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Mugabe-s Playground
BBC Focus on Africa
July - September 2007

Dear reader,

It-s been a long time since I wrote to you. I hope you are well. As you know, I swapped life in London for a life in the sunshine city of Harare some nine months ago. I came over to try and examine the Zimbabwean story from close quarters; and I have spent the last few months watching from ringside seats the fights between the forces who want change and those who maintain that they are under siege from neo-colonialist forces bent on regime change.

Now I will not pretend to you, my friend, that I am standing in bread and sugar queues on a daily basis. Hacks in trouble spots like to give that impression, but I am not one of them. I live in a lovely mid-1970s house, which would have quite suited Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, was pornography not banned here. I do my writing by the pool and enjoy the fruits of my garden. Avocados, guavas, hazel nuts, mangos, oranges, lemons all sprout freely around me. Peter, my gardener, is planting my second crop of peas, beetroot and watermelons. Gift, my housemaid, has put an end to my knee-jerk tendency to burn my food, and I have not seen the inside of a laundrette for a while. I catch cheap fights to Victoria Falls and empty game parks for my rest and recuperation. The aching beauty of this country leads all who visit to ask, "Why? Why are things not working?"

This still remains one of the most fascinating stories on our continent, and as stories go, it has been running on the sprightly legs of an 83-year old president. Should those legs stop moving, would the story change? I doubt it.

The president and his lieutenants are cloaked in a cloud of conviction that everything that is befalling this country has been engineered by the West to punish Zimbabwe for daring to take back their land some seven years ago. Everything includes targeted sanctions, disappearing lines of credit for a dwindling manufacturing industry, falling agricultural productions, cricket tour boycotts and galloping inflation.

As I write to you, inflation here has jumped from 2,200 per cent to an unbelievable world record of 3,731 per cent. I went to my local service station to quench my car-s thirst. I paid 29,000 Zimbabwe dollars for a litre. The very next day the figure had gone up to Z$36,000 for the same litre of petrol. At the newsstands, The Herald headline read "Sugar Shortage Explained", followed by a few predictable lines on speculators, foreign currency shortages and the growth of the evil black market.

Despite the large villas and streets clogged with the latest Mercedes Benzes, there is a desperate lack of cash all around us. An official rate, which pegs the US greenback to $250, is laughable even to officials and bankers. While the government tries to subsidize fuel for its new crop of farmers, commerce has been following its own head. Fuel worldwide is roughly US$1 a litre, so, commerce says, our local dollar is really worth Z$36,000 to US$1.

And while the economists on both sides of the political divide fill up column inches on the reasons for these dilemmas, life has been hard on millions. Over 80 per cent unemployment, unprecedented migration and brain drain: about 250 Zimbabweans deported from South Africa daily; thousands more risking life and limb to cross the crocodile-infested Limpopo River; some 4,500 teachers have left since January alone; nurses on strike; doctors downing stethoscopes in protest at low wages and inadequate medical equipment; 52 per cent vacancies in parts of the civil service. You know the stats - they are wheeled out for every newsreader in the world.

And then there is the violence. "Our party has degrees in violence . . . we are a party with a big fist and we know how to use it," the president is on record as saying. The brazen manner in which beatings occur is astounding - more so because uniformed officers are administering this form of state-approved violence.

We are witnessing here a new form of so-called pictorial reportage: the severe bruise; the split skull; the stitches; the hospital bed interview; the bloody swollen eyes and the politician with wrapped bandages around the head. The protectors of the law here can be used as ruling party spokespeople; they are the stick to the illusive carrot of democracy. Meanwhile the opposition Movement for Democratic Change supporters, having thrown themselves in the frontline and exhibited their swollen and broken limbs, claim more than 600 of their members have been abducted by state security agents since March on spurious charges of sponsoring violence and terrorism; of petrol-bombing police stations. Lawyers representing some of them say the accused were already in jail at the time of these alleged offences. These lawyers were swiftly thrown into the cells themselves for "obstructing justice".

And when members of the legal fraternity gathered in Harare to protest against the jailing of their colleagues in May, besuited and gowned - as if they were marching on the Old Bailey in London - they too were beaten and promptly made the papers to show off their bruises. This is not satire, it is not Monty Python-s Judean People-s Front versus the People-s Liberation Front of Judea - these scenes are repeated all over Harare every other month, scenes of such confusion amongst the jailers and the jailed that it makes little sense to follow it at all.

And no matter how detached and objective one tries to be as a filmmaker and journalist, the net of violence has already closed in on members of my profession. March 11 saw an independent stills photographer and a cameraman/producer herded into the same crowd as opposition leaders and beaten senseless for two nights. Their equipment was smashed on sight, and the accreditation issued to them by the Media and Information Commission of Zimbabwe meant little to their tortures, except proof of their guilt. A former Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation cameraman was beaten to death soon after.

So why stay? I-ve taken up fishing and there are enough distractions to keep me lazy and out of harm-s way. Besides, we have under a year to go before landmark presidential, parliamentary and local elections. The ruling Zanu-PF has one candidate, a sprightly 83-year-old who understands politics like no other, and the onus in on those who are unhappy with him to unseat him democratically. Definitions of democracy are skewed the world over, ask the people of Florida.

And when all this gets too heavy, there is plenty of football on satellite television and Springboks rugby and international cricket - minus the Australian first XI tour of Zimbabwe, which the Australian government has decided cannot go ahead this September because of overwhelming human rights abuses. Cricket fans will miss out on seeing the world champions playing in Bulawayo and the Harare Sports Club, but our president, the patron of Zimbabwe cricket, has already told us that the Australians are nothing but "genetically modified criminals". Defiance and wit should console us all.

And I can see your thoughts - not everyone is interested in cricket, and why should anyone care what besuited lawyers have to say outside the courts of justice? You are right, the politics of the stomach is the incentive for many who can no longer afford transport to work and walk up to 30 miles (48km) a day to be in a job which can barely meet the basics. Commerce is determining the price of bread as well as petrol. Calls for mass stay-away from work fall on deaf ears and empty stomachs.

Saw another interesting article in The Herald the other day: "Several people countrywide have committed suicide by throwing themselves in front of oncoming trains due to several reasons. Last year, a woman from Budiriro and her two-year-old daughter were struck and killed by a Mufakose-bound commuter train . . . "

It hasn-t got that bad yet for me personally, but if it did, I would probably consider drowning in my pool.

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