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Operation Murambatsvina touches raw nerve
Jupiter Punungwe
June 02, 2005

http://www.fingaz.co.zw/fingaz/2005/June/June2/8648.shtml

EDITOR - The Harare rumour mill is almost running off the rails churning out the theory that urban people are being "punished" for voting for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Another theory is that some rocket scientist in government wants to force as many people as possible back to the rural areas where there are all supposed to automatically become ZANU PF supporters! The theory being that since rural people have a history of voting overwhelmingly for ZANU PF, if town people go to the rural areas they will all start to vote overwhelmingly for ZANU PF. We all know that the detractors of Zimbabwe have been predicting a total collapse of the country for a long time, and they have been utterly surprised why this has not yet happened. Their reasoning has been based on analysis of formal economic data.

Well the reason why Zimbabwe is still standing is that much of the economic activity had shifted to the informal sector.

Where we used to have Cone Textiles we now had Mupedzanhamo and numerous streetside tailors making clothing - some even for export to neighbouring countries. Where we used to have Tregers and Crittal Hope, we now had streetside welders at Gazaland making window frames, door frames and ironcraft used for some of the most impressive homes in Harare.

Where we used to have Springmaster and Bowline Furnishers we now had numerous carpenters in Glen View Area 8 making carpentry items that you find in most of Harare's shops. Most of these people were making much more money than formally employed people with equivalent skills. Indeed, where the MDC has failed to bring people onto the streets for the past five years, some "clever" government strategist has managed to come up with a brainwave that has hit people where it hurts most.

By tackling the problem associated with the informal sector of unplanned settlements and business activities in a way which overnight wipes out the livelihood of many people, the government has managed to touch an economic raw nerve.

As it is the government is backpedalling. While still talking tough about "cleaning up" Harare, they are now talking about fast-track construction of home industry units to quickly accommodate the people who have been displaced by "Operation Murambatsvina".

I think it has dawned on someone that if they don't handle the issue of people's livelihoods carefully, they will give people real grievances to demonstrate about, not the trumped up political mirages that the MDC has been trying to pass off as grievances.

As for "Operation Murambatsvina", I think it demonstrates the extent to which Zimbabwe has become a police state. The police behaved like a cocaine-snorting bull in a China shop. They just descended on unsuspecting people, bashing their things including the goods that people could have been given a chance to save and take home.

There was absolutely no warning of the drastic action about to be taken. For the first two days, police spokesman Oliver Mandipaka was full all bravado and bluster on TV announcing "there is no going back" on "Operation Murambatsvina". However, of late he has been quietly pushed into the backseat and government ministers with a more concilliatory tone have been doing most of the talking.

If whoever came up with the idea of "Operation Murambatsvina" had been intellectually competent, surely it would have dawned on him or her that there was a need to do a public relations exercise ahead of the operation, not after, as is happening now.

The public relations exercise would have clearly appraised people on the motives for the action and given them the chance to take corrective action or re-orient their sources of livelihood. As it is, the person has actually demonstrated a streak of cruelty by snuffing out people's livelihoods overnight. Yet the problem has roots that can be traced back to incompetent urban planning and governance, something which is absolutely not the fault of the people who are now victims.

The government is proving to be an absolute genius at skirting around the core of the problem. While talking about cleaning up Harare, nobody is talking about the incompetence of people at Town House who have allowed Harare to deteriorate to this extent in the first place. Harare's rot started as far back as the early 90s. At that time there was a councillor who became famous for allocating people with infill stands in Glen View. Some people were given stands on top of sewer lines or on land reserved for other use. The government and relevant people at Town House did absolutely nothing, zilch, nada, kana chimwechete zvacho, about this blatant flouting of city by-laws. In the late 1990s, some people were dubiously allocated refuse collection contracts and Harare's refuse collection fleet was allowed to collapse. Some government ministers are rumoured to be some of the people who got these backscratching contracts. Again the government kept its bottom firmly nailed onto the fence.

Illegal streetside vending, which the government is making a lot of noise about now, started in earnest at the time of ESAP. Responsible city authorities ignored the growing problem. I have a sneaking suspicion that the city authorities did not even recognise that the activity was a prolem, something which would imply that they are not qualified to hold the positions they were holding. At the time, ZANU PF was ruling everything, but Elias Mudzuri, who later become mayor of Harare on an MDC ticket, was director of works for Harare Municipality, thus he was directly responsible for recognising and solving the problem. Even after he became mayor he did absolutely nothing, concentrating most of his energies on a political catfight with ZANU PF, which he lost.

The problems of Harare have been around for a long time but the responsible authorities, including government, have been too incompetent to recognise them or to know how to solve them. Even now there are numerous signs that, despite the current overzealous "Operation Murambatsvina", nobody has actually done any basic urban planning analysis of the problem and come up with scientifically correct solutions to the problem, and a host of other problems associated with Harare's rapid growth.

We have persistent water shortages, unmaintained roads, an overloaded sewage reticulation system, a critical housing shortage, a critical shortage of space to carry out commercial and industrial activities, dilapidated and outdated infrastructure and a collapsing transport system, yet all the government seems to have noticed are the dirty shacks and stalls sprouting up everywhere like mushrooms, as the MDC's Morgan Tsvangirai would say.

The lack of urban planning competence that has provided the rotting manure for those mushrooms to sprout on seems to be going unnoticed.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the problem of shacks is the only one that our local government authorities have the intellectual capacity to tackle. They are afraid of tackling the much bigger problems because they don't have the intellectual capacity.

During all this, the MDC has been highly conspicuous by its token resistance. This is a problem that directly affects the portion of Zimbabwe's electorate which they know supports them most. I think, like ZANU PF, they simply lack the intellectual capacity to know what to do about the problems. Or is it that they are too busy with internal power struggles to care about the people of Zimbabwe?

Jupiter Punungwe
Harare

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