WHILE President Mugabe and his spin doctors were complaining bitterly in Pretoria about a campaign to tarnish Zimbabwe’s reputation, a New Zealand newspaper was recounting the experience of two Kiwi riflemen detained and interrogated in Harare for carrying ammunition.
The two had been attending a shooting tournament in Bloemfontein and had decided to see the Victoria Falls before flying home. International airline regulations allow for up to five kilogrammes of ammunition to be carried so long as it is in its original packaging.
When the ammo showed up on the airport security radar at Harare airport before they were to join the Qantas flight home, they were hauled out of the departure lounge and detained.
“If we’d known we had to declare it, we would have done so without hesitation,” the pair said. But the departure forms said nothing about ammunition.
Their wives had to fly home without them. The New Zealand high commission was unable to secure their release. They were then transferred to Chikurubi where they spent the night sleeping on a concrete floor after several hours of interrogation.
The next morning they were shackled and manacled for a court appearance.
But it soon became apparent that the charges wouldn’t stick. So they agreed with the prosecution to forfeit their ammunition instead. After a terrible ordeal, they were eventually released and flew home.
They said landing in Perth was like arriving in a different world.
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“After the hostility we had felt in Zimbabwe it was so great to be back among smiling faces,” they said. They would never go back to Zimbabwe again they told the Australian and New Zealand media.
They only later discovered that they were the victims of an official conspiracy theory following the arrest of three Americans. No doubt we will see a presidential official dismissing this report as another “blatant lie or half-truth”!
Muckraker was intrigued by a notice on the front page of the Daily News last week announcing “an exclusive interview with a Zimbabwean soldier captured by rebels” in the DRC.
This was obviously going to make exciting reading. However, when the story appeared on the front page of the paper last Friday, it looked rather familiar. And no wonder. It had appeared in this column the week before. Private Patrick Nyabadza’s harrowing story, written by Sam Kiley, had been originally carried in the Times of London. Muck-raker used it and acknowledged the source.
By the time it got to the Daily News, it was third-hand. That falls rather short of “exclusive” by any definition!
Still with the Daily News, Muckraker was interested to note the appointment of William Bango as news editor.
This surely isn’t the same Bango who we caught last year recycling not entirely accurate messages about Independent journalists being poached by ANZ? When we asked why he had left himself off the list, he reacted indignantly. He had not spoken to anybody at ANZ, he insisted!
Meanwhile, Tony Namate’s cartoons in the Daily News remain the best. His picture of Professor Mahoso’s black-board with “Topic of the day: Low failure rate. A rightwing plot?” had our newsroom in stitches and very neatly summarised the shortcomings of the nation’s leading smoke-and-mirrors man.
Let’s hope the students at the Polytech put it up on their notice board!
There have been a number of diverting stories recently. A story in the Zimbabwe Smoke-and-Mirror about Uganda subsidising the ZCTU in order to “cause trouble” caught our attention.
This turned out to be a non-story when the Ugandans pointed out they were hardly in a position to subsidise anybody. But where is a story like that likely to come from?
And then in the same newspaper we were told that “the IMF again appears to be the agency for yet another phase of an economic, social and political crisis in Zimbabwe”.
The reasons for the delays in releasing funds by the IMF had all been adequately addressed by the government, the paper claimed despite evidence that Zimbabwe has missed every single target set.
But certain “stakeholders” were working to create “a social crisis” to change the government. The National Economic Consultative Forum and the Constitutional Review Commission, on the other hand, were working for stability, we were assured.
What is the connection here, we wonder?
We were also intrigued to note a recent Sunday Mail article on Morgan Tsvangirai, a reference to the ZCTU labour college which, we were informed, now lay in ruins with building materials scattered around “decomposing”.
As this was a hatchet job on Tsvangirai (“Staunch socialist turns capitalist”), readers may be forgiven for concluding that the failure of the labour college 10 years ago could be laid at his door.
But inside the same paper was an article featuring Jeffrey Mutandare of the Associated Mine-workers Union of Zimbabwe, who was ZCTU leader in the late 1980s when the labour college scheme collapsed.
Strangely, he wasn’t asked about the fate of the college, nor was he asked about a related court case at the time.
The reason is immediately evident. Mutandare now heads a pro-government union umbrella body. He said the disinvestment by BHP was “nothing but an international conspiracy against Zimbabwe to punish it over the land issue”.
We should start a column called “curious connections”!
It was interesting to hear from Kumbirai Kangai that the national land policy will be all-inclusive and take on board the views of stakeholders and donors.
Why has government only now decided to be a good listener? How much time has been wasted on the policy of confrontation and “no going back”? How many people could have been resettled?
And wasn’t the minister only recently telling us there would be “no going back” on the tobacco levy? What we want to know now is the names of those MPs who pushed for this levy set against the amount the country has lost in terms of forex receipts because farmers have moved to other crops. That way we should be able to see how much populism costs.
Meanwhile, what rock has the editor of the Chronicle been hiding under? He appears not to have noticed the new land consensus that has emerged and continues to talk of forcibly removing people from their land. “The government has resolved to press forwards,” he announces.
Really? Has the government done anything except hold up the whole process by its damaging grandstanding? Is Bulawayo so completely cut off that the Chronicle has missed the whole discourse on land which has finally resulted in the government adhering to the pledges it made to donors last year?
On absentee landlords, the Chronicle’s logic is very simple: if Zimbabweans can’t own land abroad, why should foreigners own land in Zimbabwe?
Sounds reasonable doesn’t it? Except of course hundreds of Zimbabweans own land abroad, including those in the top echelons of the party.
How on earth were dictators such as Mobutu and a few others we can think of able to acquire large estates in Europe if they were not allowed to acquire land there?
When, after the Non-Aligned Summit in 1986, vehicles which had been acquired for the occasion handed over to the police, we were told by the Herald that traffic violations by motorists would soon be “a thing of the past”. Where are those vehicles now and how long did they last?
Now comes the news that six of the 55 Land Rover Defenders recently handed over to the police have been involved in accidents. Each vehicle is valued at $1 million. The police are due to get a total of 1 500 Defenders from Britain. On past performance, it should be possible to calculate how long they will last!
We have news for Enos Chikowore. The South African Ministry of Transport has reduced its staff complement from 1 400 to 250. It has done this by identifying its core responsibilities and shedding the rest. It has privatised the airports management company and outsourced national roads, maritime safety, civil aviation and cross-border transport.
It has also arranged for all vehicles used by the Health, Transport, Labour, Water Affairs and Forestry ministries to be managed by a car hire company. The deal affects some 60 000 vehicles in use by government and is likely to save R100 million a year.
What is Chikowore doing to save the taxpayers’ money?
Following our recent coverage of the cracks appearing at the National Stadium, Muckraker has learnt that this is the least of the Chinese government’s worries.
Time magazine reports that cracks have appeared in the much-vaunted Three Gorges Dam, showpiece of a vast scheme on the upper reaches of the Yangtse River. Foreign experts have been called in to advise on the pouring of concrete.
Of the 20 bridges built as part of the scheme to resettle people affected by the project, all but three have quality problems and five have had to be destroyed. Prime minister Zhu Rongzhi has joined in the chorus of criticism of the project which has far-reaching social as well as environmental implications.
China salvation enthusiasts: you have been warned!
Customised number plates in the UK have for years been a fashion accessory. In September V-prefix cars go on sale and the licensing authority has been swamped with applications for numbers such as V14 GRA, V1 NNY, V1 NCE, V1 RGO and V1 XEN, the International Express reports.
These personalised plates cost as much as £20 000. What remains to be seen is whether any of the applicants will want a plate more accurately reflecting their sonality: W4 NKR!
Anybody expecting a change of image for Zimbabwe will be alarmed to hear of the new diplomatic appointments by President Mugabe. Instead of appointing a new generation of envoys who can communicate the image of a dynamic, reform-driven society he has simply recyled those who have been on the diplomatic gravy train for years.
Former cabinet minister and ambassador to Belgium and the EU, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, goes to London as high commissioner. Whatever his personal merits may be, is this the face of the new Zimbabwe?
More to the point, how can Mugabe’s ambassador to the court of Mengistu from 1983-1988, Tichaona Jokonya, be regarded as a suitable spokesman for Zimbabwe at the UN in New York?
Jokonya was brought home to help Chen Chimutengwende face down international NGOs at the Harare Cites conference two years ago and demonstrated a contempt for alternative views that places him firmly in the hardline camp around the president.
He will be mortified to learn that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is describing him, among other things, as a former lecturer at the "University of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia". I didn't think we recognised the "internal regime"?
Finally, Boniface Chidyausiku has been appointed ambassador to the UN in Geneva. His qualifications? He was formerly ambassador to Angola, China and North Korea.
Those on the constitutional reform commission who think Mugabe has undergone some Damascene conversion to reform should study the list of appointments carefully. It tells us all we need to know!
We were enormously saddened by the news that Tirivanhu Mudariki and Irene Zindi have lost millions of dollars to a Libyan conman. But as the rest of us have lost billions of dollars to a Zimbabwean conman who the two MPs think is so wonderful, our sympathy is somewhat muted!
