onto the streets making their displeasure known and felt, and forcing the Iranian authorities to display their repression in all its ugliness. Really, we Zimbabweans have no excuse for our apathy and our victim mentality. The lament that we’d be shot or beaten if we protested over our (many) stolen elections has become a pitying whine. People have been and are protesting repression all over the world yet we cower in our littler corner of the world. If we’d behaved differently; if we had taken the courage that sustains us in our homes whilst we “make a plan” quietly suffering the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe, and used that courage to spill out onto the streets in the vast numbers that despise the small dictator then we’d be experiencing something quite different from this odious, half baked political arrangement that we currently have. As John Githongo, the Kenyan corruption buster recently said . . .

Africans are the most subservient people on earth when faced with force, intimidation, power. Africa, all said and done, is a place where we grovel before leaders.

According to Nelson Chamisa the Unity Government’s Information, Communication, Technology Minister, he needs US$2 million to set up a national web site that will promote Zimbabwe in order to attract investment. He wants to do this within the first 100 days. Doing this would be akin to one of those electronic Nigerian scams. I mean, c’mon Nelson what are you going to say?

Come invest in Zimbabwe where we have the rule of law!
Come and invest in Zimbabwe where we guarantee land and property rights!
Come and invest in Zimbabwe where we will make sure you have uninterrupted electricity supply!
Come and invest in Zimbabwe where our telecommunications network guarantees you getting through after the 55th try!

Nelson Chamisa’s priorities are woefully out of sync with what the people need and want. How about taking the US$2 million and putting it toward the overhaul of our water and sanitation system? Or fixing traffic lights so that people aren’t continually killed and maimed? A rubbish truck or two wouldn’t go amiss either. The list is pretty much endless but at this point and time, a national web site is certainly rock bottom.

It’s about time that the GNU focused on one bread and butter issue and delivered on that one issue so that we can visibly see progress being made on important enhancements to our lives.

Of course a national web site will be necessary but only when Nelson and Co actually have some successes with which to entice international investment.

Not only is the international community looking for signs of progress but Zimbabweans are too.

Who said this when asked about farm invasions and violence on farms?

There are incidents in which it is reported that there are invasions on one or two farms but it’s all blown out of proportion. We have investigated examples of those so-called farm invasions. We have asked the Minister of Lands to give us a detailed report of what has been happening over all these so-called farm invasions and the outcry over that.

That’s Morgan Tsvangirai, although you could easily have thought it was a Zanu PF stalwart.

Meanwhile, here’s a report by Jan Raath writing for the Mail & Guardian (SA), 28 May

President Robert Mugabe’s controversial “land reform programme” took a new twist on Wednesday when a court ordered the eviction of a man who is not a farmer. Ian Campbell-Morrison (46) lives in the Vumba Mountains in eastern Zimbabwe, next to a hotel where he is the green keeper. He and his wife live in a cottage on a plot not much bigger than a suburban garden, where she tends flowers. The Campbell-Morrisons used to farm tobacco and coffee, but the government seized their land and the farmhouse and gave it to a government official, leaving the couple their cottage and the garden around it, said Hendrik Olivier, director of the Commercial Farmers’ Union, made up mostly of Zimbabwe’s remaining 350 white farmers. A magistrate in the nearby city of Mutare nevertheless sentenced Campbell-Morrison to a fine of $800 for “illegally occupying state land” and ordered the couple to be off the property by Saturday. The Campbell-Morrisons are one of 140 white farming families facing eviction from their land in the latest tactic in Mugabe’s violent, lawless campaign to force white landowners – numbering about 5 000 when it started in 2000 – off their farms. The action is in the name of a redistribution of land to black Zimbabweans, but which has instead made a million former farm workers homeless and set off the collapse the once-prosperous country’s economy. Mugabe has declared all white-owned land to be state property and banned farmers from taking the government to court.

The evictions and violence have continued despite the establishment in February of a power-sharing government between Mugabe and former opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, with an agreement to restore the rule of law and to “ensure security of tenure to all land holders”. Tsvangirai, now prime minister, began by promising to end the lawlessness, promising that “no crime [by invaders] will go unpunished,” but the police – under the control of staunchly pro-Mugabe security chiefs – continued to refuse to act against the mostly well-heeled Mugabe loyalists grabbing productive farms and selling their crops. Western governments have refused to provide finance for the recovery of the country’s economy from world-record inflation and decimation of production under Mugabe, until there are “clear signs of reform” in the re-establishment of the rule of law. The restoration of peace and security on the farms is cited as a key condition. But there was shock this week when Tsvangirai, referred in an interview to “isolated incidents of so-called farm invasions” that had “been blown out of proportion”. Said a Western diplomat: “He’s talking like Mugabe now.”

Throughout Tuesday night on Mount Carmel farm in the Chegutu district, farmer Ben Freeth and his family were terrorised by a mob of invaders who rolled blazing tyres at their thatch-roofed homestead. At the weekend, an 80-year-old woman was assaulted by police, who were removing her son from his farm. On Friday, another farmer was beaten by a Mugabe supporter. “There has been absolutely no resolution or even recognition that there is even a problem,” said CFU president Trevor Gifford, who is trying to stop a government official cutting down what is left of his timber plantation, and is selling it to the government of neighbouring Zambia for telephone poles. Gifford is due to appear in court on Friday for “illegally occupying state land”. “This is happening in a country that has become the world’s most dependent on donors for food,” he said. “Until this government respects the rights of its own citizens and investment agreements, no one will look at this country.”