It was at Punda Maria where, despite the intrusive Mopani trees and the irritating call of the Cape turtle dove, we got our first sighting.   We couldn’t believe our good luck.  If it wasn’t for a herd of impalas leaping idiotically over the road, we might have been able, with our Canon EOS 350D, to play with its shadow, its reflection, its profile.  You guessed it: a silver Toyota Land Cruiser Prado VX Turbo Diesel .  My hand was shaking when I ticked it on the checklist.

Our two-night stay at the Punda Maria rest camp was all but ruined by the crowds of long-tail cassias, Natal mahoganies, sycamore figs, tamboties, and the ubiquitous mopani.  The birds were intolerable, especially that raucous francolin!  Even worse, a pack of hyenas insisted on patrolling the boundary fence.  But all was not lost, for, parked two tents down from our campsite, was a Range Rover, 3.6 litre, V8 turbo-charged and intercooled diesel engine, glovebox illumination… smell those leather seats… and emblazoned on its rump, the proud words: “Don’t try to follow me – you won’t make it”.  We must have photographed it a hundred times.

After Punda Maria we headed southtowards Shingwedzi and, with the aid of our Zeiss FL (with fluoride glass) we almost completed our checklist: Mazda, Isuzu, Volkswagen, Ford, BMW, Honda, Opel, Nissan,  Hundayi… you name it.  But we were obsessed with the Big Five, and we’d already been fortunate enough to encounter two of them.  The famed Kanniedood Drive was a big disappointment because the bush was teeming with game: obnoxious giraffe, silly wildebeest, vain zebra, supercilious kudu….  Even the skies were polluted, with kingfishers, bee eaters, storks, herons and, worst of all, eagles and vultures.   At the sight of a ground hornbill waddling along the road with no fewer than three frogs in its repulsive beak, we almost decided to turn around and head for home.

If anything, our camping experience at Shingwedzi was even worse than those disturbed nights in Punda Maria. We had to erect our tent right under an apple leaf tree!   The resident birds, none more obnoxious than the glossy starlings and the woodland kingfishers, completely spoiled our sundowner time; and our sleep was disturbed by the yelping of jackals and the eructations of rutting impala.  We even had to listen to a leopard coughing.  But then peace at last, nay joy, when we heard the arrival of the ‘best 4X4 by far’, the Landrover Defender 2.5 TDi with Aircon, CD-Radio, Power Steering, Centre Diff Lock/Rear Diff Lock, Customised Safari Equipment.  Using our flash, we got in some good shots: from the back, from the front, and from both sides.  We managed to get a wonderful close-up of the left back passenger door handle, a picture we intend to frame.

On our way to Balule we were surprised to find that the low-level causeway over the Olifants was under water.  We, along with a number of other visitors, were afraid to attempt a crossing in case the powerful current swept us into the disgusting brown river.  It seemed as if we had been marooned there for ages, pulling faces at the wire-tailed swallows and the yellow-billed storks, bored stupid by a fight between two male hippos, sickened by the cry of the fish eagle… when a seeming miracle took place.   We heard the powerful diesel engine before we witnessed it:  a snow white Toyota Fortuner 3.0TD 4X4 with all the mod cons including mp3, Elec. Windows, and Airbags.  Almost simultaneously a huge rogue elephant with tusks that ploughed the earth before it, began crossing the causeway from the other side.  There is no stopping one of the Big Five, however – except briefly, to engage  low gear – and the Fortuner  eased on to the causeway.  The current swirled about its massive, beautifully treaded wheels as it approached the elephant, now flapping its ears like carpets being dusted.

We began to giggle with excited apprehension.  Predictably the elephant chickened out and backed away, allowing the Fortuner to cross over to glory.  We cheered and cheered, as did the other stranded visitors, all deeply satisfied with our photos of that ineffable vehicle.

After an hour or two the water subsided sufficiently for us to attempt a crossing, and we were mightily relieved to get to the other side.  Balule was a most rewarding camp site since we counted no fewer than thirteen white and silver Toyota Hilux Double Cabs within the boundary fence.  If there were a sixth Big One, this vehicle would be It.  Our disappointments were restricted to a few squirrels and an ugly pair of plum-coloured starlings.  Oh, and the far too many Terminalia prunioides with their creamy flowers in slender axillary spikes, their purplish red fruits, and their long, drooping branches.

The next day turned out to be our last because we got to see the last of the Big Five; consequently there was no longer any point in enduring unpleasant scenery: bush, bush, and more bush – especially when it teemed with game.  We suspected something dramatic when, on our way to Satara, we saw a herd of buffalo surrounding a male lion, which had been mortally wounded in a battle with a sable antelope.  That was on the left side of the road.  On the right side a rhino and a leopard had teamed up to fight an elephant, and the result was carnage, enthusiastically welcomed by four species of vulture, a family of hyenas, a pack of wild dogs, a marabou stork, and God knows how many dung beetles.  And guess what we saw in the midst of it all? Yes:  the rarest and positively the most beautiful (and dangerous) of the Big Five: a Mitsubishi Pajero with Bull Bars, electronically controlled sequential multi-port fuel injection, and a place to hold a can of coke.

There is always something uncharitable said about power whenever one has it in abundance and has the ability to influence things – and human beings. Thus it has been said that if you want something done expeditiously you must know people in high places. Power and influence. You have one, you have both. You have it all. The world in your palm. Where better else than well-connected politicians?

But there are also people in low places who have been known to have power and influence – the type that only gets you and them into trouble with the laws of Man and also the laws of nature as the favours they bestow and their line of work more often than not leave someone dead.

Power-drunk men and women have ruled ruthlessly over bamboozled men, women and children and stories abound about the Central African Republic’s Jean Bedel Bokassa being a cannibal having a strong palate for his opponents. Power to eat others, yes he had it! So imagine while enraged baddies scream “I will kill you,” you have them roaring, “I will eat you!” At least Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Malawi’s Ngwazi and self-anointed President-for-life let his pet crocodiles do the eating for him. Thus man and beast became no different.

It would be interesting to look at the favourite cuisine of African presidents, as a documentary showed on DStv the other day let us in on the food enjoyed by the two Bushes, Clinton and other past American presidents.

The powerful people that we know and who tend to be held in awe by other mere mortals have for some reason always been politicians. This is despite the truism that politicians are just people after all – very fallible and very mortal like everybody else. Do politicians go hungry? Stupid question! They have a right to eat, and whatever they eat will never be used against them in a court of culinary preferences! And what do we have to say for the powerless that appear by their own peculiar circumstances to have no right to eat? They are the wretched of the earth as Fanon put it.

Politicians tend to see themselves as “the Chosen Ones” (catch my drift?) both omnipotent and omniscient in the fashion of the philosopher-kings lionised, idolised and iconised by the sages of ancient Greece, so imagine someone who by a fluke of nature has been burdened by being endowed with the exact opposite. They are neither wise nor powerful but though they are hungry, they are sure not likely to eat one of their own!

These powerless people could be wise in their own eyes, but within their realm and physical realities have no power to control anything, not even the joystick of a play station if they were handed one. How can they when they are hungry? For them everything becomes heavy, not the type seen in political heavyweights who fail to lift themselves off giant beds! Just look at them trying to get off chauffeur-driven Mercs with their sagging bellies refusing to leave the car!

We know the mysterious power and ability of politicians to erect bridges where there is no river, ability to literally build castles in the air for rural folks, etc, but it is the ultimate powerlessness of a single unemployed mother to control the destiny of her offspring that raises the spectre of human limitation in a universe where political power appears to guarantee one economic utopia and therefore eternal bliss.

Have we not seen how aspiring parliamentary candidates fall over each other and fomenting bloodbaths as they seek to earn the right to represent “we the people” only because that unspoken determination to occupy that space is informed by that yearning for power? People “naturally” associate political power with the control of not only people’s lives but more importantly resources be they natural or man-made and thus becoming an MP becomes for many the ultimate triumph in the quest of all human endevours.

Ultimately one is inclined to rather ask a rather asinine question: what is power if it gives you the right to eat and it goes on to take away the right to eat from the powerless? Crazy world huh? “I can’t talk religion (politics[i]) to a man with hunger in his eyes.”  George Bernard Shaw (1905).

If only politicians could read!

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[i] italics mine.

Colletah, a Kubatana subscriber has just written to us with a demand that the Government of National Unity treat the issue of investigating human rights abuses with the respect it deserves . . .

Politicians in Zimbabwe say “Our call is to let bygones be bygones and for everyone and every entity to start anew and open a new page.”

I keep reading statements like the above about the situation in Zimbabwe. Where is logic in the people who are demanding that we forget about the past and get on to a new page. It is not possible to forget the torture in all forms that has gone on in the past political upheavals that have happened in the country. How do you think “OK YOU KILLED MY FATHER” but it does not matter that was yesterday, lets start a new page or “YOU RAPED ME” but let bygones be bygones and we start a new page.  Zimbabwe, please  be serious and be real. In post independent Zimbabwe it was “reconciliation” where the thinking was the same – lets forget and work together for Zimbabwe – now see the mess of letting bygones be bygones.

Zimbabwe  please Call a Spade a Spade and bring those that did wrong to face the music – that is logic.  This new page business is nonsense and we all know that life does not work like that.

Giles Mutsekwa, the MDC-T Co-Home Affairs Minister was involved in a car accident on Tuesday last week – another in a series of car accidents in which MDC officials and their families have been involved. Mutsekwa was travelling to Harare on the Mucheke road when the car in which he was travelling was rammed from behind by a Nissan Hard Body truck. The Co-Minister survived unscathed. The driver of the other vehicle involved in the accident is reported to be in police custody. Mutsekwa heads the Home Affairs ministry jointly with Kembo Mohadi of Zanu PF. This is the fourth accident involving MDC officials since the unity government was established. Prime Minister Tsvangirai’s wife was killed in an accident which left Tsvangirai injured. Deputy Prime Minister Thokozani Khuphe’s mother died from injuries received in an accident on the Bulawayo-Harare road last month. MDC ministers Gorden Moyo and Sam Nkomo were travelling to Harare airport last month when the vehicle in which they were travelling was also struck from behind by another vehicle. I am not about to launch into a conspiracy theory analysis. In fact, I was disappointed by some of the comments made at the time of Susan Tsvangirai’s death. One MDC official ignoring the bad state of Zimbabwe’s roads made the comment that the accident or at the least the death would not have happened if there had been police escort. I remember thinking of all the thousands of people who daily traverse the Masvingo road on their way to Beitbridge and beyond to South Africa. I thought then as l do now that they have never had police escort. They get on those buses and in those cars on a wing and a prayer and hope that they make it back home with their lives intact. Because of the shock surrounding this sad incident and the conspiracy theories then doing the rounds, people did not analyse this statement too much. But perhaps it needs to be critiqued.

We do not rejoice in the death of a human being. Everyone has a right to life. From the poorest among us to the richest.  From the lowest among us to the most influential. We must reject the notion that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others. This is the thinking that has seen politicians sending their children to schools overseas while presiding over the destruction of our schools and universities. It is the same thinking that has seen politicians going for treatment in South Africa, the UK, China and beyond, while presiding over the collapse of our health delivery system.  It was normal under the ZANU PF government, but we do not expect it from the MDC. It is the disease that comes with closeness to power that Alex Magaisa in his latest opinion piece talks about. It is the former mayor of Harare demanding a four wheel drive vehicle because the roads in Harare were so bad.

Now we have had a lot of talk about the roads in Zimbabwe. The terrible state that they are in and the loss of lives that this has resulted in. Every time there is an accident, politicians talk about the deplorable state of the roads in Zimbabwe. When l started writing this piece, it was my intention to discuss the accidents that have happened involving prominent politicians in the past two or three months, including the latest one involving Giles Mutsekwa. Before l finished this piece, news came through that there had been yet another accident. This time a bus travelling on the same highway where Susan Tsvangirai’s accident occurred apparently burst a front tyre and plunged into a river a few kilometres from the spot where the Prime Minister’s wife lost her life. 29 people perished on the spot and another 44 were injured. 29 nameless and faceless people. 29 people who were someone’s mother, father, son and daughter. Someone’s breadwinner. 44 people who now have to contend with hospitals that have no drips, no doctors, no nurses, no medicines, no theatres, no x-ray machines and no traction machines. They had no police escort.

And so more carnage on our roads. But in a country where human life has been cheapened by politicians, l fear that their deaths will be in vain. No one will be galvanised to act to prevent further loss of life. No lessons will be drawn from this sad event and no one will pledge-never again . . . until the next “important” person is involved.

So the MPs have been the recipients of the RBZ’s largesse? Suddenly the Guv’s activities are not quasi-fiscal now that the MPs are the beneficiaries?  “But what about the luxury vehicles that Ministers took delivery of on being sworn in?” Cried the MPs, when they received orders from the Minister of Finance to return the vehicles. “We too deserve luxury cars!” They whined.

“Comrades!”  he cried. “You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.”*

“Surely, comrades, surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?”

Now if there was one thing that the animals were completely certain of, it was that they did not want Jones back. When it was put to them in this light, they had no more to say. The importance of keeping the pigs in good health was all too obvious. So it was agreed without further argument that the milk and the windfall apples (and also the main crop of apples when they ripened) should be reserved for the pigs alone.

So the hospitals remain without doctors, medication and equipment. The schools remain without books, teachers and pupils. Budiriro remains without water; in the grip of a now unspoken cholera epidemic. The killer highways remain. 500 km away from the seat of power, crocodiles maintain their vigil in the Limpopo River, patiently waiting for the border jumper, wading into the river’s deadly depths. Still hoping for a better life on the other side. Better this animal, than the one in Harare. 7 bus loads of women, occupying a 75 seater bus will die this year while delivering the nation’s next generation. Children who will join and swell the ranks of the country’s 1.3 million orphans; to continue inexorably on the road to destitution. While the new political elite jostle at the trough.

* George Orwell

It’s 15 days into the “First 100 Days” of implementing the Short Term Economic Recovery Programme, and government hasn’t even released the plan of what it’s considering in the short term – much less implemented any of it.

The MDC is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they know that public confidence depends on them making some tangible headway in Zimbabwe’s economic recovery. On the other hand, governments like the US are refusing to give them the financial support they need unless there is rule of law and respect for human rights.

The latest report from the International Crisis Group supports the MDC’s calls for “humanitarian aid plus.” This would see Zimbabwe getting aid for education, health care, civil servant salaries, and infrastructure projects. But, given the stance the US is taking at least, it seems unlikely Zimbabwe will get the support it needs any time soon.

Ambassador James McGee said recently:

It is illegal under the existing laws of the United States to pay salaries to civil servants – we call it budget assistance. I cannot pay a secretary for the Ministry of Health or an economist in the RBZ, I would go to jail for that. What we are trying to look at is other ways of helping the government of Zimbabwe like revitalising Harare Central Hospital. The government itself will have to pay its civil servants and I hope it will be able to generate money to pay its civil servants. Read more

African countries have been approached to assist Zimbabwe, but most have limited funds themselves. If the interim government can’t stop the latest wave of farm invasions, and demonstrate a dramatic turn around in civil liberties, it will be difficult to persuade the US and EU to provide “humanitarian aid plus.”

Meanwhile, the RBZ’s dirty laundry is also coming out – Gono has admitted to raiding the bank accounts of private companies and international NGO’s for foreign currency. But, he swears, that’s all in the past – “Let bygones be bygones,” he says.

When will the interim government start demanding higher standards – and acting on some of its promises?