Zimbabwe Absurdity

I quite often wake up in a black depression. I suppose it’s the stress; the overwhelming presence of a very murky future. I have pretty much accepted that my business is going to close in the next 6 months or so and I don’t have any clear alternatives – a Plan B to use the cliche. I am not totally without alternatives though. I do have a British passport but lying in the misty pre-dawn before my alarm went off rather reminded me of what I least liked about living in the UK some years back – the weather. The constant greyness, the damp and cold. Getting out five pounds in 50p coins and desperately trying to stay warm over the weekend by getting into bed with all my clothes on. Not a lot of fun but at least then I was working towards a goal; getting out of there and going travelling on what turned out to be the best experience of my life! The depression doesn’t seem to last long (I once asked Austin, the sports doctor at the gym, if he had any happy pills. Lots he replied, which one did I want? I said the whole f…. lot would do for starters.) and a short spell on the rower soon cleared the mind a bit and started me thinking about less depressing topics.

I suppose like quite a lot of Zimbabweans I wonder what it would take to get this country back to a resemblance of a functioning state (by U.S. standards and probably a few others we are a failed state). Where would one start? Money, health, infrastructure, rule of law, education the list is long. Co-incidently I am reading a book by Ryszard Kapuscinsky entitled The Shadow of the Sun about his 40+ years as a Polish correspondent in Africa. Most of the time he does not try to analyse, he simply records his experiences in a variety of countries mostly in the northern hemisphere. In talking to various intellectuals (who mostly don’t live in Africa anymore) he notes the following:

“… the strength of Europe and of its culture, in contrast to other cultures, lies in its bent for criticism, above all, for self-criticism – in its art of analysis and inquiry, in its endless seeking, in its restlessness. The European mind recognizes that it has limitations, imperfections, is skeptical, doubtful, questioning. Other cultures do not have this critical spirit. More – they are inclined to pride, thinking that all that belongs to them is perfect; they are, in short, uncritical in relation to themselves. They lay the blame for all that is evil on others, on other forces (conspiracies, agents, foreign domination of one sort or another). They consider all criticism to be a malevolent attack, a sign of discrimination, racism etc. Representatives  of these cultres treat criticism as a personal insult, as a deliberate attempt to humiliate them, as a for of sadism even. If you tell them that the city is dirty, they treat this as if you said that they were dirty themselves, had dirty ears, or dirty nails. Instead of being self-critical, they are full of countless grudges, complexes, envies, peeves, manias. The effect of all this is that they are culturally, permanently, structurally incapable of progress, incapable of engendering within themselves the will to transform and evolve.”

It is very noticeable at the moment just how keen the Zimbabwe government is to place all the blame everywhere else. A lot of it is just a cynical buying of time while they look for something else to loot but a fair amount is heart felt. This attitude of criticism being a bad thing (I come across it all the time) is not going away any time soon and only education will solve it but that of course is a long term solution.

He also quotes a Tanzanian intellectual – “Africa needs a new generation of politicians who know how to think in a new way. The current ones must depart. Instead of thinking about development, they think about how to stay in power”. This might be stating the obvious but even in relatively enlightened political climate such as South Africa’s it is heavily entrenched. Witness the recent vote by parliament to disband the specialist police unit The Scorpions which was set up specifically to investigate political corruption!

Some facts (subject to verification):

The Marange diamond fields in the east of Zimbabwe are producing about 160 million dollars of diamonds a month. More is gem quality than first estimated and the fields are proving to be deeper than expected.

Of this about 40 million is realized on the illicit market.

There are 5 major partners – heads of the army, airforce,  police, the Reserve Bank and one other.

Most of the 40 million is going out to eastern banks, as cash.

There is a Russian delegation coming to Zimbabwe this week looking to “buy” votes in the UN General Assembly to get South Ossetia and Abkhazia recognized. Russia is one of the bigger players in the world diamond trade. They are bringing a diamond delegation with them. They might be more successful in Zimbabwe than other African states who have break-away sub-state issues (Sudan, Nigeria etc.).

Talks on the “historic power sharing deal” are going nowhere.

Join the dots.

A customer called in this morning to arrange payment. We agreed that I’d take 12 x 50kg bags of wheat instead of the Zimbabwe dollars. He said to take a closer look at the notes anyway; they were printed on bond paper! Apparently one has to check that they have actually been printed on both sides of the paper.

The power will be off until Monday at least as the utility won’t turn it back on until the trees have been cleared away from one of the supply lines. Fair enough but why didn’t they say so on Monday! Oh, and we had to supply them with  a new isolator too.

We employed a new labourer on Tuesday and for the first time in some years 2 other hopefuls arrived too. We didn’t take them on as things are not looking that good but it’s a change to know that work is in demand. Maybe they’d heard that WFP was halving its food aid to Zim due to a lack of contributions. On the way this morning to pick up the new employee’s belongings we went past a gathering by the road. Oh, he said, when I asked; that’s the government giving out seed maize but not with any fertilizer. I wonder if they will plant it or eat it.

The power has been off now for 4 and half days. The electricity utility has proven itself to be spectacularly useless so this morning I moved the contents of my deep freeze (leaving behind the 5cm of water in the bottom) to the work fridge where it hopefully won’t go off.

It’s not that they don’t know where the fault is, they are just inept and seemingly uninterested to boot. It took them 2 days to get to the fault on a cable at the bottom end of the farm. They fixed it, turned the power on, there was a big bang and 4 ha of grazing went up in smoke. Yesterday it rained so nothing happened (don’t apply for a job in the UK guys) and today they arrived at about 3 p.m. It’s raining again so who knows when they will come back.

I was buying some nitric acid this morning to acidify our irrigation water (it has not been available for a couple of months and we have paid a steep price) and chatting to the manager while I waited for the containers to be filled. The conversation followed the usual course of the disastrous economy and I asked him what he was doing about accepting US dollars. Oh, he said, we just convert it to local dollars for the books. He admitted it was an arbitrary figure. Try reading this he said and passed me a cheque for 64 quintillion dollars. That’s 64,000,000,000,000,000,000. Quite who came up with the “quintillion” or even if it is an accepted word (well MS Word dictionary seems to know it) is anyone’s guess but in Zimbabwe terms it’s worth one US dollar (using a cheque).