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A trip to Bulawayo
Judith Todd
October, 2005

http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/oct23a_2005.html

To renew the visa required to stay in South Africa I first had to return to my place of origin for a minimum of ten days by Friday October 7 which I did, returning safely to Cape Town on Thursday, October 20, 2005.

Our South African Air Link flight from Johannesburg landed near Bulawayo's flight control tower now being enfolded into the vast new Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo International Airport and we were bussed to "temporary" transit facilities in a hot, airless hangar. Fortunately work hasn't started on the proposed five star adjacent hotel as there is no sign that the new terminal itself will ever be completed.

An article in The Standard of 16 October under the heading Government strangles Bulawayo council well summed up what I found.

Essential city council services in Bulawayo are collapsing because the local authorities' hands are tied and nothing can be done to address the deteriorating situation, says the Bulawayo executive mayor Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube. The local authority "is under the grip of the government and cannot do anything to try and provide solutions to the city's problems". The ruling Zanu-PF government has always been against opposition Movement for Democratic Change - led councils, accusing them of failing to provide essential services. The accusations led to the former MDC Harare mayor Elias Mudzuri and his Mutare counterpart, Misheck Kagurabdza, being ejected from office. Bulawayo City Council is facing a host of problems - a crippling water crisis, lack of vehicles for refuse removal and serious shortages of fuel which has forced the council to suspend refuse removal services and the distribution of water bowsers to clinics, schools and suburbs worst affected by the water crisis. At the onset of the water crisis in August, the local authority requested the government to declare it a water shortage area . but government has been dragging its feet. Declaring the city a water shortage area would enable the council to suspend or amend any water permits, and make orders in relation to the abstraction, appropriation, control and diversion or the use of water. "To be honest, we are facing a crisis and we don't know what to do" Ndabeni-Ncube said. Bulawayo Agenda executive director Gordon Moyo said the government was watching with keen interest the collapse of the city for political expediency.. "They are looking at the crisis with a political eye and not a humanitarian one." Ndabeni-Ncube, like any other mayor in Zimbabwe, has been stripped of the powers to make decisions that relate to the running of the city. Almost all services, which need local authority approval, have to pass through an interministerial committee.

I called on Ndabeni-Ncube. He, the MDC Member of Parliament David Coltart and the lawyer Washington Sansole were amongst the few people I met who didn't appear traumatised by the present regime. I learned that after Government had objected to statistics from the city revealing the mounting scale of deaths from "malnutrition" a delegation from Police and Intelligence had called to find out where the statistics originated and were astonished to learn they were government statistics routinely collected by council each month over many decades. Since that day the council has been deprived of access to these statistics.

I walked through the city and found some vending has restarted after Government's destruction of the informal business sector. Flower sellers shelter inside the railings surrounding the city hall. People carry vegetables in bags or on "scanias", pushcarts, so they can run if "police", often Zanu (PF) youth militia in police uniforms, descend. Some old women sit where former stalls used to be with little piles of tomatoes, or a solitary cabbage. Verging on the residential areas there are people next to trees or bushes with small stacks of goods to sell. You would have to sell fifteen oranges at $5000 each to be able to make the $30000 profit necessary to buy one loaf of bread, if it is available.

People in general seem clueless about the fate of their fellow citizens who were abducted at night from church shelters, loaded on to lorries and dumped in rural areas. Some talk vaguely of people from formerly smart houses under tile destroyed by the State in suburbs like Bulawayo's Cowdray Park finding life fading in their "rural homes" like Tsholotsho where they were abandoned by the authorities with no food or water. No one wanted to talk about this although someone did say that UN agencies are willing to help with shelter, food and water but apparently are being obstructed at every turn by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Simbarashe Mumbengegwi.

The churches bravely do what they can. One pastor told me that although an unknown number of the dispossessed had been "lost" there are records of about 1500 others still subsisting in Bulawayo and 4000 at Victoria Falls. The churches helped about 2000 from the Falls to go to villages despite a dire situation there regarding food and water. Two children at the Falls were savagely wounded by police dogs. One known human has been eaten by lion and all those not yet resettled exist in the bush with wild animals. These displaced Zimbabweans are in hiding and only emerge, apparently from thin air and desperate for help, if they are sure that those approaching are friends. I met two such people. One, a toothless man so old that the irises of his eyes were white, was no longer able to fend for himself. The other, also old, had been granted a patch of land by a fellow-human and now needed material to build a hut. The churches are trying to provide such internal refugees with food for a further three months but what then? As the Financial Gazette, reputedly now an organ of the Central Intelligence Organisation, reported on October 19 even the government is becoming alarmed that "the majority of the country's population of about 12.5 million would not be able to feed itself ... until the next harvest" - whenever another harvest will be. It is said that today US$1 = Z$100,000.00. This means nothing to most people but during the 13 days I was in Bulawayo the price of mealie-meal soared from $75,000 for 10 kg to $99,000.00.

I have three memories I cannot dislodge from my mind. One is of an old white woman leaning, arms folded, on her shopping trolley like a self-propelling crutch and reaching the till with only one item, a packet of pronutro serial. Another is of a thin young couple, a baby strapped to its mother's back, standing wide-eyed, silent and apparently transfixed by the realization that there was absolutely nothing in the entire supermarket which could be purchased with the little sheaf of useless notes the man was holding. Finally, going to the airport last Thursday we passed through the dusty suburb of Paddonhurst. Something carrying maize must have passed earlier and there were a few kernels scattered on the tarmac. A black skeleton in rags was swaying here and there, collecting them. The kind of rags indicated that this once may have been a woman.

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