Zimbabwe Absurdity

I was in my local service provider’s outlet at the Borrowdale Village shopping complex yesterday to register my cell phone lines. I didn’t really want to do it but I’d been threatened with closure if I didn’t do it by the end of February. It also meant that I could have the dubious priveledge of being able to access the GPRS facility and use the phone to browse the web.

A women ahead of me had asked the obvious question; why do we have to do this? The sales lady trotted out the standard answer – mainly security and various other reasons that I did not catch. When I pointed out that when I went to the UK last year I bought a SIM card at Gatwick airport from a vending machine without producing any form of identification and that if anywhere should have security issues with cell phones it should be the UK she didn’t have an answer. So I just have to wonder who would be interested in my personal details (ID number, residential address, full name) and what phone numbers I own.

This apparently a la Nina year which should mean at least average rainfall for us. As I speak we are at less than half of where we should be for an average year and heading for even less rain than last year which was very dry. I took this photo early this morning. Development like this usually indicates a big storm later. We shall see.

I was making a deposit into the account of my insurance broker on Tuesday at a local branch of CABS, which despite the name (Central African Building Society) has been a registered commercial bank for some time. Behind the teller was a board offering interest rates on long term, up to 90 days, deposits. The highest rate they were offering was 7% which was a lot better than anything I could find “out there” in the real world. It’s no secret that a lot of money has been externalized from Zimbabwe, this could only be an attempt to get some of it back. I had to admit it WAS pretty attractive but just how secure is the Zimbabwe banking sector?

For the past 4 years Grace Mugabe’s farming company has been farming the land between where I live and work. Mainly they have planted late soyas there with mixed success. It has inevitably been too late – probably something to do with the ZANU-PF congress that takes place late in the year but I have to admit I am not sure what the link could be.

On Saturday they were still planting maize – at least a month too late so it will very likely yield nothing of consequence.
I am sure I have mentioned elsewhere that it is cheaper to import maize into Zimbabwe than grow it here at the moment. That is of no importance to Her Ladyship; she will not be paying for the inputs anyway but she will be pocketing the income!

It was a rather nice looking late model Case 4×4 tractor doing the planting. It was already running on one cylinder less than the full complement and pouring blue smoke out of the exhaust. I guess somebody else had paid for that too.