Baffour Ankomah
At the beginning of this new weekly column, more of which is going to come in the next months and years Inshallah, let me make this humble appeal to the authorities on behalf of the suffering residents of Wilmington Park, Harare.
The streets of this small suburb bordering the Mukuvisi Woodlands and River are returning to dust. From tar to dust! And this appeal is to humbly ask the authorities to remember Wilmington Park in their road reconstruction programmes. I see that other suburbs in Harare have had spanking new road surfaces. May it be done to Wilmington Park as it has been done to those suburbs. And long should they not wait as all the streets in Wilmington Park, most of them named after the iconic rivers of Zimbabwe – from Tokwe to Limpopo to Umguza to Pungwe and Inyanga, all neatly linked up by the Paget Road that runs alongside the Mukuvisi River, need urgent resurfacing.
Before Christmas, some City Council or National Parks staff or contractors (I don’t which) rushed to cut down some of the tall gum trees along the Mukuvisi River that they thought were threatening (or might threaten) the nearby houses in Paget Road, and decided not to clean up after them.
They even had the temerity to leave two big logs blocking half of Paget Road at the junction with Limpopo. Two-and-a-half months later, as I write, the biggest of the two logs is still blocking half of Paget Road after some local boys pushed the smaller log off the road.
Which begs the question: Do the staff or contractors of the City Council or National Parks normally behave like this? Do they just cut trees, block roads, and drive away never to come back to move the logs off the roads, or even to clean up?
I am told that at the junction of Umguza Close and Paget Road, there was a water mains leak that lay open for 15 long years and grew to become a fast-flowing stream that competed with the nearby Mukuvisi River for attention.
It was only in late 2018 that the City Council was finally able to close the leak. How is this possible, dear Harare City Council, that treated water can go waste for 15 years! I am further told that the artificial stream that flowed from this mains leak ate the tar of that section of Paget Road until the road became dust. Surely the city fathers can do better than this, if their wish to make Harare a first class city by 2025 is to materialise. At the moment it looks like a sad joke.
Self-hate at its worst
Now let me turn to my main point of the week. Two weeks ago as I went through Zimbabwe’s private press, I was struck by the sheer safe-hate that oozed from their pages. The constant putting down of the country has become an epidemic that needs to be conquered, methink.
So it came as a breath of fresh air when last week Stembile Mpofu, in her Business Times column (“Freedom of thought more important than freedom of speech”), challenged Zimbabweans to consider who has influence over their thoughts.
She wrote: “The majority of the local and international media fill the information space with negative Zim is not the worst country on earth! I AM AFRICAN Baffour Ankomah reporting about the country. The constant negativity affects the morale of every citizen and all creativity is quashed, leaving us with little hope for the future and diminished selfbelief.
“We believe that only external funding and investors can rescue us because as we are, we are unable to do [it] for ourselves. We believe this because our school textbooks have told us that – as have Aid programmes, reports from international agencies and news programmes.
“[As] Zimbabwe, like most African countries, is always in need of assistance, our narrative has been a negative one. This is unlike the CIA’s programme that successfully promotes America to the extent that a Zimbabwean living in squalor in Harlem genuinely believes that his life is better in America than at home.”
I doff my hat to Stembile! She hit the nail right on the head. For me as an African looking in, I find Zim’s socalled “independent” media difficult to comprehend. Their negativism about their own country beggars belief. But Zimbabwe is not the worst country in the world. So they should spare their fellow citizens of the superlative adjectives from the negative end of the spectrum that they love to spray on Zim and its affairs.
“Tattered and toxic economy. Sagging exports. Anarchy. Brutal clampdown. Misrule. General sense of helplessness and hopelessness. The cruelty of the regime. Impoverished leadership. A kwashiokor of leadership.”
What is their problem? Can they not stop to think for a moment that this kind of writing, as Stembile says, “affects the morale of every citizen and all creativity is quashed, leaving us with little hope for the future and diminished self-belief”?
I am not denying that Zim’s economy is not in bad shape. I should be blind to say so. I am not saying living in this country has not become extra hard, and public services are not poor. Or the roads need urgent repair. Or even the crowd control tactics of recent months leave much to be desired.
There is room to point the authorities in the right direction if they have not seen the direction already. But diligence in using all the hard negative adjectives to describe one’s country is not the stuff good journalism is made of.
Yes there is economic hardship in Zim but refusing to put it in context or getting a perspective on things demonstrates poor journalism. Just consider the following: Last week after the RBZ rebranded the bond note and gave it the fancy name of “RTGS dollar”, and sensibly allowed the rate to float against the US dollar, a survey by Povo News Africa showed that the RTGS dollar is “the strongest currency on the African continent” according to the dollar rate.
At 2,50 to one dollar, the RTGS dollar topped the African currency charts, followed by: the Tunisian dinar at 3,06 to the dollar, Ghana cedi at 5,23 to the dollar; Moroccan dirham at 9,53 to the dollar; Botwana pula at 10,54; Zambian kwacha at 11,94; Seychelles rupee at 13,88; South African rand at 14,01; Namibian dollar at 14,03; Eritrean nakfa at 15,00; Egyptian pound at 17,54; Ethiopian birr at 28,45; Mauritian rupee at 34,23; Sudanese pound at 47,61; Gambian dalasi at 49,55; Mozambican metical at 62,55; Cape Verde escudo 97,56; Kenyan shilling at 100,15; Algerian dinar at 118,64; Liberian dollar at 161,25; Djibouti franc at 177,72, Nigerian naira at 306,75; Malawian kwacha at 780,00; and Tanzanian shilling at 2 340,00.
Yet, without getting a perspective, Zimbabweans have created an apocalyptic bubble in their minds where they sadly dwell and believe that they have the worst currency and country in the world. Sad to say, this damaging belief is fuelled by the private media.
What is missing in this beautiful country is patriotism. Or, if you want, Zim suffers from a patriotism deficiency syndrome.
Selfishness has become so ingrained that the nation may go to hell for all you know, and most people will not butt an eyelid. So long as me, myself, and I are satisfied, nothing else matters.
Last week, the RBZ governor, Dr John Mangudya, said in an interview: “What I know is that this economy has been going through difficult periods and we have done well under very difficult circumstances.
And to always look down upon ourselves, it’s not only unfair but also uncalled for. The country has got very little access to foreign finance and we are using the US dollar as our medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. That is against the background of sanctions. The major hindrance for Zimbabwe is access to foreign finance.”
The majority of Zimbabweans who do not see what the effects of economic sanctions have done to this country should look at Venezuela, an oil-rich nation that was helping most of the countries in its region when President Hugo Chavez was alive. But just look at what has happened to Venezuela when the USA upped the ante against Venezuela after Chavez died in March 2013? That is six years ago.
Zimbabwe has been under a combined economic attack by the Western world, USA included, for 19 years, and Zimbabweans do not want to give themselves credit for not going under as Venezuela has gone under? Dr Mangudya says “the major hindrance for Zimbabwe is access to foreign finance”, and this is the result of Western economic sanctions.
The truth is that any nation, USA included, that is prevented from borrowing cannot survive. Zim is lucky that, after all the squeeze by America and its allies, this country still has “very little access to foreign finance” at all. Zimbabweans should learn to count their blessings. It could have been worse if the designs of Robin Cook and the others in Europe and America who wanted Zimbabweans to stone their leaders in the streets had come true.
A grave story unreported
Before I ran out of space, let me draw attention to a very important story, important to Zimbabwe, that has gone largely unnoticed by the local media. Last month (26 January to be precise), at the Sundance Film Festival in USA, a former apartheidera operative, Alexander Jones, admitted on camera, in one of the films shown at the Festival, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, that he and his colleagues at the South African Institute of Maritime Research (SAIMR), which masterminded coups and other violence across Africa in the 1970s and 80s, deliberately spread the HIV virus in the Southern African region to wipe out black people.
HIV-Aids killed a lot of people in Zimbabwe and a lot more are still infected today. But the local media gave this important story a dodge. To me, it deserved to have led the news to provoke discussion and a possible chase of the culprits who spread the deadly virus or who helped in the spread of the deadly virus that killed so many Zimbabweans.
For 24 years – as assistant editor, deputy editor, and editor of the London-based New African magazine, I was an informed part of the global Aids debate and analysis, and I came to know that the kind of confession like Alexander Jones’ is not an aberration. Because during the liberation struggle in Rhodesia, Ian Smith’s government ran a chemical and biological warfare programme (CBW) which was linked to the South African CBW programme headed by Dr Wouter Basson.
Available information shows that the two last white regimes in this part of the world used their CBW programmes to do a lot of harm to black people – of course assisted by the USAs and the UKs of this world. Thus when I read Alexander Jones’ confession, my mind immediately went to the book, Something More Sinister, published in 1997 by Ben Geer, a white South African mercenary who fought for Ian Smith’s forces during Zim’s war of independence.
In the book, Geer tells how South Africa and Rhodesia used their CBW programmes to spread dangerous diseases in the region, including cholera, and topped it up with HIVAids experimentation.
Worse, when independence was approaching in Zimbabwe, Ian Smith’s government, with tacit support from South Africa and USA, rushed to remove the evidence by killing a lot of black people in protected villages and guerrilla camps who, Geer suspects, were subjects of CBW experiments in Rhodesia.
In the “epilogue” of the book, Geer posed a number of extremely important questions, including: (a) “Did the white extremists in Southern Africa have the resources and expertise to engineer a biological weapon? (b) If they possessed such a weapon, were the proponents of apartheid capable of using it? (c) Where could they have ‘safely’ deployed such a weapon? And, against whom would they have used it?”
Geer tells the story of how “late in December 1979, in the US, a chance remark to the author from an exserviceman prompted the writing of this [book]. The soldier stated that he had been one of a contingent of US troops en route from Vietnam who had been actively deployed in the Rhodesian Bush War.
They were given no reasons for being in Africa. Engaging the local militia [ZANLA], and having killed a number of persons on their march over a number of days to the coast, they were picked up by the US navy and shipped home. The soldier was not aware of any further involvement in Rhodesia by the US. What were they doing there?” Geer asks.
Unfortunately, I have run out of space for this week. I will continue this dramatic story next week. So please make a date with me.
