ELECTRICITY power generation at Lake Kariba has been cut due to falling water levels in the dam," reported Bulawayo 24.
"In a statement, the Zambezi River Authority said water allocation for power generation at Kariba North and South would be reduced from the current 1 476mW to 890mW.
"Lake Kariba is currently five metres above the Minimum Operating Level when it should be eight at this time of the year."
It never rains but pours! The country has been hit by the drought, then Cyclone Idai and now reduced power generation because of water shortage. These natural disasters are unpleasant enough no matter who you are but they are felt even more by those with no reserves to fall back on.
Ever since the seizure of the white owned farms in 2000 Zimbabwe has fallen off its parch as the breadbasket of the region. The country used to produce enough food to feed its own people with plenty left to feed others in the region. The country also earned billions of dollars from selling cash crops like tobacco and cut flowers. The country’s agricultural sector collapsed when Mugabe seized the farms, mostly for himself and his cronies.
Mnangagwa has poured billions of dollars to revive the agricultural sector with his ‘command agriculture’. It has been a failure because of corruption and mismanagement.
The collapse agricultural sector took down with it the country’s economy leaving the country dependent on important food aid - so impoverish we could not even pay for it.
We live in the day and age when human ingenuity has turned deserts in crop fields or orchards stretching from horizon to horizon all round. And yet we are starving in a country with idyllic weather and soil for growing crops and farming animals, the Garden of Eden. A damning testimonial to the sheer incompetence of the nation’s post independence leaders!
Worse still, we, the people of Zimbabwe, have for the last 38 years and counting allowed these Zanu PF thugs to ride roughshod over our basic freedoms and rights and to destroy the nation’s economy. The drought has caught us with empty silos, for decades we have lived from hand to mouths topped up with imported food and aid.
Cyclone Idai has destroyed many schools, hospitals, homes, roads and even killed many people. The damage was much worse that it would have been where it not for the sorry state of our infrastructure. Decades of neglect have left many roads in our cities and towns full of potholes; how much worse the roads in the rural backwaters.
Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless because their mud-brick homes collapsed. It is now 2 500 since the Romans invented cement and yet millions of our rural people still live in mud hut!
Ian Smith gave Mugabe detailed drawings of the Batoka Gorge Dam, another Kariba Dam, which would have double the hydro power generation capacity and a number of other power projects. 38 years latter, not one of these projects have been carried out. Many companies have closed sending unemployment to nauseating heights of 90%. The prospect of forcing the few companies still operating to shut down because of electrical power cuts due to reduce generation at Kariba Dam is sickening!
It never rains but pours. For the last 38 years we have done little to end our man-made problems of criminal waste of the nation’s human and material resources through corruption, mismanagement and tyrannical oppression. So when such natural disaster as drought and cyclone Idai occur we are as helpless as a chicken caught in haul storm.
The next eight months or so are going to be tough, real tough, and no doubt many more lives will be lost. What we must never ever forget is that the suffering and deaths could have been avoided if we had dealt with the country’s root problem of rigged elections and bad governance.
Zanu PF has managed to stay in power all these last 38 years regardless of the regime’s clear track record of being corrupt and incompetent because the party rigged elections. Mnangagwa rigged last year’s elections just as the party has rigged past elections.
Zanu PF does not have the mandate to govern and therefore must be pressured to step down. The prospect of another four more years of this corrupt and mediocre Zanu PF government is unthinkable.
But worst of all; if Zanu PF is allowed to remain in office till the 2023 elections, we can be 100% certain that the party will rig the elections and extend its ruinous and tyrannical reign another five years. We will only have ourselves to blame if that happened!
There are reports of some international organisation and donors who have refused to help Zimbabwe in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai because Zanu PF was insisting on the regime controlling their activities. We all know this is a regime that is obsessed about controlling every aspect of the people's lives particularly in the rural areas where the regime, its local traditional leaders are the demigods. 38 years of tyrannical rule have left the rural peasant powerless and beholden to Zanu PF for everything and this is political gold dust.
ReplyDelete“Observers widely reported on efforts to undermine the free expression of the will of electors, through inducements, intimidation and coercion against prospective voters to try to ensure a vote in favour of the ruling party. Such practices also included direct threats of violence, pressure on people to attend rallies, partisan actions by traditional leaders, collection of voter registration slips and other measures to undermine confidence in the secrecy of the vote, manipulation of food aid and agricultural programmes and other misuses of state resources,” stated the EU Zimbabwe Election Observer Mission final report.
Zimbabwe’s own Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission, a statutory body acne to the ZEC, confirmed in its own election report that Zanu PF members and local traditional leaders had indeed used seized state supplied food aid and agricultural inputs and distributed them to Zanu PF supporters only.
The other reason why many donors are loathed to help Zimbabwe is because the extravagant waste of the country’s resources. There are reports of Mnangagwa hiring a private jet all the way from the Middle East, to fly him from Harare to Bulawayo, 300 km away and back. He was in the jet for one hour but was billed for 15 hours including waiting time, at the usual rate of $74 000 per hour. The nation paid US$ 1.11 million for his flight to Bulawayo alone! Surely a nation that can justify such extravagant waste must have enough resources to meet the emergency needs of its own people whose homes were destroyed by Cyclone Idai!
Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess because of 38 years of corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF rule. For 38 years we have ignored this problem because we feared the regime’s brutality and hoped against hope that it will change. Well the corruption and tyranny only got worse and worse. Today Zimbabwe stands right on the edge of the precipice, unemployment has soared to 90%, basic services such as supply of clean water, education and health care have all but collapsed.
The next eight months or so will be hell-on-earth for our people as the hardship brought on by drought and other natural disaster pile on a nation already weaken to the point of helplessness by 38 years of man-made disasters. Millions are going to suffer and thousands will die unnecessarily for want of $10 per month of medication, food, etc.
After 38 years of pretend bad governance was not a problem we must now face up to this reality and deal with it. Zanu PF rigged last year’s elections, the party has no mandate to govern and no stone must now be left unturned to make sure the regime steps down!
MOTORISTS here have for the past week endured stock outs of fuel supplies, indicating a worsening fuel situation in the petroleum industry
ReplyDeleteKiya kiya! What a way to run a nation's affairs!
"As far as we are concerned, this is an insult to teachers. We are not going to accept this. The PTUZ is saying no. This is pure dog food and it doesn't address the suffering of teachers. If you listen carefully, people at Apex are saying they are very happy, but how do you generate happiness when you are giving out a cushion pillow of stones. This is not a cushioning allowance."
ReplyDeleteHe said the duty-free car importation scheme would only breed corruption because the teachers have no capacity to buy vehicles with their current salaries.
Amalgamated Rural Teachers' Union of Zimbabwe (ARTUZ) said it was disgusted by the "flawed deal" signed between government and the "illegitimate and highly-compromised Apex Council”.
To pay teachers or anyone US$146 per month in a country with a poverty datum line of US$650 per month is an insult. The more insulting when Mnangagwa goes and splash US$1.11 million on a hired luxury jet to fly him from Harare to Bulawayo and back again.
What is at issue here is that Zanu PF does not have the mandate to govern the country because the regime rigged last year’s elections.
“The final results as announced by the Electoral Commission contained numerous errors and lacked adequate traceability, transparency and verifiability. Finally, the restrictions on political freedoms, the excessive use of force by security forces and abuses of human rights in the post-election period undermined the corresponding positive aspects during the pre-election campaign. As such, many aspects of the 2018 elections in Zimbabwe failed to meet international standards,” stated the EU Election Observer Mission final report.
Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess because the nation has been stuck for 38 years and counting with a corrupt and tyrannical regime. Well the “and counting” must stop right here and right now! Zanu PF must step down, that is not negotiable!