The hypocrisy in international cricket is mind boggling.

David Miliband, Britain’s Foreign Secretary has joined Flash Gordon in stating that Zimbabwe must not be allowed to tour England in the summer of 2009. Miliband is quoted as saying

“The situation in Zimbabwe is deeply concerning – I think bilateral cricket tours don’t send the right message about our concerns,” Miliband said. “This is something that needs to be discussed with the ECB and others.”

Now what if we substituted Zimbabwe for Pakistan in this argument?

As recently as July 2006 Pakistan was welcomed with open arms in the United Kingdom. Pakistan is variously described as repressive, violent and a dictatorship. The political opposition in Pakistan is either forced into exile, killed while campaigning, placed under house arrest or they have their rallies violently disrupted. If the England cricket team were scheduled to play in Pakistan it would be the fear of Monty and the gang getting in the way of a suicide bomber that would stop the tour. It wouldn’t be because England dislikes Mr Musharraf’s repressive regime.

Pakistan and Zimbabwe are probably as “bad” as each other. The difference is that Zimbabwe is a light weight in international cricket. Pakistan, on the other hand, with the backing of the Asian cricket heavy weights, would very quickly put England in its place if threatened with a boycott.

Personally I’ve been very supportive of a complete sporting and cultural boycott of Zimbabwe as a non-violent method of isolating the Mugabe regime and drawing attention to the abuse of human rights in this country. I’ve also participated in, and worked towards the boycott of cricket tours to Zimbabwe.

However I do think that its important to criticise Britain’s selective show of concern and their refusal to host the Zimbabwean cricket team.

In the chemist downstairs you can’t get any headache pills but you can buy individual Ferrero Rocher chocolates at Z$3 million a mouthful. I guess they’d ease the pain at a push. Sometimes its good not to aim too high so I’ve just been out in search of a good movie to watch tonight. I figured this would be easier than withdrawing some cash, or buying a chicken. This is Zimbabwe after all. Unfortunately all I could find were endless copies of Lost with badly photocopied covers. So I carried on to the TM Supermarket to see what I could find. Of course I had the choice of joining the 200 people queuing for sugar round the back but I thought I’d try the front door. Now I’m back in the office with some butter, two tins of tuna and 24 rolls. That should keep me going until January 13th.

The bad news is, among other things, that we’re being played. All that time spent queuing to exchange cash which is still valid? That money spent on transport to get to the banks to exchange the cash? The things people bought that they didn’t really need, but they didn’t want their cash to go to waste? To what end.

And, of course, we’re being played at a much larger scale. This whole cash situation is just one example. The largest denomination in circulation is the $750,000 bearer cheque. Never mind that they’re practically impossible to count – most of us aren’t very comfortable operating in base 75 – they’re also still completely inadequate to our needs. Is it any wonder the cash queues are still just as bad as they’ve been? The (state-run, Zanu PF mouthpiece, propagandising) Herald newspaper costs $900,000. A combi into town from a nearby suburb is $1,500,000. So if all you do is buy the paper and go in and out of town, you already need more than 5 of the largest bills. Granted, not everyone uses cash every day. And hey, with unemployment at 85% and 60% of the population living in the rural areas in a largely subsistence lifestyle, maybe Gono figures we’re all too poor to need pocket money – much less rent money, transport money, school fees money, uniforms money, food money, etc . . . .

But seriously. What self-respecting country has its largest denomination unable to buy a newspaper, or pay for local transport? Imagine if the United States announced tomorrow that all of their bills are out of circulation – it’s a coin only economy now and they’re not minting any larger coins?

Gono’s pleased with himself for ensuring that there’s $100 trillion in circulation. For a population of 12 million Zimbabweans, that works out to just over $8 million per person cash on hand. That’s return bus fare from Harare to Marondera (as of last week’s prices). It’s enough to buy almost three litres of cooking oil (at the newly gazetted prices, if you can find it). It’s a miserable, paltry, insulting amount, and if there’s only $100 trillion in circulation, no wonder we’re having such problems.

The thing is, to fix the problem Gono has to print more money. An increase in money supply spurs inflation – but not having enough money isn’t making prices go down – if anything, prices are going up as cash gets more and more expensive. And it’s not enough to just print more $750,000 bearer cheques. I don’t think there are enough hours in the day to print the volume of cash that would be needed if that’s as large as they get. If they’re not going to take off some zeroes, then it’s time to swallow our national pride and print the $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 million bearer cheques.

So, I’m not sure what it says about the Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono’s attachment issues, that he’s not willing to let go of a few zeroes in our currency and make all of our lives a whole lot simpler by introducing some new notes as part of his Sunrise II. But he’s not. Instead, we’re losing one note and gaining three more, all as part of his efforts to punish the cash barons – and in so doing, I fear, make things difficult for the rest of us as well.

But, one can only hope that these moves get cash back into the banks and into our pockets. If nothing else, it had better ease things enough that stories like this from Tichafa Nenzara (We’ll Die of Hunger), don’t happen again.

Here is just a small excerpt of the whole letter.

I write this open letter to you (Gideon Gono) with a lot of grief. No malice is intended and the experience presented herein is very true. My wife suddenly fell ill in the early hours on 3 December 2007 and needed immediate specialist attention. A well wisher rushed us to Harare Central hospital. After four hours of waiting for the doctor, my brother offered to foot the bills for a private doctor. He rushed into town and collected banking details from a well known private clinic and made a bee line for the bank to make an RTGS as the cut-off time drew nearer. Getting cash was out of the question. You are well aware of the severe cash shortage in the country. The private clinic insisted that no payment, no treatment. There was a winding queue at the bank for RTGS transactions. Just after 1200pm, my brother phoned to say he couldn’t beat the RTGS cut-off time. I could feel tears swelling in my eyes as I watched my dear wife writhing in pain, with my four year son looking at her confused at why nobody was interested in assisting her. I prayed and hoped that at least the doctor at the general hospital will at least turn up. He finally did and I was relieved. But it was short lived. He looked at my wife and wrote a couple of tests that were required urgently to diagnosed the real cause of the illness. All these tests could not be carried out at the central hospital because the required machinery was not working. He only recommended Paracetamol to reduce the pain. We were back to square one. The private clinic! But no cash, no treatment!

That day was the longest in my life. The following day, we were at the bank by 0330hrs but already there was a queue. When the bank opened its doors five hours later, pandemonium ensued and the queue became useless. My brother did however manage to submit the RTGS on time but I couldn’t get cash, so we left the bank and rushed to the private clinic. If we thought our misery was coming to an end, we were wrong! The clinic told us that they will only attend to my wife after the RTGS had cleared. Their contention being that some RTGS transactions were taking as much as 72 hours. My wife died the following day without receiving medical attention!

Burying my wife was not easy either. The funeral parlour also insisted on the RTGS clearing first. We couldn’t buy enough food for the mourners as the vendors at Mbare musika do not accept RTGS. It was the worst experience in living memory and the most traumatising ever.

We recently invited our SMS subscribers to send us their thoughts on how they can, and will make a difference in 2008.

Here are just a few of their replies:

Lets go out and vote out the regime.

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Lets copy South Africa. Say no to dictators!

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Facilitate on issues of peace, conflict, governance and human rights. Inform more friends about how to get SW Radio News. Distribute hand-powered radios if they are made available to remote areas. Participate in training elections monitors, etc.

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In 2008 I have to speak up against bad governance and share my views with others.

What are do you think? Is voting still a viable option? Are we so naïve we think these elections will be any different than the past three? Or can we think more creatively and develop strategies that demonstrate the power of people over politicians?

What are you going to do to make a difference in 2008?

A few weeks ago, I was reminded of a quotation I had first seen some years back. When I looked it up and found it again, I found it as beautiful and as compelling as I had when I’d first seen it.

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being ‘drawn toward’. Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf on women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds. For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called ‘love’. Love is a choice – not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity – a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life.
~ Carter Heyward

I was moved enough to do a bit more research on “lesbian feminist Episcopal priest” Carter Heyward. And what I found impressed me.

Among other things, in an interview with OutSmart, Heyward speaks openly about both her sexual and her spiritual journey, her personal history of pushing the envelope in seeking justice, and her commitment to her principles, despite the possible risks.

Heyward was involved in pressuring the Episcopal church to ordain women, over 25 years ago. She explains:

Those of us who planned and implemented the measure have really come to believe that without some kind of force, some kind of radical act, the church was not going to come through on the ordination of women any time soon, maybe not for 10, 20, 30 years. Sue Hiatt, the woman who really was the mastermind behind this thing, said the church would not ordain women until it’s harder not to ordain them than to ordain.

This struck me as a useful reminder for all of us engaged in struggles for social change. It’s sad but true – most of the time this change won’t happen unless and until not changing become more painful, difficult, or untenable than changing. Unfortunately for us in Zimbabwe, the more difficult things become for us here, the more we seem to turn inwards, focused on how to make sure that our families can get by. Maybe instead of rolling over and giving in, as has been our way, it’s time to think about how to make it harder for the regime to carry on along with its stubborn disregard, than it would be for it to change, so that finding a new course becomes the path of least resistance.