Zimbabwe Absurdity

“So how’s it going – saving the world?” I joked to the public health doctor this afternoon.
“Not very well” he replied. “We cannot address more than eight people without having police permission. If we send a person out to educate a group of people on HIV/AIDS he (or she) is immediately seen as partisan to a political party and reported. Our funding only lasts until the end of 2012” he said pointing to the logo of a branch of the UN on the side of his truck “and we are just standing still. There IS going to be an election this year and the (political) temperature is rising.”

I told him that yesterday I’d had a meeting with another branch of the UN which had a project going in rural Zimbabwe and wanted me to quote on a large order of onion seedlings. It hadn’t sounded very well thought out to me so I went along to discuss it. The manager of the project really wanted to get it going quicker than the 8 weeks it would take us to grow the seedlings so I suggested that they did it the old fashioned way with seed beds. I asked why there was such a rush to be told it was to keep idle young hands out of the way of the Devil – metaphorically speaking. I addedto the doctor that the last NGO order we’d done was sent out to the rural areas overnight to reduce the chance of being intercepted and disrupted.

“Why do we have to put up with this?” said the doctor, getting into his pickup. “Why can’t we just do as we like?” he added as he drove off.

“That’s not my change up there, is it?” I said pointing to the packets of biscuits, sweets and crisps on a shelf.
“No” said Christine and giggled. “It’s nothing to do with Forestry Commission”.
I was in the Forestry Commission seed sales office looking for eucalyptus seed to grow in the nursery. They didn’t have the species I wanted as the seed had been sent for germination testing. It seemed that Christine, the officer on duty, was doing a bit of moonlighting to help get by. The civil servants in Zimbabwe are notoriously badly paid so I was not at all surprised.

Earlier I had driven past a vlei in Mount Pleasant where two tractors were busy cutting and baling grass and there was a sign by the road advertisng the bales for sale. It is municipal ground but I couldn’t determine if they were municipal tractors. At least they were making use of the grass which every year gets burnt. Elsewhere there are other people busy cutting and combing thatching grass in the hope that they can sell it. Despite the patchy rains last season the veld is looking good which unfortunately means the fires will be severe and there already has been one at the front of where I live. It was too early in the season to be hot and damaging. That will come later.

I called by Tendai’s office at the end of last week to retrieve a DVD I’d lent him on, of all things, the RLI which is my old regiment. He was fascinated by it! He didn’t have the DVD on him but he did let drop a pearl of wisdom: apparently as of the end of June cars (and other vehicles I presume) older than 5 years will not be allowed to be imported into Zimbabwe. This is quite a blow to those who could get access to cheap, reasonable quality, second-hand vehicles from Japan. It seems that someone thinks we should support the Zimbabwe vehicle assembly industry instead. This is unlikely as they are expensive by any standard. I think we’ll just see ever older and more delapidated vehicles on our roads as few people will be able to buy the new vehicles.