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This article participates on the following special index pages:
Price Controls and Shortages - Index of articles
Harare
Notebook: Life is slipping out of control
Jan
Raath
July 20, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2106459.ece
It-s been like
this for three months. The first thing when I wake, I press the
switch on my bedside lamp. Six days a week there is no response.
The power is off. It will be like this for at least 12 hours. It
sinks any positive charge I may have woken with, and the mood will
underlie the whole day. This week I gave a lift to Charles, a technician
with the sinking state power utility company. He said last month
he and 250 other technicians went for interviews in Botswana with
the UK National Grid. "We all got offered jobs," he said,
and laughed when I asked if anyone would be left in Zimbabwe. I
check my landline, which has been dead for three weeks. The phone
is not just silent, you can hear the deadness. The batteries in
the local exchange have run down because of the persistent power
cuts. I try my mobile instead. The red "network busy"
sign flashes with the first ten attempts. It can go on like this
for 20 minutes. Congestion became severe immediately the Price Monitoring
and Stabilisation Task Force ordered the mobile companies to halve
their tariffs. Everyone can now use the telephone with no regard
for the cost, and does - if he can get a signal - all
the time. The sense of isolation that comes with being without functioning
telephones for extended periods is profound.
Nyarai, my housekeeper,
arrives nearly two hours late. There are almost no commuter minibuses.
Fuel is unobtainable from service stations since the owners were
ordered to cut the price to about 18p a litre two weeks ago. She
had to walk for an hour and then struggle in a heaving mob to get
on to an open truck. My friend Nicolle couldn-t find a hairdresser
that was open. They all had power cuts and those that had generators
didn-t have fuel. The big OK supermarket near me also closed
for a day because it had no diesel for its generator. TM supermarket
has not closed, but inside people are running toward the back of
the shop to join the bread queue. At the checkout till everyone
looks hungrily in everyone else-s shopping basket for something
they missed on the thinning shelves. A woman in front of me had
a box of 30 litres of milk in cartons. It will coagulate in the
freezer before she can use it. I snatched up two packets of bacon.
I don-t eat bacon from one year to the next. We are all behaving
abnormally. Because we all know that before long there will be nothing
left in the shops and there will be no fuel and we will have to
hunt around the black market for food and fuel, and even that is
bound to dry up and then everything will stop. Everyone knows that
what the Government of Robert Mugabe is doing is not just bungling,
not just senseless - but mad. It feels as though we are slipping,
out of control, God only knows into what.
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