The Country That Never Was……Zimbabwe, ……………..wait before you……………….!
on June 27, 2008
Category: Elections, Zimbabwe, Social Movements, South Africa, African Politics, Refugees
Excitement gripped me when I was able to go back across the border to visit my family in Zimbabwe. Pleased as I was, I tried to ignore all the media reports on the country’s disregard of acceptable and proper treatment of human beings. Before going home, I braced myself for whatever the hell was to befall me! Imagine going back home to unpredictable situations, disastrous conditions, or even impending death - and when home is Zimbabwe this is no exaggeration. If you have been in South Africa you are immediately suspected of being MDC. Anyway, going home was the only way to please my mum!
From Johannesburg I boarded a bus directly to Harare, Zimbabwe. I paid 300 Rands for the trip and took at least seven hours to reach the Beitbridge Border Post. The border was highly-congested, with border officials dragging their feet at main checkpoints. My stay there was four hours. Later, the bus had to leave for Harare at around 5 o’clock in the morning. The bus took eight hours to reach Harare.
My arrival in the capital city was met by a great shock. There was no transport to ferry me to my small city of birth, Marondera. Familiar to my country’s economic woes, I immediately settled on the fuel disaster as the explanation. However, I waited by Fourth Street, just behind Roadport for any transport, and immediately arrived a smoking, dusty, ready-for-scrap Mazda T3500 lorry, and not wanting to miss it, I jostled alongside other stranded commuters onto its back. Along the way the driver demanded Z$500 million, as transport fares. He said this was to enable him to buy fuel.
As we drove past Ruwa, a small town just outside Harare, the black-marketeers of fuel waved down the driver. It was a clear signal that only Zimbabwe could run dry, but never the black-marketeers. Immediately, the driver parked by the roadside, but was told to restart and get fuelled in a small patch of thick bush, obviously to be hidden away from the raging battalion of the army or police. He complied. I tried to get as close to the black-marketeer as I could to grasp details of his conversation with the driver, but had to gather the two were arguing over the exact price of the ‘precious liquid’. It seemed the young man was attempting to refuel the lorry before settling on the actual price.
When I arrived in the newly-crowned city of Marondera[formerly a town, and recently given a city status], I just slept overnight, eager to catch the morning bus to my mother’s plot, that she was allocated by the ruling Zanu-PF party. The house in Marondera belongs to my grandfather, my mother’s stepfather. Currently, the four-bedroomed tiny property is home to my mother’s sister, together with her three children. Her first-born is a boy, who has two younger sisters as well. The next morning I took a lift to the Baker Plots that were grabbed from a Mr. Baker, a white farmer. Mr. Baker is one of the 4 000 white farmers whose farms were forcibly grabbed by the ruling government in 1997, under the influence of the late and former Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association leader, Chenjerai Hunzvi.
I paid Z$200 million from Marondera to Baker’s. Initially, the driver of the small, out-of-date obsolete Datsun Pulsar had asked for Z$300 million, arguing that the exchange rate of the ZimDollar Versus the South African Rand was unpredictable, thus the need to cater for the unexpected devaluation of the dollar. True to his utterances, and as I had to experience for myself during my short stay in Zimbabwe, the Z$ keeps falling on an hourly basis. To stay on the safe side, one has to keep a close and tight guard on the ‘now indispensable’ Tito Mboweni product.
[Read more…]
