I had not realised the true extent, and impact of the Zimbabwe crisis on ordinary Zimbabweans until last weekend I embarked on a four and half hour drive from Johannesburg to Kabokweni, a tiny, far-flung township situated in a valley near Nelspruit, in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province.

I was visiting my two brothers, a cousin, a nephew and an uncle who now, due to circumstances back home, are trying to eke out a living there. To my utter amazement I soon discovered there are literally hundreds of Zimbabweans there, perhaps without a thought of returning home soon. Commenting on how he has been forced to put away his degree certificates and resort to doing odd, often degrading jobs just to survive, all that my uncle said to me was, “Look what Mugabe has done to us!” I felt a deep sadness in the depths of my soul and began to agonise over the root causes on the crisis in Zimbabwe.

This morning, while taking a shower, that is usually my time of greatest inspiration, it suddenly occurred to me that the primary driver of the crisis in Zimbabwe and the consequent misery and suffering of the people is greed on the part of those in authority. For the avoidance of doubt, authority in Zimbabwe resides in ZANU-PF and its allies the so called war veterans, green bombers, and security forces.

Greed has so consumed those in authority so much that they have ceased to care about anything except their excessive desire to accumulate massive wealth which they neither deserve nor need. Political power, for them, is the vehicle through which they can satisfy their greed, and therefore, they would be prepared to shed blood to acquire and retain that political power. In their twisted sense of logic, they are therefore justified in unleashing waves of electoral violence and coerce people to ‘vote’ them into political power, or to use other fraudulent means to attain political office.

Understanding that greed is the primary driver of the Zimbabwean crisis would lead to a better understanding of the paradoxical situation of Zimbabwe that, in the midst of all this suffering, you find multi-millionaires in United States dollar terms, on the streets of Harare. This also explains how a person like Joseph Chinotimba, a mere municipal guard (no offence to this humble profession intended), who was virtually penniless before he discovered the benefits of ZANU-PF membership, can claim that due to loss of his mobile phone for just a week, he had lost business worth US$19 million! And this is not one of those Chinotimba jokes doing the rounds. What business is he into?

Clearly there are a few people who are directly benefiting from the suffering on millions of Zimbabweans. That same group of people is reaping where they did not sow. Again, this is not just a figure of speech, scores of those aligned to ZANU-PF are currently on an invasion spree of white-owned commercial farms and are literally reaping where they did not sow. Zimbabwe has enough resources to support all those who live in it, and also to support the region, but a few, politically connected and greedy people are busy plundering Zimbabwe and eating everyone’s share. I would not be surprised if there are people in Zimbabwe whose daily prayer is that the crisis never ends!

Greedy political leaders who do not care about the people they purport to represent invariably breed misery and suffering. This breed of political leaders often have the following distinctive characteristics: (1) Although generally incompetent and lacking in business acumen, they are involved in all kinds of businesses; (2) they measure they political achievements by the amount of wealth accumulated or cars they own; (3) they publicly speak against the West and pose as pan- Africanists while privately sending their children to school in the West, drink wines imported from the West and do not miss on their monthly satellite television subscriptions; (4) all their ill-gotten wealth is derived exclusively from their political connections; (5) their lavish, and outlandish lifestyles are at odds with their professional salaries (for example, it is not surprising in Zimbabwe to come across a mere journalist working for state media, but with powerful political connections, owning several properties that he can never acquire on his journalist’s earnings).

This breed of political leaders is beyond redemption and cannot be expected to reform and be like the biblical Zaccheus, the chief tax collector who repented and gave away his ill-gotten wealth. Politicians of this kind, who unfortunately at present dominate the political scene in Zimbabwe, must be removed from office and mechanisms put in place to ensure that this breed becomes extinct. This legacy of leaders who doggedly pursue self-serving interests must be broken. Without such a paradigm shift, charting a new political direction for Zimbabwe will remain a pipe dream. It is worthwhile noting for political leaders in government, particularly those in the MDC whom many of us look up to in hope, that greed is not a trait confined to leaders from one particular political party.

Zimbabwe desperately needs political leaders with integrity, who deeply care for others, and have the ability to self-transcend. Political leaders are judged not on the basis of the political party they belong to, but on content of their character and their service to humanity. I am absolutely convinced that if we had leaders who really cared then Zimbabwe would not have gone through the horror, pain and suffering which characterised the past decade and continues. It is not an act of God, neither is it a freak of nature, that Zimbabwe finds itself in this multi-layered socio-economic, humanitarian and political crisis. The issue boils down to want of able political leadership. Want of leaders who have already distinguished themselves in their private and professional lives who now take up public life leadership roles to serve, deriving satisfaction from putting a smile on an old woman’s face.

If we all stand back from things that are broken, that need fixing and say that we can’t do any thing, and that the government is responsible and they need to fix it. And if the government says that it doesn’t have the money to fix it then does that mean that there is no solution? Does that mean students will forever go without schools and books and teachers? And sick people will go without hospitals doctors and nurses? If we all agree that we don’t want handouts from rich countries and that we want to dictate the terms of their aid, and yet we still expect them to come and bail us out, do we really believe that they will take us seriously? If we let our politicians get away with corruption and we don’t hold the MPs that we voted into position accountable for their actions, who really is to blame for a bad situation turning into an untenable one?

And so 40 more people have died on the Harare-Masvingo-Beitbridge road. Before that it was 30, and before that? Many more.

As a nation we seem to have lost our sense of outrage. We have become inured to death and loss. It seems as if over the past ten years, we have lost so many people we have become desensitised to death. Whether it is 1 of fifty people dead doesn’t seem to matter.  Just earlier this year we were losing hundreds of people to cholera by the week.  Mothers, fathers and children, gone.

Now this bus crash has claimed so many lives. Mothers, fathers, children. We will not hold our breath that something will be done soon. When Susan Tsvangirai lost her life on the same stretch of road, noises were made. Months later, those noises had died down. Until this. Now I suspect there will be a resumed frenzied cacophony of them. But after all the noise has died down, after the State has bought coffins, doled out bags of maize and provided transport for the dead, life will go back to normal. We will be stuck once more with a State which helps people when they die, but does not help them live.  Then officialdom like circling vultures will wait. Wait for the next crash (it cannot be an accident when we can pretty much predetermine the cause). Wait for the next batch of people to die. Wait to declare a state of disaster and buy more coffins, dole out more maize and provide more transport for the dead. Shedding crocodile tears while leaving the road unfixed.

Don’t you just love this?

TIME: How real is the transition?

Tsvangirai: This transitional inclusive government can already record some significant progress, in critical areas like education, health, water and sanitation and food.

I reckon Tsvangirai needs to take some time out and visit the many waterless and powerless suburbs in Harare. And whilst he’s at it, he should take his US$100 a month salary (yeah right) and see how far it gets him in Zimbabwe – one of the most expensive countries in the world.

Hmmm. Education? Right. Well here’s an excerpt from a recent Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU) statement:

Students were given the platform to air out problems they are facing at their different institutions. The meeting was briefly disturbed by ZANU Pf youths who were purporting to be students, but it managed to proceed after 30mins of delay. The ZINASU Vice President, Briliant Dube chaired the meeting and briefed the participants on the activities ZINASU is carrying out. The students raised the following issues:

- Unaffordability of education.

- Poor sanitation facilities.

- Under qualified teaching personnel.

- Electricity and water problems.

- Outdated library materials.

- Shortage of computers.

- The ratio is 200 students per 1 computer.

- Students are not allowed to attend lectures without proof of paying fees.

- No Students Representative Council (SRC) at Solusi University.

I’ve just read a statement that’s come in from a Zimbabwean NGO called Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development. The statement calls for an audit of “Zimbabwe’s unpayable and odious loans” and asserts, “Zimbabwe’s debt – much of which has resulted from the post colonial burden, failed IFI structural reform programs in the nineties, and the lack of access to debt reduction programmes that other countries have benefited from.”

Whilst there is an urgent need for this kind of audit there is also an urgent need for organisations like ZIMCODD and Transparency International-Zimbabwe to charter that scary and unpopular course of demanding that public servants like Mugabe have his wealth investigated and audited.

According to the statement “Debt relief from both multilateral and bilateral creditors is imperative if Zimbabwe is to be able to meet the basic needs of its people”. It is also true to say that Zimbabweans need debt relief from the avarice of Zanu PF.

According to Zimbabwe’s 2005 Demographic Health Survey (DHS), 47% of women aged 15 to 49 reported an experience with either physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.

Statistically speaking, it is difficult to make an over-time comparison because the 1999 DHS did not collect data on incidences of violence against women.  I suspect, and literature supports the argument that including incidences of violence in the 2005 DHS is the result of recognition that violence against women in Zimbabwe has been increasing.  Beyond statistics I see the pressing and complex question as follows.  If you ask a Zimbabwean man:  What do you think your wife would do if you hit her?  Or a Zimbabwean woman: What would you do if your husband hit you?   I suspect, more often than not, the answer to either of those questions would not be an immediate, without hesitating…. I would never hit my wife. Or my husband would never hit me.  Instead, a male or female respondent would pause.  And think.  Their pausing and thinking is because that act of violence in the home is a very real possibility.  That real possibility is troublesome, but to me equally as troublesome is resting in a space where it’s ok to pause before answering the questions I posed.  In Zimbabwe, copious are cultural practices, traditions, perspectives around normative spousal roles, forms of peer pressure, extended family dynamics, failures to communicate, economic hardships, and so on which explain away why domestic violence exists.  Yet, these types of explanations only scratch the surface in trying to understand the baseline crux of the matter:  What prompts one human being to inflict physical and emotional harm on another human being?

With an interest in exploring the issue of violence, International Video Fair Trust (IVF)  brought a group of seven men and seven women together for a week of discussions during the first week of July.  These in-depth discussions were filmed and I served as director for the week’s programme and the film project.  The methodology follows that used for the 2008 filming of IVF’s Sex in the City of Harare.   The basic idea is this:  Create a safe space for people to speak and debate openly and honestly.  Encourage the participants to move beyond the predictable conversation.  Capture the discussions, the emotion, and trepidation on film.  Make a documentary film which presents the story that unfolded during the week.  Screen it locally as a way to guide individual communities to engage themselves in similar conversations.  In the end, both the week long discussions which are filmed and in turn, the documentary film itself, serve as an awareness-building, educational, and advocacy tool.  In this case, advocacy which ultimately is about helping people understand that there are options other than violence when it comes to resolving disagreements.

One reason this participatory discussion methodology works well is that nearly all pressing issues have, at their core, simple solutions.  Just that getting to that simple solution is a layered process which requires honest, probing, and direct conversations about what is preventing positive change from taking place. Therefore, with respect to the topic of violence is the line of thought that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the simple equation violence = harm is not sufficient to bring about an immediate shift to non-violence.  Instead, making the shift involves letting an introspective process play out.  This is to say that it is easy to assert that violence is wrong, but much harder to actually make the necessary changes at both personal and societal levels to enable violence-free lives.  The latter step to actually change requires an intellectual thought process to recast ways of thinking and ways of being.  Further it is not merely a matter of women demanding men change. Or men demanding women change.  Change has to come from within.  And it doesn’t happen overnight.  What the week of filming brought forth was a group of people who I observed as intricately conflicted individuals, very much at different points with respect the introspective process that tries to understand and reduce violence.  The discussions provided space to recognize the complexities at work and to reflect on why you yourself and people in general are resistant to change.

Now that the filming is complete, I’ve been trying to conceptualize a story for a film.  And have been thinking a lot about performances of masculinity and their potential relationship to acts of violence.   In this instance, by performance of masculinity I mean the ways people (men and women) put on an act as a way to assert authority and control over another person.  The thing about these kinds of performances is that to an outside observer they often make evident contradictions.  But to the person engaged in that performance of masculinity likely the contradiction is not seen.  The inability to see the contradiction is because what’s at work is a performance to get what you want, what you think you are entitled to.  And what you want, your entitlements, and the ways in which you obtain them do not necessarily bring forth contradictions in your mind.  For example, it’s not unheard of for a man to speak gushingly about loving his wife.  When that husband enters discussion concerning, for example, labola, conjugal rights, and/or household duties, there are ways that conversation becomes about the authority and control the husband feels he has over his wife.  Engaging in a discussion of wanting that power is a performance of masculinity, while pursuing that desire might result in the husband using physical and/or emotional violence to get his way.  The outside observer is likely going to look at that situation and ask:  If you love your wife why would you hit her?  And go on to say:  That’s a contradiction.  But not to the husband, as he feels he is rightfully doing what is necessary to get what he wants.

Another example might be a woman who intelligently and passionately asserts that it is wrong for a man to be violent toward a woman.  This assertion might become so strong in the woman’s mind that she will make maneuvers and strategize how to ensure her husband does not become violent.  Whether it involves being a perfectly obedient and subservient wife or gaining economic independence within the marriage and keeping those earnings for herself, there are ways she is engaged in a performance of masculinity, working to position herself as the person with authority and control of the relationship.  The outside observer is likely going to look at that situation and ask: If you love your husband why do you manipulate him and withhold from him?  And go on to say:  That’s a contradiction.   But not to the wife, as she feels she is rightfully doing what is necessary to get what she wants.

The paragraph above is a tricky one.  Probably not the status quo line of analysis around the topic of violence.  After hearing fourteen Zimbabweans talk about violence for five and half days, it has become crystal clear to me that the status quo analysis is not enough.  All status quo gets to is the far too easy space of relying on broad sweeping statements such as men are socialized to be violent, women must be empowered, culture accepts violence.  But those concepts—socialization, empowered, culture—often are either loaded or vacuous, they don’t go very far in actually telling us much about the nitty gritty detail of the dilemma.  What’s much harder, yet in my view far more important, is to open up.  Be honest.  And dare I say, get in touch with your feelings.  Recognize your own masculine performances that concern desire for power and in turn the ways ensuing actions towards others might be contradictory.   Fourteen Zimbabweans admirably spent a week travelling down this path of honesty.  The door is open for the next fourteen.

Alternatively, if broad sweeping statements must be invoked, my suggestion would be the one that is the broadest of the lot.  This being.  Much of Zimbabwe’s history (and world history for that matter) has involved one big chess match of masculine performers and their quests for power.  To be successful in the quest might require violence, so the wisdom contradictorily goes.  Flows then that individual homes and extended families in the present often end up smaller-scale versions of this chess match.