According to today’s Herald, the Registrar General’s office now enables one to access the passport application form online, fill it in, print it out, bring it to a passport office – and get an SMS when it’s ready for collection.

Today, our attempts to access the Registrar General’s website have been intermittently successful – Suggesting that perhaps they’re getting more hits with the launch of this service than their server has capacity for. But we were able to get to the online form, which looks like this:

I did think to myself – “But I’m not Patience. Can’t I be Amanda whilst the form is downloading?” but other than that, I can’t complain.

I could fill in the form on their site, print it locally, and could take it to the passport office and submit it in person if I wanted to apply for a passport.

According to The Herald, the fee for using the online form will be $33 – less than the standard $50 charge, and you’re spared the step of having to queue up just to get the form. So all of that certainly sounds more convenient than the current system.

So, will it really work? Who will be the first to try it? If you do, let us know!

Jill Roberts represented Kubatana at the recent SHARE Beirut event.

SHARE Beirut is a weekend-long public, free and non-commercial hybrid event blending an Internet culture and technology related daytime conference with dynamic cutting-edge music festival by night. It will bring together hundreds of passionate people, forward-thinkers, cultural creatives, activists and artists from Lebanon as all around the world for talks and parties in 72 hours of powerful gathering to share ideas, knowledge and creativity.

Last Sunday in Harare East I noticed women wearing bright yellow t-shirts with Mugabe’s face on them. Members of a soccer team, with Mugabe as patron. Is this subtle election campaigning? Getting Mugabe’s face out there in a benign way but all the while reinforcing his party’s position. The MDC could learn a thing or two.

Have you noticed that work on the Harare Airport Dualisation Project (read “dollarisation” – the folks who got that contract are doing well for themselves) seems to have stopped. The poor home dwellers lining the Airport Road in Hatfield have gates fronted by gravel and dust coating everything. Imagine when (if) the rains come. Mud madness.

A late night visit to Avondale Police Station. A broken window. Demoralised staff who looked like they couldn’t care less.

The pleasure of your company is requested at

‘I S O L A T I O N’

An exhibition of graphics by

Virginia Chihota

To be opened by

Cosmas Shiridzinomwa
Artist Painter, Lecturer and Dean of the Students at
Harare Polytechnic

on Tuesday, 16th October, 2012 at 5.30.p.m.

Previewing from noon the same day

Exhibition duration until 5th November, 2012

at
gallery delta
‘Robert Paul’s Old House’
110 Livingstone Avenue/Ninth Street
Greenwood Park, Harare
Telephone/Fax 792135

Services which citizens of a nation are supposed to get from local authorities as a basic right have become a privilege.

In almost every town in Zimbabwe citizens are bemoaning poor service delivery – from dry taps to dark nights caused by load shedding. Mounting complaints fall on deaf ears. Recently it was reported that City of Harare’s wage bill has doubled leaving little revenue going to service delivery.

For decades now the Zambezi water project (now Zambezi water pipe dream), which is supposed to help solve Bulawayo’s water woes, has not produced positive results even when the Movement for Democratic Change took over the Ministry of Water. Residents of Bulawayo recently had to resort to the so-called “Big Flush” and Councilor Thaba Moyo was quoted saying, “The big flush is meant to take care of areas that would have been placed under water rationing. Residents will be asked to systematically flush all their toilets so that sufficient water will be deposited in the system in order to get rid of the material that would have dried up and blocked the system.” I just can’t imagine residents trying to beat evening traffic to reach home so that they can comply with the 7:30 pm Big Flush directive.

Service delivery problems are even affecting smaller towns like Gweru and Masvingo.

Try to imagine a growing town like Chitungwiza with no independent water supply of its own having to rely on City of Harare for supply of this precious basic right which sometimes gets disconnected for non-payment.

Soon it will be raining and heaps of gravel will be dumped along the roads to patch up pothole riddled partly tarred roads. This exercise of patching tarred roads with gravel has not done any good to the roads as the potholes have increase to ditches making the roads impassable during rainy season.

And, instead of just starting with putting the pre-paid meters in households somebody didn’t do his/her job right at Zimbabwe’s power distribution company ZESA by wasting money ordering millions of bulbs to save electricity which residents only receive less than twelve hours a day.

Exhibition runs from 13 October – 19 October 2012.

The Cycle, a photographic exhibition about water and sanitation in the city of Harare, by Davina Jogi.

Davina Jogi is a freelance photojournalist from Harare. She focuses on telling daily life stories about Zimbabwe that are often not covered by international media, and has worked with a variety of local and international newspapers, magazines and NGOs.

She was awarded the 2012 Media and Advocacy Grant from Market Photo Workshop for which she photographed a story about Harare’s water and sanitation challenges, entitled The Cycle.

The Media and Advocacy Photography Mentorship
The Media and Advocacy Photography Mentorship is solely aimed at the development of photographers with an interest in documenting societal issues that might often go unacknowledged in the mainstream media.  Davina Jogi is the first recipient of the award and her mentor for the project was Jonathan Torgovnik.

About the Market Photo Workshop
The Market Photo Workshop is a Johannesburg-based school of photography, gallery and resource centre for practicing photographers. Since its establishment in 1989, the school has played an integral role in the training and growth of photographers from South Africa and further afield.

For more information
Davina Jogi: www.davinajogi.com