Messages From Zimbabwe

James Etheredge relaxes on his patio and surveys a bucolic scene of green lawns and orchards, where a peaceful river sparkles in the sunshine. But slowly, as he talks of the violence and destruction that surround him, the pastoral landscape emerges as something very different: a war zone.

On the river behind him, calmly fishing now, are the farm invaders, young thugs who wear the T-shirts of a prominent member of the long-ruling ZANU-PF political party.

They set up their camp at the entrance gate, where they nailed their posters to the farm buildings. “Our Land, Our Sovereignty,” the posters say, bearing a large photo of President Robert Mugabe.

The thugs have repeatedly ordered Mr. Etheredge and his brother to surrender their 110-hectare citrus farm, one of the biggest in Zimbabwe with 6,000 tonnes of fruit waiting to be harvested this month. So far the young invaders have refrained from violence, but there is a menace in their presence.

The assault on the citrus farm is just the latest in a fresh wave of invasions of the dwindling white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe, a last-ditch scramble for free land before the new coalition government can prohibit the practice. About 80 farms have been seized and at least 50 more are under siege, sparking a crisis inside the new government as Mr. Mugabe continues to defend the invasions.

“I’m not afraid,” Mr. Etheredge says, gazing at the young men who invaded his land. “I’ve told these guys, ‘If you come into my house, I will kill you.’”

He speaks of guns and death with the nonchalance of someone who has seen violence around him for years. “I killed a person in my house last March,” he shrugs.

He keeps his guns under his bed these days. Until last June, his arsenal was locked in a safe. Then a gang of young men, led by a powerful senator from the ZANU-PF government, drove onto the farm and threatened to kill the Etheredges if they refused to leave.

The gang looted the farm and stole everything they could haul away, including tractors, stoves, refrigerators, freezers, furniture and even the curtains on the windows. Using a jackhammer, they blasted through a thick wall into the safe and took 14 guns. When the Etheredges tried to recover some of their looted property, they were clubbed.

Later the Etheredges fired shots in the air to recover a stolen tractor, a small part of their $5-million investment. One of the invasion leaders was a soldier from a nearby military camp, they say. “If we had found him, we would have killed him,” James Etheredge says.

Three months earlier, he used a shotgun to kill a military-garbed man who had burst into his house at 3 a.m. The man killed one of his guards and struck his wife with a gun before he was shot dead, the farmer says.

The killing took place with one of his two young children watching. “They’ve been through a hell of a lot,” he says. “I just tell them we have to be careful because of the bad people.”

Nine years ago, Zimbabwe had about 4,300 white-owned commercial farms. Today only about 300 remain, and many are reduced to small plots of land. Many of the invaded farms are sitting idle or neglected despite a desperate need for food in Zimbabwe, where three-quarters of the population is dependent on food aid from foreign donors.

Largely because of the invasions, Zimbabwe‘s farm output has dropped by 50 to 70 per cent in the past seven years, and most people subsist on one meal a day.

After reaching a peak of brutal violence during the national election last June, the invasions stopped for a while. But in recent weeks they have accelerated again.

Senate president Edna Madzongwe has been targeting the Etheredge farm for the past two years, though she is believed to have four other farms already in her possession. She visits the farm almost every day, accompanied by gangs of young men who tell the 50 farm workers that they must work for her now. After one confrontation last month, the police filed an attempted murder charge against Mr. Etheredge’s brother for allegedly trying to run over an invader with his car, a charge they deny.

The farm workers are deeply worried by the senator’s attempt to seize the citrus farm. “When the oranges are gone, she will move on and leave us stranded,” says Fillipo Banda, the oldest of the employees. He doesn’t know his age, but farm records show that he has been employed there for 58 years. “If these disturbances continue, I won’t be able to feed my family,” he says.

The workers remember that the senator paid them nothing when she seized the farm for two weeks last year. “If Edna comes, we’ll die of hunger,” says Lodi Jizara, a tractor driver on the farm.

The Etheredges and other farmers have managed to hold off the invaders – for now, at least – by taking legal action to defend their land. They even persuaded a tribunal of African judges to issue a ruling in their favour. The judges – from the 15-nation Southern African Development Community, which includes Zimbabwe – ruled that the invasions were racially discriminatory and a breach of the community’s rule-of-law guarantees, since the farmers were denied any compensation or judicial hearings.

Mr. Mugabe reacted furiously, saying the tribunal’s decision was “absolute nonsense.” He vowed to force out the white farmers, using a derogatory word for whites in the Shona language. “They must vacate those farms, they must vacate those farms, they must vacate those farms,” he thundered in a speech at the celebration of his 85th birthday last month.

The farmers have tried unsuccessfully to persuade Zimbabwe‘s courts to respect the tribunal’s ruling. Most Zimbabwean judges are ZANU-PF loyalists, and many have been rewarded with seized farmland.

At a dairy operation near the Etheredge place, a group of armed men are in control of the property, and the farmer has fled. “He will be allowed back to collect his belongings,” says a young man carrying a shotgun. Then, showing some unease about the challenge ahead, the gunman asks a visitor whether he thinks the farmer might be willing to return as a “partner” to show them how to run the dairy operation.

Another nearby 1,200-hectare farm is owned by Ben Freeth and his father-in-law Mike Campbell, who were savagely beaten with rifle butts in an invasion last June.

“I can still feel the hole in my skull,” says Mr. Freeth, touching the 15-centimetre fracture on his skull. His ribs were broken, and he still he has no sense of smell as a result of brain damage from the assault.

“I’ve been beaten up quite a few times, but it’s never stopped me,” he says. “We said, ‘If you want to take this farm, you must do it legally.’ We’ve been protecting ourselves through the courts. But it’s a full-time occupation, just to stay on the farm.”

Three weeks ago, Mr. Freeth and Mr. Campbell were served with a “Notice to Cease Cropping” by a local official who ordered them to “pave way for the new beneficiaries.” A few days later, gangs of young men arrived on the farm.

“In a country that’s starving, we’ve been ordered to stop farming,” Mr. Freeth says incredulously. “It’s a nightmare trying to operate in these conditions. They’ve destroyed agriculture in this country.”

Of the 30 white farmers in the Chegutu area, only about five are still on the land, he said.

“Most of them are on the run, so the police don’t find them.… This is ethnic cleansing, so that Mugabe can intimidate the population in the next election. He wants to get rid of the last white farmers.”

(Source)

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Thursday will launch a new short-term economic recovery plan aimed at rejuvenating the country’s beleaguered economy, its news agency New Ziana reported.

Finance Minister Tendai Biti, who presented a revised 2009 budget statement in Parliament Wednesday, said turning around the economy was the inclusive government’s toughest job.

Mugabe will officially launch the programme dubbed “Short-Term Emergency Recovery Programme STEP)”.

Step is in response to severe economic challenges facing the country at the centre of which is hyperinflation, deteriorating public service delivery and corruption, he said.

Biti said these major challenges had resulted in negative economic growth of over 40 percent in the last eight years.

STEP will become our major fiscal tool to directing our budget.� Biti said STEP was based on three pillars, which are correction of the macro-economic environment, the democratization agenda and social protection and safety nets.

Under the democratization agenda, the programme would tackle issues pertaining to the strengthening of the rule of law, good governance as well as the drafting of a people driven constitution and liberalization and freeing of the media.

The logic of STEP is that it is not possible to have a stabilization programme disconnected from issues of rule of law and other issues, he said. Social protection tackles issues related to the need to protect vulnerable sections of the society such as orphans, the aged, teenage led households in light of the liberalization of the economy.

It also addresses restoration of the education and health sectors.

The final phase of the programme deals with the need to restore productivity in various sectors of the economy chief among them agriculture, mining as well as mobilization of savings, capitalization of the financial sector and the need for a social contract. Zimbabwe‘s economy has contracted in the last decade owing to various challenges including political conflicts that were compounded by sanctions imposed by the West.

The country last month formed an all-inclusive government made up of three parties represented in Parliament, which is expected to steer the country out of the economic quagmire.

(Source)

An international group is in Zimbabwe to investigate allegations of mass murder by government soldiers in a diamond field in the east of the country, state media reported.

The mission from the Kimberley Process (KP), the United Nations-founded body to monitor the trade in so-called “blood diamonds” arrived on a fact-finding mission on Monday and were due on Tuesday to visited the notorious Chiadzwa diamond field about 80 km south of the eastern city of Mutare, the government-controlled daily Herald said today.

The KP has established a system of international diamond trading which bans the sale of diamonds that have been exploited in “conflict areas” or where diamonds are used to prop up violent regimes.

The Chiadzwa area has been the centre of controversy since October last year when hundreds of soldiers from President Robert Mugabe’s army were deployed to drive off thousands of wildcat diggers and panners who invaded the area.

There have been widespread reports of random killings of hundreds of diggers and of mass graves.

“No-one was killed in the operation,” Mining Minister Obert Mpofu was quoted Wednesday as saying, adding that the “high level of criminality” led to three murders among diggers.

He said that Zimbabwe, a signed-up member of the KP, “is committed to the successful implementation of the Kimberley Process, and will provide information on the situation on the ground.”

The last inspection by KP officials was in 2006.

The government illegally seized the Chiadzwa diamond claim from British-based Africa Consolidated Resources in 2007, and set off a diamond rush when it encouraged locals to help themselves.

But since the army was deployed there, the area has been cordoned off to all but security forces.

The soldiers also embarked on a major crackdown on illegal traders who had turned much of the eastern Manicaland province into a thriving economic area from illegal dealing, which saw the streets of Mutare filled with new luxury vehicles as diamond barons flouted their wealth.

However, the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights group said about 5,000 people were arrested during the army operation, with three quarters of them of them showing signs of having been tortured severely.

The Movement for Democratic Change, now in a coalition government with Mugabe’s ZANU (PF) party, has claimed that hundreds of people were buried in mass graves “to hide the regime’s murderous activities,” and that the soldiers sent to guard the fields had become illegal dealers themselves.

The state-run Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation has been given exclusive mining rights in the area, but its officials admitted this week that the organisation, like most of Zimbabwe’s bodies, was bankrupt and was “looking for partners” to exploit the fields.

(Source)

The Zimbabwean government wants to investigate white commercial farmers over their alleged involvement in the car crash that claimed Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s wife a fortnight ago, State media has reported. The latest reports implicating the Commercial Farmers Union, which represents the country’s remaining white farmers, adds a new twist to Mrs Susan Tsvangirai’s death that most Zimbabweans refuse to accept was an accident. This also follows a statement by the United States embassy in Harare disowning the Nissan Diesel truck that side-swept Mr Tsvangirai’s vehicle leading to the fatal accident about 100 kilometres outside Harare. The embassy had initially admitted that the vehicle belonged to the United States International Development Agency (USAID) and that it was carrying out US and UK business at the time of the crash through a private contractor. The truck was delivering essential HIV and Aids and medical supplies to health clinics under an effort co-financed by USAID and the United Kingdom Department for International Development.

But the State-owned Herald newspaper, which usually reflects the thinking in President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party, said it had uncovered fresh information that the contractor in question was Crown Agents, a concern with roots steeped in British colonialism. The paper said John Snow International, which partnered Crown Agents and had admitted ownership of the truck had their headquarters at a building owned by the CFU. It might be coincidence but JSI’s headquarters here is what is called Agriculture House or CFU house, the paper said, quoting an unnamed government official. On the day of the accident, white commercial farmers were at the scene before the Prime Minister’s own close people knew what had happened. The government official said security officials should determine exactly how far this friendship (between CFU and Crown Agents) and their interests in the country go. CFU vice president, Mr Deon Theron was arrested as he allegedly filmed and photographed the wreckage.

Professor Jonathan Moyo, a former Minister of Information and Publicity in Mr Mugabe’s government and now an independent Member of Parliament also called for an investigation into USAID’s operations following the accident. He said the fact that a USAID driver was implicated in the shooting of Air Force of Zimbabwe commander Air Vice Marshal Perence Shiri last December was too much of a coincidence. The driver whose employers insist was nowhere near the scene of the alleged hijacking was released early this month because of lack of evidence linking him to the crime. However, it is the latest attempt to link the crash, which Mr Tsvangirai insists was an accident, that might fuel fresh controversy. Zimbabwe has witnessed a fresh wave of farm invasions targeting the remaining few white commercial farmers and their unions say the disturbances are racially motivated. Mr Mugabe accuses the white farmers of working with former colonial power Britain and the US to try to topple him from power so as to reverse his land reforms. The ageing ruler also accused the Mr Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change of being puppets of the West and the white farmers until the party agreed to join him in a unity government last month. However, in some circles the attempt to link the white farmers to the crash would be seen as trying to shift blame from the real culprits. The country has a long history of prominent politicians who die in mysterious accidents after falling out of favour with those in power.

(Source)

From the moment we enter Zimbabwe, there’s chaos. “Sorry, we don’t have any visa papers to stick into your passport, we’ve run out,” the Customs official says at the border crossing as he stamps a page and writes the necessary details.

That’s fine, I think to myself, secretly delighted. If visa papers have gone by the wayside, then the likelihood of paperwork recording our arrival and being sent to Harare is surely slim.

We’ve made it in undetected, a great relief for any international journalist wanting to get a story about conditions in what’s left of Zimbabwe’s society and economy.

Outside the passport control office, the desperate try to sell trillion-dollar notes. The notes are worthless but there’s obviously no shortage of paper at the mint. President Robert Mugabe seems to have an ample stock to print the ludicrous denominations.

“Five trillion dollar notes for $US100, madame?” A young man tries to accost me as I move towards our taxi.

Poor bloke, I think, we’re probably the only tourists he’s spotted for weeks. “Please, madame, I need money to feed my family,” his head tilts down and his dark brown eyes look up at me. He’s clearly a seasoned beggar but, I have no doubt, in real strife. As I fend him off, knowing I’ll encounter many more like him, a trail of Zimbabweans pass with piles of goods balanced on their heads, attached to their backs, hanging from their necks, squeezed under their arms and clutched in their hands: they bring across the border as much as they can carry. Shop shelves are empty in most places in Zimbabwe.

We’ve come to cover the cholera epidemic, the latest catastrophe to be overseen by Mugabe and his ZANU PF regime. The death toll is more than 4000.

One public health expert tells us it’s a disease that normally thrives in wartime, an indication of the extent of Zimbabwe‘s rot and a good reason for the 85-year-old dictator to deny its existence. He doesn’t want the world to know about it and certainly doesn’t want journalists seeing the carnage and filming it.

But we’re prepared. We’ve got a couple of small domestic cameras and, our trump card, a hidden camera. But it’s not easy. People are incredibly scared. The last thing they want is to attract the attention of Mugabe’s mob.

If they speak out publicly, they know what will happen.

Frank Tore is a case in point. An organiser, during last year’s presidential campaign, for recently installed Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change, Tore was hunted down by ZANU PF heavies. He tells us how his genitals were burned to ensure he’d never have more children to challenge the regime. His brother was killed and his wife and two daughters, 18 and 14, were repeatedly raped and abused for days. You have to wonder how someone who endures such horror is able to continue.

But Tore and his family do. Dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, he teaches his four-year-old son to somersault as his wife and eldest daughter look on and occasionally chuckle at the cute sight. But the longer we’re with Tore, the more his past trauma seems to invade his face. And there’s more heartache for him and his family. Tore’s sister-in-law and her two children died of cholera late last year.

He takes us to the inner-city apartment block where they live. The air is heavy with the smell of human waste. Sewage pours out of broken pipes and pigeons pick in the piles of garbage surrounding the building. You could call it a slum, but the people who inhabit the area are considered lower to middle class, certainly not the worst off. It’s in such filth that cholera thrives. The bacterium lives in human faeces and, if ingested, the disease can kill in a matter of hours unless treated. The undernourished and those already weak from other illnesses such as HIV (which means a large percentage of Zimbabwe‘s population) are the most vulnerable.

A Physicians for Human Rights report, release in January, argues Mugabe has knowingly allowed the cholera epidemic to happen and should be charged with crimes against humanity. It’s not difficult to see how this conclusion was reached.

Across the country, streets are flooded with sewage. The water supply, where there is one, is contaminated. Pipes have not been maintained, engineers and sanitation workers have not been paid, inexpensive chemicals have not been procured to treat the water and the health system is defunct.

Yet Mugabe manages to put together hundreds of thousands of US dollars to celebrate his 85th birthday and taunt hungry Zimbabweans as he tucks into his lavish cake.

There’s no doubt Mugabe is a villain, but on our journey into the country we find there is also another monster whom many people consider culpable. I don’t want to say too much before our story goes to air tonight because I want you to watch it.

I will say, however, that the UN humanitarian effort in Zimbabwe seems to be more about pleasing and befriending the brutal regime than helping the people. You can hear it tonight from a senior UN insider who puts his career on the line to speak out. Many people back him up, but few will go on record. It seems Mugabe also holds a tight rein on the wider international community.

You really have to wonder about comments by UN Assistant Secretary-General of Humanitarian Affairs Catherine Bragg at a press conference after her recent trip to Zimbabwe, for example. She was delighted at how co-operative Mugabe was in her talks with him and boasted that he’d invited her back. She seems to have forgotten that a year ago he refused her entry into the country.

How easily are these people convinced? How must it feel, if you’ve been persecuted by Mugabe, to hear the UN fawning over him?

We travel far and wide to makeshift cholera clinics: some are a cluster of tents, others are in run-down hospitals, some have the disease under control, others are struggling without medicine, disinfectant or beds. Victims lie on the floor or on bare wire springs or, if they’re lucky, on plastic-coated camp beds with a large hole halfway down and a bucket underneath; there’s no dignity in this disease.

Nursing staff tell of 24-hour shifts and no pay but, if appearances are anything to go by, few have dropped their standards. In many places, uniforms are crisply starched and fluorescent white.

The only way this epidemic can be eradicated is if the sanitation and sewage systems are repaired. Tsvangirai has promised to do that, but the problem is he has no money and faces a political landscape as treacherous as one of Africa‘s jungles.

A couple of days after his inauguration, we receive a call early in the morning from one of his advisers summoning us to a location for an interview. When we arrive we’re told to tell our driver not to wait outside the building; we’re not sure why, but we don’t ask questions. We’re then quickly shuffled inside the front door and taken to a side room.

It’s filled with foreign journalists or, rather, ostensible tourists.

They ask us to keep quiet. Apparently the Prime Minister will be escorted to the office by Mugabe’s intelligence officials, the same men who run terror campaigns against the opposition, not to mention the media. We hear voices entering the building. Is it them, we all wonder with some dread. Then silence as we strain to listen through the walls. The Prime Minister’s adviser sticks his head around the door to let us know all is fine: Mugabe’s hounds have been detained in the front room and the big man will be in to see us soon.

All that to get an interview with the country’s Prime Minister. But it worked. We get away with an interview in the can.

Such tricks may overcome small hurdles, but to fix the serious humanitarian crisis the country faces Tsvangirai will need more than subterfuge. He’ll need to work some magic.

(Source)

Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai refused the food served at the Heroes Acre on Saturday at the burial of the late former Zimbabwe Defence Forces Commander General Vitalis Zvinavashe. The food was being served by Robert Mugabe’s personal presidential chef.

Tsvangirai did not take food which all other leaders at the top table were eating. He was seen nodding his head from side to side, a cultural sign that means no thank you, after being offered a drink by the presidential chef.  

Tsvangirai attended the burial of the late Army General despite utterances which were made by the Service Chiefs last year that they were not going to salute him should he become the country’s President. He was the first one to arrive before the Service Chiefs, Vice Presidents Joseph Msika and Joyce Mujuru as well as President Robert Mugabe, who got a salute from the presidential guard upon his arrival.  

The late Retired Vitalis Zvinavashe is also well known for publicly declaring, on the eve of the 2002 presidential election, that the security chiefs would not back a president who had not participated in Zimbabwe‘s war of liberation – a clear reference to MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai.  

The  same utterances  were also made  by the Zimbabwe Prison Commissioner last year a period running to the harmonized  election when he told prison officers that he  was  not going to salute Tsvangirai if  he  wins  the  presidential elections.  

“I will rather retire and go farming if Tsvangirai wins the Presidential ticket, because I have difficulties in saluting a person who did not go to the liberation struggle,” Zimondi was quoted at ZPS headquarters last March. 

The late Retired Vitalis Zvinavashe died last Tuesday at Manyame Military hospital after a long illness.

(Source)

MDC Pressroom – MDC National Treasurer and Deputy Agriculture Minister-designate, Hon. Roy Bennett who was yesterday granted a US$5000 bail was this morning released from Mutare Prison.

Thousands of MDC supporters thronged the prison to witness the release of Hon. Bennett, who walked out of detention at exactly 11.04 AM today after spending a month in prison on trumped charges of banditry and terrorism.

Bennett, who was in high spirits waved and shook hands with the MDC supporters, who had been singing and dancing since morning awaiting his release.

Hon Bennet, who was appointed deputy minister of Agriculture, told journalists at the MDC’s provincial office in Mutare that he was ready to take up any post given to him by the party and the people of Zimbabwe.

He said he had no hard feelings over anyone who had stood in the way of the legal process to have him get his freedom. Hon Bennett expressed his concern over the massive starvation in the prisons, where people are eating sadza with salted water. He said five people had died while he was in prison.

MDC supporters have been keeping a vigil at the prison since Hon Bennett’s arrest.

The Supreme Court yesterday dismissed the State’s appeal against High Court decision granting Hon. Bennett bail but increased the bail money from US$2000 to US$5000. As part of his stringent bail conditions, Hon Bennet will report three times a week at Harare Central Police Station and has surrendered his travel documents and the title deeds of his property to the Clerk of court.

Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku threw out the State’s appeal to set aside the lower court’s ruling to deny Hon. Bennett bail.

Hon. Bennett, who is facing trumped up charges of possessing dangerous weapons for purposes of insurgency, banditry and terrorism, has been in custody since February 13 this year, when he was arrested at Charles Prince Airport in Harare on his way to South Africa.

He was granted US$2000 bail by the High Court on February 24 but remained in custody after the State was granted seven days to lodge its appeal against the court’s decision.

However, the State unsuccessfully sought leave to appeal against the granting of Bennett bail at the High Court, before it was given the right to appeal at the Supreme Court last week.

MDC Information and Publicity Department

(Source: via email)

Something extraordinary is happening in Zimbabwe. Supermarket shelves that were empty three months ago are once more stacked with produce.

Prices, practically doubling daily at one stage, have been going down.

The simple explanation for this apparent miracle in Zimbabwe’s broken-down economy is that everything is now priced in US dollars or rands.

Zimbabwe’s dollar, shrinking at a dizzying rate despite repeated efforts to relaunch it, has disappeared into nothingness, devoid of value except as a souvenir.

In late January, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe gave up trying to stem dollarisation of the economy, and let all companies and individuals conduct transactions in foreign currencies.

Until then, only authorised businesses were allowed to do so. But retailers and service providers were increasingly demanding payment in US dollars or dollar-based fuel coupons.

Then, in a bid to keep the country’s currency alive, the bank announced further redenomination of Zimbabwe’s dollar: one new unit for every trillion old units.

Bank governor Gideon Gono was adamant that other currencies would never overtake the Zimbabwean dollar, and it would remain “a fundamental economic pillar of our sovereignty”.

More importantly, perhaps, was that he could print Zimbabwean dollars at will, and allocate them. His post, now at the centre of a political battle, became the most powerful in the country’s distressed economy. But those Zimbabwean dollars have rapidly become irrelevant.

There have been cases before of a country throwing over its own currency and adopting someone else’s. Panama, Ecuador and El Salvador, for instance, all use the US dollar. But Zimbabwe is unusual in allowing not one but several foreign currencies.

The rand, popular in Bulawayo, is also used in Harare for small change. Otherwise, the lowest US denomination available is the one dollar note.

Inflation in Zimbabwean dollar terms reached an annual rate of 231-million percent last July – when the authorities stopped counting – and galloped on well into sextillions.

The practice of adding zeros brought an initial spurt of inflation in dollars. The price of a half-litre bottle of mineral water doubled to $2, but has since dropped back to $0,80.

An unsystematic sampling this week produced a consistent story. Chipo, serving at the bakery counter of one Harare supermarket, said that before the change she was marking price increases on the blackboard as often as six times a day. Now prices were stabilising well below their dollar peak. A 20kg bag of maize meal was down from $13 to $10.

Three months ago, shelves were almost empty. Shopkeepers removed goods because they could not make a profit at government-controlled prices, and wholesale suppliers withheld deliveries as they were no longer willing to be paid in money that was plummeting in value by the hour.

Shortages were worsened by customers buying in bulk produce that they could then resell.

Checkouts are busy again now. Most customers buy only a few items at a time, but everybody has US dollars. Any suggestion of paying in Zimbabwean currency is laughed at.

Even small-time street sellers, who have proliferated in the meltdown of the formal economy, have bundles of US notes. Where they come from is a mystery economists find hard to explain.

As soon as the new unity government was inaugurated a month ago, Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change and now prime minister, said public servants would all be paid in foreign currency. This included army personnel, who were getting restive at seeing the top brass getting hard currency while their pay was becoming worthless. Teachers, who had stopped going to work, finding that their salaries did not even cover their travel costs, could return.

The first payments came in vouchers for $100 a person. But banks, short of currency supplies, were reluctant to redeem more than $15. While banks do not have the dollars, people in the street somehow do. More than anything, this phenomenon reveals the extent of informal sales networks.

Anything that can be bought or taken into the country can be sold for hard currency. For many Zimbabweans, this sideline activity provides the only meaningful income.

“Everybody’s selling something,” said a young woman supermarket customer. She has a job, but like many others it has been cut back to 15 days a month. “You’re practically working for nothing,” she says.

Companies that do not generate foreign-currency income continue paying staff in Zimbabwean dollars. Others pay in mixed currency. Ida, a cashier, said she was still getting a Zimbabwean dollar income even though the shop traded in US dollars. She could use it on some transport, but for nothing else.

Even for US dollar earners there is often a big discrepancy between pay levels and living costs.

A recently promoted barman produced a pay slip showing net monthly pay of $68. Prices, meanwhile, are roughly the same as in a European capital, if not higher. A loaf of bread costs $1, a kilogram of rice $2,70.

Unions have been demanding steep pay rises. The wage bill at one hotel in Harare – a US dollar business – went up by 175% from one month to the next.

While food prices have settled down, state-run services such as telephones have increased their bills sharply, to the extent that customers are refusing to pay. With the switch to dollars, schools have reopened, but parents are flinching at the new fees.

And the government’s promise to public sector workers is a risky one.

Economists reckon that without an injection of foreign exchange, the government’s ability to honour its pledges in dollars will run out towards the end of next month.

(Source)

Zimbabwean authorities released MDC official Roy Bennett from prison on Thursday, a day after the Supreme Court ordered his release on bail, a Reuters witness said.

The release could ease tension in the power-sharing government of President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai which faces the task of rebuilding the country’s shattered economy.

Bennett, set to become deputy agriculture minister in the unity government, was arrested on February 13 and charged with plotting terrorism.

He was released from jail in Mutare, 300 km (188 miles) east of the capital Harare. Bennett did not speak to journalists or supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change gathered outside the prison.

A High Court judge granted him bail last week but state prosecutors appealed against the decision. The Supreme Court ordered his release on Wednesday.

Bennett faces up to life in prison if convicted. His arrest is an early test for the new government, which Zimbabweans hope will end years of economic hardship.

Zimbabwe, beset by 90 percent unemployment, hyperinflation and shortages of basic goods, needs Western donors and foreign investors to rescue its economy.

Their help will be conditional on the implementation of fully democratic government and reforms such as reversing plans for nationalization.

(Source)

Australia ended a long-standing ban on non-humanitarian aid to Zimbabwe Wednesday, saying it wanted to help Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai relieve the suffering of his nation’s people.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said Australia would provide 10 million dollars (6.5 million US) for the Zimbabwe government to restore basic water, sanitation and health services.

“Australia‘s assistance to Zimbabwe to date has been limited to humanitarian aid,” Smith said in a statement.

“The government plans to expand Australian assistance to support efforts by Prime Minister Tsvangirai and his ministers to bring sustainable and long-term improvements to the lives of Zimbabweans.

“The government recognises there are some risks to this approach. We are under no illusions about the fragility of the political situation in Zimbabwe.”

He said five million dollars would be spent through UNICEF on providing water treatment chemicals in an attempt to curb a cholera epidemic.

The other five million will be used to make payments to health workers and nursing staff struggling “as a result of the country’s economic and social collapse and the unreliability of salary payments from the Mugabe government”.

“Australia‘s funding will assist their return to work in hospitals and healthcare centres around the country, and support the resumption of essential medical services,” Smith said.

Australia had repeatedly called on Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to step down, imposing financial sanctions and travel bans on members of his regime, prohibiting arms sales and cutting defence and ministerial links.

(Source)