Storms develop south of the local microlight club where we fly model aircraft
“Nah, it’s a ZANU-PF problem, they must sort it out themselves” Fabian responded when I asked him if he was going to join today’s protest march in the centre of Harare. Fabian was a non-combatant porter in Robert Mugbe’s ZANLA army as a young man in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia’s bush war which ended in 1980. He has little time for the ZANU-PF political party that Mugabe founded.
The current Zimbabwean president, Emerson Mnangagwa, is looking to extend his presidency to a third term of five years. Zimbabwe’s constitution forbids this and protests have been planned for today which will be spearheaded by Blessed Geza who was a ZANLA veteran. Not surprisingly this has led to accusations of treason from Mnangagwa even though demonstrations are allowed under the constitution. While a lot of Zimbabweans are thoroughly fed-up with an inept and kleptocratic government the cynics are saying that it’s just a changing of the guard – a different herd of snouts to the trough.
Last week saw amoured cars and troop carriers on the streets in an attempt to intimidate would-be protestors. There were road blocks manned by police stopping traffic going into town though yesterday evening, when I came back from the airfield, the one on the main road in had packed up.
The organizers of the protest were clear in their instructions to the general public; stay out of the city centre though this may have been disinformation by the government. Schools are shut today and most businesses are closed or working with reduced staff. There was very little traffic about when we went out to walk the dogs on ART farm. My business is working on essential staff only as we really didn’t know what to expect.
There were videos on social media this morning of protestors starting to march into town. They must have been aware that the last time this happened it all turned nasty when the army opened fire killing six. This is not like Turkey at the moment where thousands of students are gathering every evening to protest the collapse of the country’s democracy. They only have to put up with tear gas.
On the way back home I stopped at a local hardware store to get a jerrycan for my paramotor fuel. “Have a nice day” the cheerful teller girl said as I was leaving. “Yes”, I replied, “and tomorrow we’ll have a new government” giving her a large wink. She giggled, “So, what are you doing here then?” was her response.
It did rain last night. In some areas the storms were violent but here it was just 14mm of rain. Enough to make us thankful for the 4×4 capability of my truck on the very sticky ART farm roads.
Dawn breaking on ART farm – it was colder than it looks!
The car thermometer read 10C but I was determined to get the photograph that I’d seen on several early morning trips to walk the dogs on ART farm on the northern boundary of Harare. There was nothing for it but to just put up with the cold. Yes, it’s winter here in the southern hemisphere and we expect it to get cold, with the occasional frost in low-lying areas, but this winter has been unusually warm during the day.
We get our rains in our summer and this last season was marked by an El Niño event in the south Pacific Ocean (unusually warm temperatures) which kept the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the source of most of our summer rain, well to the north over Kenya and Tanzania. Zimbabwe went dry and consequently hungry. Most of the staple crop of maize grown in the country is rain-dependent and there was widespread crop failure. Farmers desperate to sell their cattle while they were marketable, swamped the abattoirs who eventually refused to buy any more. I’m told by my commercial farmer customers that what maize has been grown has been subject to widespread theft.
Droughts are nothing new in this part of the world – in 1992 when I was living in the east of the country we had a similar one and I took the photo below near where I was living. The next year the rains returned and the grazing recovered.
Not the sort of temperatures we expect to have in what is usually the coldest time of the year
From my business’ point of view I am not complaining – the warmer temperatures help us to get the seedlings through the nursery quicker and reduce costs. We really do need the prospect of a good wet season though as we rely entirely on boreholes for our water supply and despite the La Niña event of 2020 to 2022 we didn’t get the good rains the rest of the country experienced so they will need replenishing.
I am starting this while waiting for guests to arrive for lunch – my wife is an inveterate entertainer so needs little excuse to get friends around and of course today is a holiday so that’s what we are doing. Not sure when I’ll get to finish…
It’s an el Niño year so rainfall has been erratic so far; a heavy fall in October and then nothing for six weeks so crops are not looking great for those who don’t have irrigation available. There is a lot of fuss and bother in the various weather groups on various social media platforms whenever rain is forecast and then much soul searching when it doesn’t happen. People forget that forecasting is far more accurate than a few years back, even in this part of the world, and that hey, we get droughts in southern Africa! We have had 3 good years in succession and are due a drought, so all is normal in that respect.
I guess I could be cynical and say that the incompetence and corruption that we see all around us are also just about normal for this part of the world too. The road to my work is being resurfaced as we speak, and we are delighted but I fear there is an ulterior motive. The President has an interest in a housing development out beyond my business, and I think that is a prime motivation. Just by chance it goes past a big rubbish tip project that one of his sons has taken over. It looks like it’s being run properly, now we just need to get the city council to collect our garbage on a regular basis. Roads elsewhere in the city are in a dismal state and it’s not uncommon for local communities to take up the challenge and fill in the potholes on their own initiative.
I have just read in an article in The Economist that Indonesia built 300,000km of roads in the last 10 years. It is of course a vast country, bigger than the USA, but there’s an example here that our government could follow.
Zimbabwe is still in the bizarre situation of having two currencies: our own dollar and the US dollar. The local dollar is treated with contempt by all except the government who have just brought out a proposed budget with LOTS of zeros involved (the street rate for conversion is around 7,000 local dollars to the US dollar – officially it’s 6,000). Various members of parliament refused to vote for the budget to pass unless, amongst other demands, they got new 4×4 Toyota Landcruisers so that they could get over bad roads to visit their constituents. Nobody pointed out that the roads were such a mess in the first place due to the inefficiency and corruption. Fortunately, there were other bad ideas in the proposed budget that were also ditched – an annual tax on houses over a value of US$100,000 being one of them. Who was going to do the valuation was never revealed and quite how they were going to get around bribing the evaluators was not discussed either.
My business plods along. It pays the bills and that’s about all. We are charging less than we were in 2014 largely due to the proliferation of small seedling nurseries around town whose quality is dismal and who almost certainly don’t pay tax and cut a lot of other corners, but we cannot compete with their prices. I suspect a lot of people either don’t know what a quality seedling is or don’t care. Our core customers are commercial farmers and I think most of them do appreciate our commitment to quality – well that’s what one told me last week!
Of greater concern is a building project encompassing two neighboring farms in the form of a giant wall. The farms have been “acquired” by Grace Mugabe, wife of the late president, and word is she wants to have a 700-house project built on the enclosed 400ha. The wall is quite something (it has been nicknamed The Great Wall of Pomona after the area) – it’s not visible from space but is from 5,000m altitude on Google Earth. It is 3m high, has a reinforced concrete core and a course of bricks on the outside and inside. I asked a constructor what it might cost, and he suggested US$300-400 per metre. Given that the whole structure is 9km long that’s at least $27 million! The enclosed area is a rough rectangle but the property on which my business is located is a triangle jutting into the northeast corner. The big question is: what will they do when they get to the triangle, will they go around (an extra 500m), or will the wall cut the triangle off? Grace Mugabe is close to the President so wields disproportionate power and probably could just take the property if she felt like it. Perhaps she will force my landlady to sell the property, so she gets the title deeds? We will find out within the next 3 months or so when the wall will get to our boundary.
Despite the poor performance of the Zimbabwe economy the building sector is booming. Likely it’s due to money laundering. Al Jazeera TV did a documentary series (“Gold Mafia” in 4 parts) on this and explained that gold was being exported illegally, mainly to Dubai, by politically well-connected fat cats who were then bringing the cash back with the tacit approval of the President who is taking a 15% cut. The money is then invested in construction projects. Indeed, the suburbs are thick with construction projects of various descriptions – apartments, shopping centres, restaurants – which are often approved without the consent of residents. One of my cousins is in a street which is fighting the proposed construction of a Chinese restaurant. The Chinese are our friends so it’s almost a given that they will get permission.
We are cursed in this country with a wealth of minerals, especially gold. It’s just about everywhere you care to dig. My brother came out from the UK in October and as part of our travels we took a trip through the village where my mother lived after my father’s death. It was established as a gold mining area at the end of the 19th century. The commercial scale miners have long since moved on but the small-scale miners are everywhere and the place is a rubbish tip. One can only but wonder about the mercury pollution and mining safety. Health and safety are not concepts they care about.
The countryside is still largely beautiful. We got invited to an old school friend’s safari camp on the Zambezi River in Mana Pools National Park. I guess it’s about 200km downstream of Kariba Dam. While the game was not as plentiful as it usually is at that time of year due to unseasonal rains, we still had a great time in a beautiful part of the country. Drifting down the Zambezi in canoes at sunset was memorable – crocs and hippos notwithstanding!
An evening drift down the Zambezi River
Earlier this year I had a bit of an “episode” early one morning. I can’t remember much about it but thought I should go to my doctor about it. She thought it was probably just what is known as Transient General Amnesia (TGA) but given my age thought it worth a spate of tests just in case it was something else. I had mentioned it to some friends of roughly my age and they both said they’d experienced it. Indeed, after much prodding, imaging and blood taking that conclusion was reached. The physician at the final consultation was impressed with the state of my health, structural issues notwithstanding, and commented; “Well, whatever kills you in the end it won’t be your heart!”. I wasn’t sure if that was good news or not – I am of the age now that how I “go” has become a subject of some importance and going quickly is the preferred option.
The degeneration of the structural issues necessitated a lower spine operation in April. It was deemed successful by the surgeon, but it necessitated 3 weeks of bed rest which have had a lasting effect on my mobility. The general anaesthetic also had a lasting effect in the form of POCD (post-operative cognitive dysfunction) which also causes episodes – a sense of disconnecting with the world which the physician said would eventually pass.
It’s New Year’s Eve now and fortunately it has stopped raining! Such is the erratic nature of the climate we find our selves in. The experts tell us it’s all symptomatic of climate change i.e. it’s becoming more extreme though I’d hesitate to attribute a few days of exceptional weather to that just yet.
So, what can we expect from the New Year? You have and election coming up, the Olympic Games are in Paris, the war will continue in Ukraine – the cynical French expression plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose does come to mind!
Zimbabwe Absurdity 
A storm approaching
31 03 2025“Nah, it’s a ZANU-PF problem, they must sort it out themselves” Fabian responded when I asked him if he was going to join today’s protest march in the centre of Harare. Fabian was a non-combatant porter in Robert Mugbe’s ZANLA army as a young man in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia’s bush war which ended in 1980. He has little time for the ZANU-PF political party that Mugabe founded.
The current Zimbabwean president, Emerson Mnangagwa, is looking to extend his presidency to a third term of five years. Zimbabwe’s constitution forbids this and protests have been planned for today which will be spearheaded by Blessed Geza who was a ZANLA veteran. Not surprisingly this has led to accusations of treason from Mnangagwa even though demonstrations are allowed under the constitution. While a lot of Zimbabweans are thoroughly fed-up with an inept and kleptocratic government the cynics are saying that it’s just a changing of the guard – a different herd of snouts to the trough.
Last week saw amoured cars and troop carriers on the streets in an attempt to intimidate would-be protestors. There were road blocks manned by police stopping traffic going into town though yesterday evening, when I came back from the airfield, the one on the main road in had packed up.
The organizers of the protest were clear in their instructions to the general public; stay out of the city centre though this may have been disinformation by the government. Schools are shut today and most businesses are closed or working with reduced staff. There was very little traffic about when we went out to walk the dogs on ART farm. My business is working on essential staff only as we really didn’t know what to expect.
There were videos on social media this morning of protestors starting to march into town. They must have been aware that the last time this happened it all turned nasty when the army opened fire killing six. This is not like Turkey at the moment where thousands of students are gathering every evening to protest the collapse of the country’s democracy. They only have to put up with tear gas.
On the way back home I stopped at a local hardware store to get a jerrycan for my paramotor fuel. “Have a nice day” the cheerful teller girl said as I was leaving. “Yes”, I replied, “and tomorrow we’ll have a new government” giving her a large wink. She giggled, “So, what are you doing here then?” was her response.
It did rain last night. In some areas the storms were violent but here it was just 14mm of rain. Enough to make us thankful for the 4×4 capability of my truck on the very sticky ART farm roads.
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