By Brian Raftopoulos
Viewing the broad spectrum of the political landscape in Zimbabwe at the end of 2011, one is left with the distinct impression that all the political forces are caught under a spell of indecision. The dilemmas of leadership renewal, electoral strategy and a broad vision for the future are all inducing a sense of hesitancy, that in the case of Zanu PF, manifests itself in renewed aggression and political hubris. Moreover if the Wikileaks reports have any validity this sense of uncertainty is not new, as all parties have, over the last decade,sought out the father confessor of the American Embassy to vent their fears and schizophrenic party psyches, none more so than the outwardly macho Zanu PF.
To start with Zanu PF, it is clear that the decision at the recent Bulawayo conference of the party to nominate Mugabe once again as the presidential candidate for the next election tells us a great deal about a party that is simply unable, at this stage, to visualise a regenerative strategy outside of its octogenarian leader. (Read more…)
A pregnant woman stands in her empty kitchen, rural Gwanda, October 2011. “No food, no work, no money. If only I could get cattle to help me plough.”
SPT Report
Nationally, Zimbabwe is more food secure at the end of 2011 than it has been for several years. However, parts of Zimbabwe suffered serious crop failure earlier this year and a million people are still predicted to need supplementary feeding. In Gwanda, Matabeleland South, the authors found that almost half of households indicated a day without food in the recent past.[1] Only 17% of families reported eating three meals a day, meaning that 83% of households were, weeks before the onset of the official “hungry season in October”, already making food compromises daily. Grazing is critical, and people are traveling further to find water. This has been one of the hottest Octobers on record. Several families reported that baboons were killing and eating young goats and chickens, as the hunger now affects all living creatures in this area. Several families had no livestock left at all, not even one chicken.
(Read more…)
In Hopley Farm, Harare, 8,500 adults live in makeshift housing: out of 2,000 school age children, 75% are out of formal school. (July 2010)
By Busani Mpofu
The World Bank estimated urban poverty in Zimbabwe in 1990/91 to be 12 percent while the 1995 Poverty Assessment Study found urban poverty to be 39 percent. In January 2009, Save the Children estimated that 10 out of 13 million Zimbabweans, over 75 percent of the population, were living in ‘desperate poverty.’ In April 2010, UNICEF noted that 78 percent of Zimbabweans were “absolutely poor” and 55 percent of the population, (about 6.6 million) lived under the food poverty line while New Zimbabwe estimated that more than 65 percent of Zimbabweans lived below the poverty datum line in December 2009. Recently, commentators have argued that it is very clear that poverty is increasing in the country. The sense we get from the above statistics is that some agencies have defined certain percentages of Zimbabweans as poor, below some abstractly conceived poverty lines. The statistics, however, do not tell us how long those poor people have existed in poverty conditions or the historical and social dimensions of people’s understandings of poverty-what it is to ‘be poor.’
(Read more…)
