A couple of things.

I was rather amused to get an email from Sunset Tours this morning with the subject title: Air Zimbabwe Specials and Extra Baggage Allowances. The departure hall at Harare International Airport is a scary sight on the night that Air Zimbabwe flies to London. You can hardly swing a bag for the masses fleeing our sinking ship. Now with Extra Baggage Allowances one wonders if the plane will even get off the ground. By the sound of it (low and loud) it would seem that ScareZim clears my roof – I’m in the flight path – by barely a few feet as it is.

Then I laughed at a headline just seen: Zimbabwe Places Military On Alert: Says Opposition Planning A Coup. Hmmm. The Movement for Democratic can plan an election at best, and interminable board meetings at worst. But a coup is certainly outside of their capabilities. A headline like this is just another example of the type of propaganda that’s churned out by the state.

Meanwhile Tendai Dumbutshena writing for the Zimbabwe Times seems to have his head screwed on right going by his article Time for MDC to make big decision. OK, we got that, awhile back. Besides the fact that they are way over the deadline on making a decision, the fact is that they need to make a decision. Scary thought, I know. But Tendai puts things quite clearly . . .

Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC meets on Sunday 18 January to decide whether to join the proposed inclusive government. It is imperative for the MDC to arrive at a clear decision that leaves no room for uncertainty or ambiguity. It is now four months since the Global Political Agreement (GPA) was signed on 15 September 2008. A lot has transpired in that time. The MDC should be in a position to make a firm decision based on concrete facts and not unrealistic hopes.

This is no time to dilly-dally. The party is either joining the government or opting out. There are no more SADC summits that will help the situation. All parties including SADC have made their positions crystal clear. It is decision time for the MDC.

A coalition or unity government only works if parties in it have a common purpose. In Zimbabwe this is clearly not the case. Mugabe sees the inclusive government as a tactical ploy to ultimately outmaneuvre the MDC.  He does not see it as a vehicle through which the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe can be genuinely tackled. His main objective is not to bring prosperity to the people of Zimbabwe but to rule them until he drops dead. He only signed the agreement to secure legitimacy for his presidency which he could not obtain through the ballot box. He detests the idea of having the MDC in government even as junior partners.

He has no intention of allowing the inclusive government to serve a full five – year term. His intention is to call for an early election when he believes the MDC is sufficiently weakened. Mugabe is shrewd enough to know that the MDC’s presence as junior partners in a largely ineffectual government will have serious political consequences for it. With no improvement in the lives of Zimbabweans the MDC’s political fortunes will rapidly nosedive. At the same time the MDC’s foot soldiers – the backbone of the party – will continue to be killed, arrested, tortured and displaced. With its organizers battered and demoralized and its structures crippled, the MDC will be ripe for easy pickings in an early snap election.

We should however debate one of the observations Tendai makes . . .

The argument is often presented by some analysts that the MDC will be cast into the political wilderness if it declines to join the inclusive government. This is a false argument bereft of any merit. The MDC’s raison d’etre is to seek democratic change in Zimbabwe. That is supposed to be its mission. It is not to seek political accommodation with a regime hell bent on preserving its own tyrannical rule.

As Amanda raised in her recent blog, perhaps the MDC is in fact seeking some sort of political accommodation rather than the ousting of Mugabe. Clearly the MDC has struggled to get rid of Mugabe democratically, and if they are unable to pull off a coup (and who wants one anyway), then politicians (rather than freedom fighters) opt for political accommodation.

On the 18th January Tsvangirai will have a hard time persuading his colleagues and MPs to walk away from a negotiated settlement. They will want to keep the dollars and perks that Mugabe has been dangling in front of them.

I’ve just been preparing information on cholera – causes, symptoms and prevention – for our next Kubatana email newsletter. In countless publications its stated that good sanitation and waste management is vital to preventing the spread of cholera.

Take a drive or a walk around Harare these days and you’ll find over flowing rubbish bins in every shopping centre. In the Avenues, home to thousands of flat dwellers, rubbish is strewn on the street. At Kamfinsa Shopping Centre, the mound of rubbish dumped near where people queue for their daily or weekly allowance from Gono, is growing daily. Street cleaners have stopped cleaning. Public toilets have been closed because there isn’t any water to service them. The toilets in my office block, and no doubt countless others, seldom have water. With this degree of failure of public services, people cannot achieve the high standards of cleanliness required to stop cholera in its tracks.

Foreign governments and international development agencies are engaged in trying to stop the spread of cholera. Whilst these efforts are helping Zimbabweans on the ground I wonder how the aid agencies are reconciling the fact that the Mugabe regime has been the chief architect of the collapse of vital infrastructure in Zimbabwe, and that if we want to actually stop cholera, then Mugabe, the larger problem, has to go. Until then we’ll be running around trying to extinguish countless humanitarian crises.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) chief executive officer Frank Donaghue, believes that the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe is a “symptom of the collapse of the entire health system” and PHR is calling for Zimbabwe’s health care system to be placed under international receivership.

Millions of Zimbabweans couldn’t agree more and our lives depend on it.

In Zimbabwe, a good newspaper is hard to find. Luckily one of my Christmas gifts was a copy of The New York Times together with The New York Times Magazine. The magazine feature, called The Lives They Lived, took note of the lives of 24 very different people that ended in the past 12 months. Below Susan Dominus writes about the colour of love; about a marriage that broke the law – and then fixed it. Mildred Loving was born in 1940 and died in 2008 – this is part of her story.

In the June 1963, Mildred Loving, the 22-year-old wife of Richard Loving, a bricklayer, sat down with a piece of lined loose-leaf paper and wrote a letter in neat script to the Washington branch of the A.C.L.U. “My husband is White,” she wrote, “I am part negro, & part indian”. Five years earlier, they married in Washington, she explained, but did not know that there was a law in Virginia, where they lived, against mixed marriages. Upon arriving back home, the two were jailed, tried and told to leave the state, which is how she ended up back in Washington. Her requests to the A.C.L.U. was heartbreakingly humble: “We know we can’t leave there, but we would like to go back once and awhile to visit our families and friends.” A judge had told them that if they set foot, together, in the state again, they would be jailed for one year. She hoped to hear from the lawyer there “real soon”.

The letter didn’t mention the details of the arrest: the three local authorities, who let themselves into her mother’s home one hot June night, invaded the bedroom where Mildred and Richard slept and woke them with the blinding glare of a flashlight. She didn’t express the humiliation of spending five nights in a rat-infested jail (her husband, because he was white, spent only one night behind bars). She didn’t try to convey just how homesick she was for the small, rural speck of a town in Virginia where she had lived with her family all her life, just down the road from Richard, who started courting her when she was just 11 and he was 17.

Their relationship was, by all accounts, an uncomplicated love affair in Central Point, Va., an area in which racial divisions were far from straightforward. She and Richard grew up attending segregated churches and schools, but outside of those formal arenas, blacks and whites, many of whom also had Cherokee blood, freely socialized, worked side by side (Richard’s father worked for a black landowner) and occasionally fell in love. Richard first met Mildred when he went to hear her brothers play music at her home down the road.

Two young civil rights lawyers took up the case, and in 1967 the ruling came down from the Supreme Court, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren: Declaring that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” Warren argued that the Virginia statute violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. An unforgettable picture captures the Lovings at a news conference in their lawyer’s office the day of the ruling: Richard and Mildred, their heads leaning close, his arm draped possessively around her neck, Richard looking gruff, Mildred looking girlishly delighted. More than triumph, more than justice, the picture captured, at a glimpse, a couple in love.

In the years following the ruling, the Lovings turned down countless requests for interviews, public appearances and honors. Mildred Loving had no affiliations beyond her church and her family and never considered herself a hero. “It wasn’t my doing,” she said a year before her death. “It was God’s work.”

She resolutely lived out a private, ordinary life with its ordinary pleasures – a happy marriage, three kids, a home near family – and its sadly ordinary tragedies. One day when Mildred was 35, she and Richard were driving on a highway when another car crashed into theirs. Richard was killed instantly. Mildred, who lost her left eye in the accident, never remarried or considered it. She spent the second half of her life attending church, cooking for children and grandchildren, smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, drinking cup after cup of instant coffee with the neighbors and looking out from her back porch to a peaceful view of the fields.

Civil rights historians had pretty much accepted that they wouldn’t hear again from Mildred Loving. But last year, the 40th Anniversary of the ruling, three colleagues working on behalf of Faith in America, a gay rights group, visited Loving at the small ranch house that Richard built after they moved back to Virginia. The organization was hoping to persuade her to make a statement in favor of gay marriage at a celebration of her own court ruling that the group planned to hold in Washington. “I just don’t know,” Loving told them. She hadn’t given it much thought. She listened sympathetically, a worn bible on her end table, as the group’s founder, the furniture entrepreneur Mitchell Gold, told her of his own struggles as a teenager to accept that society would never let him marry someone he loved. She was undecided when the group left a few hours later, but told Ashley Etienne, a young woman who consulted for the group, that they could continue to chat about the subject over the phone.

Etienne, who said Loving reminded her of her own grandmother, started calling every few days. She asked Loving about how she and her husband endured their setbacks; Loving told her that she didn’t understand why two people who loved each other could not be married and express their love publicly. She talked, as she always did, about how much she loved Richard and what a kind, gentle man he was. On her own, she talked to her neighbors about the request; she talked to her children about it. And in the end, Loving told Etienne, yes, she would allow the group to read a statement in her name supporting gay marriage at the commemoration. “Are you sure you understand what you are saying?’ Etienne asked. “You understand that you are putting your name behind the idea that two men or two women should have the right to marry each other?”

“I understand it,” Loving said, “and I believe it.”

I was lying in bed this morning a bit bleary eyed from too many serial killer Dexter episodes when I heard what used to be a very familiar sound. The noise of waste removal trucks that used to ply the streets of Harare’s suburbs picking up bags of rubbish placed outside homes. No such luck these days. When I drove out of my gate this morning I saw one solitary bag on the side of the road. Talk about optimistic. But this all reminded me of Kubatana’s current electronic activism campaign called One House at a Time. With the complete breakdown of municipal services in Zimbabwe we’ve got to clean up after ourselves. And that includes removing the Mugabe regime as well.

Sharing some comments recently received from Kubatana subscribers . . .

It’s strange how somebody talks with confidence, on a public media, about everything being ok in the country, needless to mention the educational sector. Believe it or not, students at some tertiary institutions are being called for to pay as much as US$450! But guess what the ‘government’ is offering our belearned lecturers; a whopping US$50. I need not explain the catastrophic repercussions of such a mean, ridiculous and ill brooded move on us, the students, and the future leaders of Zimbabwe.

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I am currently visiting South Africa and how the country has become a haven for Zimbabweans is rather depressing to say the least. There are criminal elements, vendors, entrepreneurs and so on. This other day I met a Zimbabwean prison warden, a very senior one for that matter, washing cars. He said he manages to feed his family that way; so why not.  Almost all backyard shacks are occupied by foreigners and these are mostly Zimbabweans. Everywhere I go, I meet people using the Shona language. With the Zimbabweans of Ndebele origin, it is a different matter, because they quickly integrate into the South African society because Ndebele and Isizulu are almost similar. South Africans have been accused of being lazy, but I do not think that is true. We have taken over their country and all thanks to Mugabe. We can not expect the South Africans to smile when Zimbabweans own houses, businesses etc using illegally acquired Identification documents.

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Zanu PF if you don’t inspire then expire! For how long have you talked about sovereignty and forming a government of national unity without the MDC-T? A one legged government under the existing chemistry of problems will not address the challenges the country is facing. It’s not only a matter of forming a government but of paramount importance will be the viability and productiveness of that government. Zanu PF has proved to be a failure for past years hence nothing much if any will come out from these greedy men.

Now seems to be the word of the moment. Kubatana subscriber, Sophie Zvapera, wrote to Kubatana sharing a short story about her sister and a new year resolution . . .

I phoned my sister’s seventeen-year-old daughter to wish her a merry christmas and a prosperous new year since they were visiting the rural areas and I was not going to be able to talk to her till after new year. She was excited to go and see her nana and I asked her whether she had already made her new year resolution. I wish I had not asked! She said all she wanted was to study hard and pass her A levels this year and find herself a place in some university somewhere outside Zimbabwe where she can do her studies.

Then I cried!

I cried because my sister’s daughter was going to this mission boarding school and at the end of last year she was sent back home before schools closed because there were no teachers, no food, the school fees that we were paying in zim dollars were not even enough to buy a loaf of bread. Therefore there was nothing that the school could do except to send all the students back. I started thinking of all the other children who have the same resolution as my sister’s daughter and who cannot go to school as the term starts because they cannot afford to pay private college fees in foreign currency. Here is a whole generation whose hopes and aspirations have been shattered by a group of Mugabe’s thugs. They are thugs because they have stolen our children’s future yet they claim to be governing or whatever they call it because the people voted them into office. Which people I ask? How many of all these school and tertiary going students’ future have these politicians quashed, trampled upon and thrown into the dust bin all for the sake of political power? What happened to the concept of investing in the youth for they are tomorrow’s future leaders? What legacy are we leaving for our children?

So while I am still wiping my tears I will put my request to the political leaders for the new year. This political bickering, grandstanding and media statements will not bring back the lost years for our children neither will it arrest or correct all the things that are wrong in this country. So for the sake of Zimbabwe please put people’s interests first and foremost and rescue the global political agreement from wherever it is and come up with a government that will take the country forward. This does not require Monthlante, SADC, AU, UN, Britain or America just us Zimbabweans can do it if there is the political will to do so. How long can we continue to have all these abductions, murders, cholera, starvation, HIV/AIDS and all the deaths before all you politicians say the people have suffered enough?

It is now or never.