The SADC Troika Summit of the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation met in Livingstone, Zambia yesterday. The Summit was chaired by Rupiah Banda, President of Malawi, and attended by the heads of state and government of Namibia, South Africa Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The purpose of the meeting was to consider the political and security situation in the region, in particular the republics of Madagascar and Zimbabwe.

On Zimbabwe, the Summit received the report on the political and security situation in the country from President Jacob Zuma. He was commended for the frankness with which the report was presented and also on the work that he has been doing on behalf of SADC.

The Summit noted with disappointment the insufficient progress in the implementation of the GPA, and expressed its impatience with the delays. It also noted with grave concern the polarization of the political environment, characterised by a resurgence of violence, arrests and intimidation in Zimbabwe.

Among the resolutions made was a commitment to the full implementation of the GPA and another to the immediate cessation of violence, intimidation, hate speech, harassment and any other form of action that contradicts the letter and spirit of the GPA.

The Troika Organ also resolved to appoint a team of officials to join the Facilitation Team and work with the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (JOMIC) to ensure monitoring evaluation and implementation of the GPA.

While it is heartening to see that Mr. Zuma’s candid report on Zimbabwe was endorsed by the Troika, previous meetings of regional heads of state and government have made similar resolutions on Zimbabwe without them being translated to reality.

Both the President and Prime Minister have made repeated calls for an end to violence and intimidation with no effect. In fact, the violence has greatly increased. In an article published in Newsday on 22nd February 2011, co-Chairperson of JOMIC is quoted as describing the Committee as a “toothless bulldog” with no legal or statutory powers to implement its resolutions. It will be interesting to see how and if this will change with the appointment of SADC officials to the Facilitation Team.

For those of us less than talented in the sporting arena, night golf is a welcome relief from critical eyes. If you’ve tried teeing off in broad daylight in front of the clubhouse, you’ll know what I mean. The pressure, your hands start to sweat, you mutter to yourself “head down, watch the ball, eyes ON the ball!” And then you keep looking over your shoulder as you do a semi-jog, as opposed to a full sprint or a walk – more conspicuous and involving greater hip movement – after your ball, hopefully down the fairway, but inevitably not.

I get totally put off by any sign of water. It doesn’t matter how near, how far, how off to the side, how small, I will find it or hit my ball in the entirely wrong direction JUST to avoid it. I also just dribble it off the tee box (thereby really falling short of the water).

Anyway, night golf is for those who don’t own golfing outfits to match their Callaways. You can encourage your caddy (it is best to pay for one if you don’t know the course – distance and direction becomes an issue even for the most geographically-savvy) to levy fines against you when you do something wrong. This includes hitting fresh air instead of the ball, what I call the “practice swing” (my son always blames on the wind, bless him), or landing in the water – lucky the balls glow.

Remember to get your cooler box from the bar. Each player gets a free six-pack to start (a word of advice, take an extra 2 per person and don’t forget your shooters for spot fines) and then merrily stumble and sing (and swing) your way round nine holes.

Normal golf rules apply. Treat the course, your surroundings and fellow players with due respect. And please pee before you start – white buttocks in the moonlight are made for target practice!

If you’re not much of a golfer, you might consider packing a towel and a change of clothes in case you have to go swimming to retrieve your ball. While eau-de-swamp seems to deter mosquitoes, it doesn’t do anything for the rest of us. And if you’re hoping to hit the town afterwards, and get lucky – make use of the club’s showers!

Next date for night golf at the Borrowdale Brooke is Friday 13 May. Come dressed ghoulish (or pay a fine) and book early – they are always over subscribed.

This homeless Zimbabwean man is rumoured to be insane and has lived in and around the Pomona area for several years. In his hands he holds a 750 000 Zimbabwe dollar note, last used in 2005. Although he keeps to himself and seldom speaks to anyone, both residents and vendors try to steer clear of him.

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.

I spent most of my life in Mutare even though I was born in Bulawayo and I am now a permanent resident of Bulawayo. This places me at a distinct advantage: I am very familiar with both the Shona and Ndebele worlds. There are a lot of things that both sides do not know about each and wild assumptions that damage relations are made.

Considering the history of Matabeleland: The slaughter of about twenty thousand people, there is always suspicion between Ndebele and Shona and a number of times I have to pull two warring sides apart as I happen to see things in a clearer light than a person who is exclusively Shona or Ndebele. I have a friend who believes every Shona person in Matabeleland is an enemy, planted in Matabeleland as part of the Gukurahundi agenda (the total disempowerment of the Ndebele people by flooding the region with Shona people and making sure that Ndebeles do not get any opportunities).

I cannot say for sure that the Gukurahundi agenda does not exist, but I believe individuals should be judged on individual merit not broadly based on the sins of a few mad people who did not have the people’s mandate to do what they did.

When my friend suggested that I happen to get opportunities because I have one leg in the Shona world and the other in the Ndebele world I knew the Shona-Ndebele thing had gone too far; I happen to have worked abnormally hard and continue to do so to get to where I am.  The so-called Gukurahundi agenda is now being used by lazy people who do not exploit opportunities as a crutch.

Whilst it is important to address past and current injustices, we have to remember that were we come from matters less than where we are going.

So often we are hit by a barrage of bad, bad news leaving us wondering where does all the good go? We asked Kubatana subscribers to email us their experiences of what’s positive about Zimbabwe. Here’s what we got – enjoy!

My Zimbabwe is about all the unemployed young people who make it happen, against the odds, and do it with innovative style.  It is the young woman, pictured recently in a weekly publication, who needs to make a living to raise her daughter but is unable to afford a babysitter.  So everyday she takes the toddler with her to work and places the girl in an enormous cardboard box.  While the mother sells her wares at the corner of a busy city street, she keeps an eye on her child who frolics about in the safety of her makeshift playpen.

Despite the harsh economic conditions and the uncertain political future, Zimbabweans still have the spirit of ”Ubuntu”. My Zimbabwe is a country in which women came to assist during our bereavement in early March in Bulawayo. They cooked for others on a fire in the blistering heat, washed all the plates and still had the energy to go back and do their household chores. The men braved the evening chill to keep my brother and cousins company. These people were saying to my family: ‘‘we cannot reverse your loss but we are here for you, we share in your grief.”  It is this spirit of ”Ubuntu” that makes me proud to be Zimbabwean. No matter how bad things may get, our neighbours and others around us are there for us, they give us shoulders to cry on. The mere feeling of belonging makes each day easier to bear.

My Zimbabwe is the young man who offers me his seat in a bus from Kwekwe to Harare because I am pregnant and he stands all the way to Kadoma. It is the police officers and the eyewitnesses, both men and women, who rush to the scene of the accident without protective gloves to assist the injured before the ambulance arrives.

It is a politician who decentralised education from the scenario of the pre-Rhodesia era by establishing day secondary schools to equip black children with literacy. My Zimbabwe is a local legal practitioner who defended the hairstyle which those pre-independence, half pint advocates said was illegal to sport when attending the House of Assembly. Let’s face it, constitutionally; a hairstyle is of no importance in the House.

The women who in their diversity tirelessly contribute to family, community and national development despite being marginalized, embody my Zimbabwe. They always ensure that there is food, water, love and care at home even in times of power and water cuts or any social, economic and political crisis.

It is a country where the literacy rate is very high meanwhile teacher wages are some of the lowest in the region. From tattered uniforms in rural areas, we produce internationally recognised graduates yearly.

My Zimbabwe is the street vendor in Victoria Falls who wanted to pay me for the airtime I didn’t need and was trying to give to her. The political leader who had the courage to try to work with the people who had beaten him close to death. The people who voted for change in 2005 and 2008 when they knew they could suffer for their stand for freedom in their country. And apart from all that, my Zimbabwe makes the best cakes in the world in the Vumba.

It is the people in Gutu South whose families were decimated at an attack during a pungwe in the 1970s at Kamungoma Farm.  (More than 50 were killed in one night.) They have kept on going, with their physical and emotional wounds, without asking for compensation or sympathy from anyone, let alone the government. They took it that the liberation struggle was for us all.

It is a woman called Precious Nyamukondiwa who runs a small organisation in Chinhoyi. She and her colleagues have gone a long way in assisting people living with HIV/AIDS. Their work has long gone unnoticed while affected and infected little children have been taught ways of positive living. It is Mai Zenda, a volunteer at Felly’s Orphanage at Stodart Hall in Mbare. Felly’s orphanage is a place where orphans in Mbare are fed one meal a day. These orphans live with their relatives who are too poor to feed them. Mai Zenda currently cooks for an average of 69 children from Monday to Friday all on her own. If there is no relish, she goes to Mbare musika to ask on behalf of the orphans. She has been a volunteer there for 4 years for no income. Mrs Zenda is determined to support these children as best she can.

My Zimbabwe can certainly look bleak on the surface but a closer look shows a myriad of rainbows. It is a place where black people have discovered the value of entrepreneurship. Everyone is thinking of how to set up a business whether informally or formally. We have started changing the colonial mindset where we were groomed to be worker bees that strive for someone else.

My Zimbabwe is the once a year visit to Honde Valley in the Eastern Highlands. Eating bananas, roasted maize cobs, pineapples and mangoes in my grandparents homestead.

It is a place where you can send children to school on their own and not have to worry about kidnapping and abuse. A place where they can go about visiting their friends and being children without having to grow up too fast for their age.

My Zimbabwe is a place where we have time to stop talk and enjoy meeting friends and family in the streets because we still hold relationships dear and understand the value of maintaining them.

This article was co-authored by Zimbabweans believing in the positive: Thandi, Yeukai, Cherish, Sally, Peter, Ethel, Farai, Donald, Chirikure, Tabitha and Nomqhele