Midlands State University students pose for a photo with fellow students from universities in America at the 2012 Enactus World Cup tournament. Zimbabwe came fourth in the tournament.

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.

Community Radio Harare recently published this:

As water shortages continue to worsen in many Harare suburbs, some mandimbandimbas have taken charge of local boreholes demanding that each resident must pay $1 to access the borehole water.

Several residents who spoke to Talking Harare confirmed that the mandimbandimbas were terrorizing them and taking advantage of the water crisis by demanding money. ‘Yes it is true that the mandimbandimbas are asking us to pay $1 per resident for us to access UNICEF boreholes that are the only source of water in Highfield. For example, at Highfield Satellite Clinic this situation has been going on for over a week now and these people seem to be untouchable once again as nothing is being done to stop them,’ said Mrs Faith Madondo of Highfield.

When Talking Harare visited Mbare, it noticed the mandimbandimbas controlling hundreds of residents who were trying to draw water from a mass tap near Mbare Netball Complex. Residents were being asked to pay ‘maintenance’ fees for the water tap which is apparently owned by council. The situation was similar at a borehole near Budiriro 2 Primary School and other suburbs like Glen Norah, Dzivarasekwa and Glen Norah. Those who were failing to pay were turned away and denied access to water.

The mandimbandimbas were recently chucked out of kombi ranks where they were forcing transport operators to pay them fees which were not justified since all bus termini in Harare are owned by Harare city council. Police and soldiers moved in to remove them following incessant complaints by members of the public, kombi operators and stakeholders that these were becoming a law unto themselves and causing havoc to the travelling public and transport business.

Meanwhile, some touts who were removed from kombi ranks are slowly trickling back after council failed to swiftly move in and reclaim its termini. Talking Harare observed that at Copacabana, Market Square and Fourth Street, the illegal touts are coming back and causing confusion once again.

Tsvangirai’s appeal has faded fast.

This is Zimbabwe’s tragedy: the mantle of leadership has rested too long on the shoulders of the man who currently leads Zimbabwe, and it will sit uneasily on the man who wants to unseat him. But voters are likely to conclude that Tsvangirai is the lesser of two evils. Flawed as he is, he may just make it.

More from Petinah Gappah here

The Zimbabwe urban transport system has had touts for the past donkey years and all these years the authorities have known of their existence as well as the fact that they are illegal elements of society but they did not take any action against them. The authorities wake up one September morning and the touts are beaten like hell and rounded up in army vans and it’s headlines everywhere. It’s like these touts are aliens that have just landed in Zimbabwe from some far away planet and we are all amazed about them. The Harare City Council says it now wants to control kombis and one wonders why they have, for all these years, let touts control the kombi ranks.

King Mswati III has got his priorities all wrong.

Wheeler dealer

Relative to the number of roads in his tiny southern African country, King Mswati III has a surfeit of horsepower. Then again, with 13 wives, each of whom has her own palace the king of Swaziland has a lot of royals to transport: his 27 children must be taken to school everyday.

In 2004, after media criticism of the 44-year-old monarch’s purchase of southern Africa’s only Maybach 62 (estimated cost: €325,000), the king banned newspapers from writing about his cars. Since then, Mswati has been seen arriving for the opening of parliament in a six-door Mercedes Benz S600 Pullman limousine.

Mswati head of an army that has never fought in a foreign conflict, only crushed internal dissent; as such, he has made surveillance, logistics and crowd control his priorities. The Umbutfo Swaziland Defence Force has three Alouette 3 helicopters, one IAI Arava transporter plane and seven RG-31 Nyala Mark 5E armoured vehicles, all bought from South Africa.

In 2002, Mswati paid a €2.6 m deposit on a Bombardier Global Express 19-seater; however, donors disapproved and the deal was off. This year, a mysterious “development partner” gave him a 36-seater McDonnell Douglas MD-87 which had a VIP conversion at Goderich Aircraft in Canada. The jet, worth up to €16m, was delivered for his birthday n 19 April.

Source: Monocle