First it was the cars, followed by salary increments, then sitting allowances, now its demands for residential stands in leafy suburbs. What is most fascinating about these latest demands is the choice of area. Meaning MPs want residential stands in the areas like Borrowdale Brooke, Grey Stone Park but not Budiriro or Mufakose. Most of these legislators never owned a residential stand even in the high-density suburbs where the Povo live and where the bulk of the greedy lawmakers came from. Hiding under the disguise of the fact that the government owes them money in sitting allowances so they should be given the stands at a subsidized rate leaves one wondering if the law makers are holding the country hostage. Since they are the lawmakers they are just going to pass the resolutions and get the stands just like their previous demands at the expense of the taxpayer.

Such a clever and calculating move comes at a time when the nation is still gripped with fear of early elections meaning some of these MPs are now preparing for the future in the event that they lose the elections and get booted out of office.  Off the record some of these MPs have failed to attend Parliament sessions. Use your vote wisely in the next elections and don’t let your X cost you in the next five years.

I wrote to the Mayor of Harare last year about my concerns regarding the flagrant abuse of zoning regulations for businesses in suburban areas in Harare. No response. No big surprise. Everywhere you look there’s a creche, or a cafe, or a restaurant, or a clinic, or a security firm … it’s just not acceptable. I can only think that the authorities in the City of Harare are just plain incompetent, powerless or corrupt. Years ago people operating businesses from residential properties used to duck and dive to avoid The Law. But these days in Zimbabwe, the rule of law, along with any kind of rules and regulations, are flouted with impunity. Do the authorities in the City of Harare honestly think that it is fair and just for home owners to have the value of their property plummet, along with their quality of living, on the back of second hand car dealers et al getting to operate businesses illegally?

Here’s Mr Dube from Eastlea who shares similar concerns. In the meantime, Mr Mayor, please Wake Up, or get the hell out ….

Open Letter to the Mayor of Harare

We, the residents of Wheeler Avenue, Eastlea, Harare, wish to register our strong objection to the granting of consent for the setting up of car sales or any other type of business along this road.

Previous experience has shown that areas zoned for car sales businesses along Robert Mugabe Road/Glenara Avenue are de-greened in order to create parking space. We do not want this environmental damage to happen again in our area. Trees are central to our existence and we know why they are important. We value most of the great natural beauty and the charm of the treed area than the current piece-meal planning. Let us build the environment, instead of destroying it.

Whatever the merits of that decision may have been at the time, conditions have since changed so much since then that is no longer relevant. Already, there are a lot of car sales in the area; we do not see the need for more! The hard practical truth, in our opinion (although we are not experts in traffic engineering or town planning), is that the zoning for car sales ignores the absolute necessity of widening this access road to the city centre. To serve the material increase in population in Harare, Goromonzi and Ruwa as well as traffic from the entire route (Mutare-Harare), Robert Mugabe Road now requires extra road space equivalent to a six-way freeway with separate levels of crossing traffic to remove congestion. The current developments will cause Robert Mugabe Road to remain at its present abnormally low width. The blossoming car sales in our area engender traffic problems. Public and private vehicles are now using the roads on both sides of Robert Mugabe Road which is supposed to be an arterial transportation route, to avoid congestion at the Chiremba road traffic lights.

At least your good offices should have had the courtesy of asking residents if they had any objections to the zoning of our neighbourhood for car sales or any other business. This raises questions about the professional conduct of business and accountability at the Harare City Council offices. We call upon those with the requisite expertise on environmental governance to cause the city fathers to reverse irrational decisions that have a negative impact on the environment, let alone a residential area.

We hope this matter merits serious consideration.

Your assistance is greatly appreciated.

Yours Sincerely

G. Dube
CHRA Member (Eastlea)

We can no longer deny that the hopes and aspirations of the Zimbabwean people have been usurped by politicians. Neither ZANU PF nor MDC may claim innocence in illegally seizing what was supposed to be a ‘people driven’ constitution making process and manipulating it for their own political ends.  In truth neither party has the people’s wishes at heart.

In  Pambazuka, Maxwell V Madzikanga writes that the process has become a ‘tokenistic exercise for the rich corrupt and powerful’:

A national constitution is not a political and partisan document and thus all political and non-political actors in Zimbabwe were expected to unite around this very noble cause. This did not happen as politicians from the major political parties selfishly and parochially promoted their partisan position at the expense of national virtues, ethos, rationality and reason.

The constitution is not about regime change. The constitution-making phase was not supposed to be a stone-throwing, political space expansion exercise, sovereignty-induced visitations to the rural areas. The forums were supposed to be focus group reflections, listening tours and detailed discussions of fundamental, all and cross-generational ethos, virtues, values and thinking. The consultations were supposed to dialogical, discursive, give and take clinics and memorable encounters in the life and history of a republic in general and all stakeholders in particular. Sadly, this was not the case. A process that could have been harnessed to promote national unity and reconciliation ended up being hijacked by political heavy weights that stubbornly postured and arrogantly promoted their partisan agendas.

Read the full article here

From yesterday’s editorial in the Zimbabwean:

Zimbabweans are renowned for choosing to skirt hurdles instead of removing them. But this need not be so. Faced with the injustices perpetrated by public service institutions like Zesa and municipalities, we need to organise ourselves into vibrant and uncompromising lobby groups that fight for our civil rights.

These groups, divorced from political affiliation-for there is no water or ZESA with a Zanu (PF) or MDC colour-should strive to confront the authorities.

Strange, I thought that was the purpose of the civic society organisations operating in Zimbabwe. The real issues, water, power, education, health and poverty seem to have been lost in the tug of war between MDC and ZANU PF. Where are the lobby groups who are in the so-called grassroots fighting these battles with our legislators? Instead we are all preoccupied with a constitution that may never see the light of day and elections that have already been stolen.

Clearly, we are not doing enough.

I got a bit depressed this morning when I read The Herald article COPAC in gay storm. For all the bombast of the headline, and the frenzy around keeping gay rights out of Zimbabwe’s new Constitution, there really isn’t much of a story – which just makes the intolerance of the article all the more apparent.

The article references the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, where a non-discrimination clause provides that “Everyone has the right not to be treated in an unfairly discriminatory manner on such grounds as their nationality, race, colour, tribe, place or circumstances of birth, ethnic or social origin, language, class, religious belief, political or other opinion, custom, culture, sex, gender, marital status, age, disability or economic, social or other status.” It latches particularly onto the phrase “circumstances of birth,” and then proceeds to report feedback from a number of lawyers and analysts who acknowledge that yes, hypothetically, this could be used to make an argument to the courts against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Of course, depending on where you fall on the nature versus nurture debate, I suppose one could also make the same argument using the protection of opinion, custom, culture, or other status. But does this mean we must remove the broad notion of tolerance from our Constitution – because some group we might not like might use it to their own benefit? Racism, sexism and xenophobia remain prejudices in some people’s minds – which is why the Constitution explicitly protects people regardless of race, sex and nationality.

Regardless of whether it is used to make an argument in favour of tolerance for homosexuality, including protection against discrimination regardless of circumstances of birth demonstrates the sort of broad tolerance a Constitution should provide. This means it doesn’t matter whether your parents were married when they had you, if you were born in prison, on an inauspicious day, as the child of rape or incest, malnourished, premature and in need of extraordinary medical support, exposed to narcotics in utero, as conjoined twins, as an intersex baby, or any of the other myriad ways in which you might be different from others. You still have the same rights everyone else does.

All human beings are equal. That why they’re called Human Rights. We all get them, regardless. But all human beings discriminate. That’s why fundamental rights and freedoms are including in Constitutions, and why we need protection against intolerance – our own and other people’s. Finding yourself trying to take out a part of a clause designed to promote tolerance? Is all the more reason to work for its inclusion.

Since the introduction of the Internet in Zimbabwe a lot of people have started to embrace social media as a means to share information and to socialize. In countries in the Middle East social media was mainly used to cover the Arab spring protests where citizen journalists, only armed with a camera phone and Internet connection, managed to cover the events. Recently in Zimbabwe the press has been awash with stories of poor service delivery. The most recent and painful one being of a child who was seriously burnt by naked ZESA cables, the child eventually died. The good thing about citizen journalism is its done by citizens reporting on issues relating to their day to day lives and one can it do it without incurring any costs. Since an informed citizenry is a basic principal of self-governance, citizen journalists are the people who report from the ground and this makes their stories more credible than most of the profit driven articles we now read from the established media houses.