From Ben Freeth

This was a piece I wrote that was published in the Beeld last week and gives a bit of a flavor of where we are in Zimbabwe at the moment. All the best
Ben Freeth
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Media 24 article - January 2011
Last week I took a drive to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, from Harare.

At a police road block in our desperately dishevelled home town of Chegutu, I asked whether Chief Inspector Manika had come back from his tour as a peace keeper with the United Nations. "He is coming soon" the Constable said. I winced but said nothing. I knew how through the selective application of repressive laws he had caused so much suffering; and also ensured none of the perpetrators of the violence against us and our workers and against the MDC members in the last election had ever been brought to justice.

I went through the town, past the orange and mango vendors selling their fruit from the farms we had been run off, and stopped at David Whiteheads, the jewel of the once thriving cotton manufacturing industry. There was no electricity but through the twilight of the cavernous factory I could make out the silent looms. The place was deserted. Our voices echoed eerily in the emptiness where once 2000 workers made the place hum.

I got back in the car and drove on stopping again at Kadoma Spinners and Weavers. I spoke to one of the workers. "We can just make nappies at the moment," he said. "That's all the generators can cope with. Most of the time we are just seated because there is no ZESA."

I borrowed some fuel off a white farmer, Doug Alexander, because none of the fuel stations had any. He had been booted off first one farm and then eventually off the next and was now in town going out to try to farm odd little patches on various black owned properties. His beard had gone much whiter since I last saw him.

The fuel got me to Gweru. All along the sides of the roads, beyond the broken fences, there were patches of subsistence maize which I looked at sadly. I knew they were almost all being grown on properties that had never been paid for. I spoke to a few white farmers in Gweru. I could see they were weary. Sid Shaw had had Onverwacht until Welshman Ncube, now the new leader of the smaller MDC faction, had torn it from him. "They're no better than ZANU PF" said another farmer. One of the farmers present was Anne
Lourens, mother of a school friend of my wife's. She said sadly: "I am tired." My heart went out to her. "I know how you feel," I said, "we're all tired." I knew though, that for her it wasn't just the weathering as a
widow of the last 11 years of farm invasions that had made her tired.

Before that, during Gukuruhundi, her husband had been murdered and she had had to bring up a young family all on her own. It was a whole quarter of a century of struggling to survive.

In Bulawayo, driving around the industrial area was a bit like driving through a ghost town. There were no cars on the road and the few people I saw did not seem to have a purpose at all. They were just loitering. With the national un-employment rate at 95 percent I suppose it wasn't surprising.

The Wall Street Journal in conjunction with the Heritage Foundation has just ranked Zimbabwe 178th out of 179 in their index of economic freedoms which measures the freedoms to invest, work and produce. The formation of the Inclusive Government has done nothing fundamental to change our status: none of the notoriously oppressive legislation has been repealed; the police, army and justice system remains malevolently partisan; the human rights commission after 2 years is still dormant; the only public broadcaster still remains entirely controlled by ZANU PF. In fact there is non compliance with the GPA on almost every issue relating to giving people the freedoms that were guaranteed by SADC and the AU. Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights [ZLHR] have charged that "SADC has encouraged ...impunity and continued non compliance with its own dead lines and benchmarks."

Back in Harare though it is a different world - a completely different country. Everything seems to be humming. The supermarkets are full. The roads are busy. The MDC Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti, is predicting a 9.3 percent GDP growth rate and even the IMF said it would be 4.5 percent for 2011. It seemed impossible coming from where we had come from as refugees off the farms just beyond the city boarders.

I wondered what the optimism from Tendai Biti and the IMF was all about; but I suppose economic growth is not too hard a thing to achieve in a time when many of the world mineral prices are higher than they have ever been; and after a decade where the economy was in virtual freefall it doesn't take too much to bounce back some of the way.

Professor John Mukombe, a political analyst, has dubbed this year "the year that the dictator will, in one way or other, have no choice but to go."

Most of us don't dare believe him because we have heard it all before and had our hopes dashed so many times.

Everyone is nervous. Even the people in the bubble of Harare I talk too are worried about 2011. Mugabe is talking elections and all over the country there are reports of ZANU PF gearing for them. At the road blocks there are now often military police as well as the usual police officers. Soldiers have been moving around in the towns. Threats of violence are all over the place. The fear of what happened in the 2008 elections is still fresh.
According to ZLHR "there has been no progress on reform of laws that directly or indirectly facilitate free and fair elections."

White and foreign businessmen are jittery. The probability that the indigenisation legislation is going to be used to reward the Party stalwarts in the campaign seems strong. Already they are testing the waters. At lake Chivero, the district chairman of the war veterans for Zvimba, Aaron Mazvi, took over all the boating clubs and other tourist properties along the lake shore last week. Residents were locked in and visitors locked out. Ispoke to one American diplomatic couple who had gone to Larvon Bird gardens in their CD plated car for the weekend: "They just turned us away at the gate. We pleaded with them but they didn't allow us in." JOMIC to its credit did eventually intervene, but nobody was arrested or charged with any crimes.

But it's the diamonds that many think have sealed it. Reported as the biggest diamond field by far ever found anywhere in the world and out of bounds, even to the parliamentary committee, they are surrounded by a web of intrigue. Where ever alluvial diamonds have been found in Africa they have bought guns and caused blood shed. Speculation abounds regarding Chinese involvement. Over the last couple of months a massive, brand new Chinese military barracks has sprung up on the Mazowe road. It's never been discussed in parliament or the senate or cabinet; but someone must have authorised it. There must be substantial interests to warrant setting it up.

For us though, we are the little people and we have to either be consummate optimists, or perhaps, just people that have resigned ourselves to try to somehow survive whatever the future brings.