One really has to wonder about the Zimbabwe government’s airport highway project. First, there’s hardly anyone using the airport. Second, on my return to Zimbabwe last Thursday evening, there were no traffic lights working and there was very little street lighting. The current road does its job just fine. Pretty soon we’ll have a very big and expensive road and we’ll still have no street lighting or working traffic lights because Zimbabwe’s national power company can’t deliver.

Some fine minds at work in our government.

The non-working traffic lights on the night I returned were of course causing mayhem. Lounging in the dark at these intersections were details of two policemen and women clearly waiting for some political chef to make his or her way home from the airport. They stood idly by gazing at the traffic snarled up in front of their noses. But, imagine if they were caught directing traffic and Mugabe or Tsvangirai came motorcading through!

On arriving home I was greeted at the back door with someone waving a torch at me.

I was told that most days and nights there had been a powercut. Since Thursday I’ve had one day of power. The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) estimates our bills every month. Amounts are not based on actual useage. But do you think that they’ll take into account that as winter bites and they’re providing a third of the power they used to, that they will estimate their bills down. Ha. Fat chance. Instead our bills will remain the same, or in many cases, increase.

Bright sparks at work in ZESA? I don’t think so.

The Kubatana offices are on the second floor of an office building near the city centre of Harare. Yip, the women’s toilets are painted a garish pink, and the men’s a bright blue. Go figure. It seems like the whole of Harare is experiencing dry taps today, even whilst we’ve just had a major down pour – the last of the rainy season?

The first time I heard about sanctions, back in 2005, I thought it was a lie fabricated by Gono et al to justify his heavy handed printing of currency and the resultant inflation as a necessary evil.

No one can deny that this worked in the favour of those with connections and in high office to profiteer off the situation without regard for the plight of the general mass of Zimbabweans. My resentment was always especially directed at ministers and such who casually drove past me in their government issue air conditioned Benz as I stood in a round-the-block queue waiting to get my money from the bank for the Kombi home.

Later in the evening, they would be on ZBC news, well dressed and rotund, emphatically telling a ragged, sinewy audience just in from their drought-stricken fields that ‘we live in poverty because of sanctions”… some of us more than others.

Last week a newsreader on radio was saying that hospitals and are ill-equipped because of sanctions and let loose a diatribe about the effects of poor health care on Zimbabweans. There was little mention of the facts: diagnostic machinery has fallen into disrepair because the companies that sold it to us cannot or will not honour their service agreements because their home countries either make no effort to encourage trade with Zimbabwe, or at worst actively discourage it. A little while ago Natpharm declared that they had run out of stocks for the Malaria TB programme in the height of the malaria season. Again without reference to the fact that the programme is largely funded by the Global Fund, which is heavily influenced by the US government and has for several years rejected applications by Zimbabwe for funding of this and other programmes because of mismanagement by the government and the effects of ZIDERA.

Much has been made by the government of ZIDERA. But the strategy of speaking the name of its demon possessor fails government again. They do not explain that while the act does makes provision for targeted sanctions against individuals, it also empowers the US to use its voting rights and influence (as the main donor) in multilateral lending agencies, such as the IMF, World Bank, and the African Development Bank to veto any applications by Zimbabwe for finance, credit facilities, loan rescheduling, and international debt cancellation. This basically means that the Government of Zimbabwe is not only broke but it is in massive debt, following not only from the governments own over expenditure, corruption and mismanagement but also from the structural adjustment programmes it was ‘encouraged’ to implement by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1990s.

For the ordinary Zimbabwean this means that the government is unable to carry out it’s essential services. It is unable to bring electricity to rural houses, fix potholes in the roads, supply clinics and hospitals with drugs, build dams or increase the capacity of the water delivery system. This in turn means that we have places in Zimbabwe that saw better times in the stone age, and health crises such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and cholera will always be a rainy season away.

Land reform may have been successful, but there is no way to protect people from random acts of nature. In times of drought, such as this year, sanctions mean that the government cannot buy maize to feed its own population. Even without an act of nature the government is unable to fully support farmers as is the policy in more developed countries.

The anti sanctions propaganda fails to explain how exactly sanctions affect the average person living an ordinary life. Our government in its poor application of propaganda fails to understand that they have educated their population beyond their simplistic reasoning, and the contradictions and omissions in the information they liberally propagate on the state broadcaster are not lost on us. Reading Marko Phiri’s blog on the views of the people in Gwanda, I am not surprised to find that many people understand the sanctions to be merely about travel bans.

Half way through a too hot, too long run yesterday my friend asked me if I wanted a “penny cool,” one of those colourful, frozen sugar water drinks thus named from the 80’s when they really did cost just one cent. Gratefully, I assented. So much for one cent each though. In 2010? They’re 5 (South African) rand each, or two for a (US) dollar.

Late yesterday afternoon I got a Big Shock. While I was at home there was a hoot at the gate and lo and behold, a Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) meter reader had arrived to do an Actual reading rather than the usual Estimate.

I took the opportunity to ask him two (2) questions:

1) If I only get power between 8 or 9 at night until about 5am most days then surely my electricity bill shouldn’t go up, or stay the same, it should go down? He nodded his head in profuse agreement but said that ZESA seldom does actual readings so they continue to estimate useage and don’t take into account the fact, the sad, sad, fact that they supply very little power to home owners. In other words, every month, if ZESA doesn’t actually read your meter and do some accurate calculations, they’re robbing you and me, all of us, blind.

2) Why doesn’t ZESA publish a load shedding schedule so that we know when to plan to eat and all that stuff? Well the ZESA meter reader said that ZESA can’t vaguely guarantee any kind of regular supply and that the power deficit is so huge that they have to flip the switch Off at any given moment.

I said thanks a lot – its not his fault – and said see ya later. I watched him drive away, clutching his meter readings, in a brand spanking shiny new mini bus.

What sense does this make? This 15 seater mini-van hopping from house to house when ZESA should have a fleet of motor-cycles moving around our city, doing Actual meter readings.

A week before the FIFA hoopla in South Africa began Minister of Energy Elias Mudzuri made the following announcement:

“I have directed ZESA to suspend disconnections to allow the public to enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Zimbabweans have had to endure persistent power cuts for as much as 10 hours per day in some case while ZESA battles to meet demand.”

Essentially ZESA would suspend its regular programme of load shedding so that football fans would not miss the World Cup.

While I’m not a soccer fan I was happy, actually jubilant, that we would have a few more hours a day of electricity. I even considered that I might be able to take a proper hot bath, with more than a bucket of water and perhaps even some bubbles. I admit I may have misinterpreted the Ministers remarks. I thought that it would follow that those customers who had been loyal, i.e. had been paying their bills, to the power utility, would also be rewarded.

As with most promises made by politicians, this one failed and even went backwards. I have been disappointed by Ministers before. In fact I’m still recovering from the promises made to me by another Minister regarding the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe issuing radio and television licences.

In the case of ZESA, and the electricity delivered to my house, the disappointment is particularly bitter. Our loyalty as ZESA customers feels like its being violated. We paid our bills regularly, even in the confusion that followed dollarisation, the few US dollars that we had went first towards the ZESA bill, even when the meter wasn’t being read. When we had faults, we drove the ZESA people around. Under the circumstances, I think we as customers have done more than our fair share of maintaining a cordial relationship with our power utility.

Yet following the Minister’s announcement, it seems that now that we have even fewer hours if any power per day. There has been no explanation of this in the paper, and instead ZESA sees fit to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign, which most notably features half a page of solid black ink. Moreover, the Minister’s statement undermines the entire purpose of the advertising campaign, and indeed ZESAs recovery. It’s simple, if you didn’t pay for the service, you shouldn’t get it. The World Cup is no exception.