Zimbabwe’s manufacturing industry, with some notable exceptions, has been through a bad period with declining sales. Many things have been blamed: ease of importing, pricing, productivity, lack of modernisation, and bad management. Some of these are valid, and there are good examples showing how they can be fixed, while others are simply red herrings.

To take the two red herrings first. These are imports and prices. With the opening of the economy following dollarisation it became easy to import. When goods were in very short supply imports were a flood. Now imported goods are bought by consumers when they are cheaper, better quality or more readily available. Modest duties have given a little boost to local suppliers, but not much. Zimbabwean manufacturers should be able to compete easily in a lot of areas; for a start the transport bills are lower.

Which brings us to the second red herring, pricing. We doubt that any Zimbabwean business is profiteering. The retail trade has slashed margins because of the intense competition. Manufacturing facing similar competition, not so much internal but from imports. The fact that they have found it hard to reduce prices suggests that their costs are higher then their foreign competitors.

So now we are left with productivity, lack of modern equipment and poor management. In many businesses productivity is low, so the labour costs are too high a percentage of the finished article. Far too much of the capital equipment in Zimbabwe’s industries is old, obsolete and inefficient. While there has been some modernisation, too much has been inherited from the days of the closed economy, when almost anything would make money, and needs to be replaced. This is one reason productivity is low; people using 1970s equipment will have 1970s productivity.

But in our opinion poor management is the root cause of so many problems. Some businesses have been a resounding success in the past five years, competing comfortably against imports and still dominating their Zimbabwean markets. And the big secret appears to be that their management has figured out how to do business viably in the new environment.

We can take two major companies listed on the Zimbabwean Stock Exchange: Delta and Innscor. Delta modernised their breweries and bottling lines, retained their excellent customer services and distribution systems, and built new supply chains for essential raw materials.

Innscor have rather rapidly built a vertically integrated concern of food processing, retail and restaurant operations, taking over companies that were in trouble and rebuilding them, fixing the supply chains, and reinvesting earnings at a high level.

Unlike Delta, which had access to SABMiller, its largest shareholder, Innscor have done the job with Zimbabwean managers.

In both cases there are industrial managers who stopped thinking about the old days of legal near monopolies and complaining about the change. Instead they looked at the good new days, figured out how to work in the open competitive markets, reorganised supply chains to fit the new environment following land reform, and using good management rebuilt or created their businesses. .

A third example is the Meikles-Pick n’ Pay joint venture. The South African company appears to have helped sort out management deficiencies and once again we see the same policy of success: good management, reinvestment, and creation of good supply chains stretching into the Zimbabwean farmers and food processors.

Those wandering past Bata shoe stores in the last couple of years will have seen how another manufacturer and retailer has through imaginative management won back so much of what it had lost and was likely to lose.

At the core of the successes is good management and the willingness to embrace, rather than decry, change. For too many decades running a

There are serious constraints in the Zimbabwean economy.

But these are not a total bar. Even if they were alleviated or removed, we doubt that some industries could be revived or created unless this was coupled with managements that had a clear idea of how to do business in the new world.

Phyllis Johnson Special Correspondent
NATHANIEL Manheru raised an important issue in Zimbabwe’s Saturday Herald of April 25 2015, when he said the flow of business between South Africa and other Southern African Development Community (Sadc) member-states need not be uni-directional, but must be a “movement of many centres”.

He added that this can be easily achieved through a “spatially balanced regional industrialisation strategy, indeed something Sadcc sought to achieve before South Africa and Sadc.”

His proposal for the way forward is to search for the lost “C”.

He was discussing xenophobia in South Africa, the murder of Mozambican Emmanuel Sithole, and making the link with industrialisation, which no other analyst has done, and he further addressed this issue in the context of the special Sadc Summit that takes place this week in Harare.

“The culprits for xenophobia are not the unemployed South African youths who killed Sithole, themselves victims, the culprit is a long apartheid, with its sucking tentacles, its tendency of creating a huge, transnational underclass, always at war with itself. Is (President Jacob) Zuma ready to decapitate the apartheid dragon? Or is he about to defend it, to give it an African complexion. Let Harare test that.”

Thus the scene is set for this week’s important Sadc Extraordinary Summit in Harare to achieve transformative results, and the gauntlet has been thrown to South Africa to be a part of the solution to regional development and prosperity, rather than viewing the region “as a giant supermarket chain”, as another analyst said.

Sadc leaders are meeting in Zimbabwe on April 29 to discuss an industrialisation strategy as well as approve a revised regional development blueprint.

Therefore, it seems timely to unpack the history of regional economic cooperation initiated in 1980 and to search for the lost “C”.

The Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference (Sadcc) was established in Arusha, Tanzania, in 1979 and launched in Lusaka, Zambia in April 1980, with nine member-states.

Sadcc was re-invented as the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) in 1992 after the independence of Zimbabwe (1980) and Namibia (1990), and as legal and institutional apartheid drew to an end in South Africa (1994).

They and others joined the regional economic community, and Sadc now has 15 member-states in southern Africa, including the mainland and the islands.

The Sadcc had been established to coordinate regional economic development which could be strengthened with independent Zimbabwe at its core, and to reduce the dependence of neighbouring countries on the apartheid regime in South Africa, notably for trade and transport.

Britain and other European countries gave strong support to Sadcc not so much through a desire to oppose the apartheid regime in South Africa which they regarded as a western ally, but rather to contain the about-to-become independent Zimbabwe and support the establishment of a “constellation of states” as envisaged with the South African government.

Critical to Sadcc’s plan was the development of the regional transportation system to reduce dependence on South Africa, a new option for the contiguous states that Pretoria then set out to destroy.

An integral part of the Sadcc transportation strategy was the access to alternative ports for shipments by sea, as most of the region was heavily dependent on South African ports due to the skewed transportation system that was constructed in the colonial period.

Construction of the Tanzania-Zambia (Tazara) railway had been completed with support from China in 1973 to transport Zambia’s trade, especially copper, on a northern route to the port of Dar es Salaam.

Zimbabwe took immediate action after independence to increase traffic through ports in Mozambique, which was almost non-existent in 1980 but was increased to just over half of the country’s total traffic by 1983.

Pretoria acted against this, by sabotaging the Beira railway line and other targets in Mozambique.

“The savagery of the attacks unleashed on Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Lesotho, and the escalation of the war in Angola and Namibia using military, economic and political weapons” is well documented in books and reports such as Frontline Southern Africa – Destructive Engagement and the United Nations report on South African Destabilisation: The economic cost of frontline resistance to apartheid.

This economic and military action caused extensive damage to the region in the 1980s estimated at between US$45 and US$60 billion, starkly illustrating the importance to the South African economy of retaining regional trade.

Another example was energy, as South Africa was (and is) dependent on the continued flow of low-cost electricity from the giant Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambezi River in Mozambique, then owned by South Africa and Portugal, and now owned by Mozambique.

As Manheru mentions in his reference to the creation of a “transnational underclass”, the workers of the region were recruited to the South African mines and other labour-intensive jobs as human capital.

They didn’t flow across borders and through fences, they were recruited by the big mining companies who could pay them less than local South African workers. Often they established new families and stayed on.

So people from the region, as well as the transport, electricity and trade flowed to South Africa to sustain and expand the apartheid economy. Little has changed in that pattern since the official end of apartheid in South Africa 20 years ago and the emergence of a black majority government through democratic elections.

After Sadc was established as an economic community in 1992 in Windhoek, the plans and targets focused mainly on the removal of barriers to trade, but as only one of the member states, South Africa, was industrialised, this has continued the pattern of skewed development, both within and outside South Africa.

That is what the region is now trying to change, with the industrialisation strategy to be debated this week by Sadc leaders at Summit in Harare, to replace the uni-directional trade patterns with the “movement of many centres”.

The lost “C” has been located and the region is on its way to multi-sector, multi-country development, based on the decisions to be made this week about a regional industrialisation strategy and a new regional strategic plan. — sardc.net

Glen Ford and Sophia Kerby
“There are more Black men missing from their communities than the combined Black male populations of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington and Boston.”

A new analysis of population data confirms what has long been obvious to every minimally conscious Black person in the United States: a huge proportion of the Black male population is missing, physically absent from the daily life of the community.

Many are prematurely dead, but the largest group has been consigned to the social death of incarceration.

According to a study by the Upshot unit of the New York Times, when prison inmates of both sexes are taken out of the equation, there are now 1.5 million more Black women in the country, age 25 to 54, than there are Black men.

In some locations — for example, Ferguson, Missouri — there are only six Black men physically present in the community for every 10 Black women.

In white America, there is almost no imbalance in gender among the 25 to 54 age group. For every 100 white women, there are 99 white men.

There are more Black men missing from their communities than the combined Black male populations of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington and Boston.

Six hundred thousand of them are in prison, and that’s not counting Black male prison inmates that are younger than 25 and older than 54.

The analysts estimate that roughly half, and maybe as many as three-quarters, of the other 900 000 missing Black men have died before their time from diseases and accidents, and that 200 000 are no longer here due to homicide.

Black life in America does not start out with these bizarre imbalances between the sexes.

There is no gender gap among Blacks in childhood.

Roughly the same number of boys and girls are born, and the ratio stays stable until the teenage years, when the war of attrition begins mercilessly grinding down the numbers of Black males.

How else is this phenomenon to be described except as a war, in which 600 000 are held captive during their most productive years, 200 000 are killed by violence, and most of the rest go to early graves from accidents and diseases that cause far lower casualties among whites.

The data shows that US society has become much more toxic for Black men during the very period in which Blacks were supposedly making such fantastic “progress.”

The numbers show that the missing-Black-men phenomenon “began growing in the middle decades of the 20th century.”

The increasing ratio of Black women to men is primarily a product of the age of mass Black incarceration.

The war of attrition is a race war deliberately and methodically initiated by the US government, the effects of which have been devastating to Black society on the most fundamental level: stunting the formation of Black families and the Black American group as a whole by physically removing and eliminating the men.

The data support a totally plausible, factually grounded charge of genocide, based on international law.

The US government, through its mass Black incarceration policies of the last half century, has been guilty of a) “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” as well as b) “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.”

The facts bear witness to the indictment. So do 1.5 million missing Black men.

A broken criminal-justice system has proven that America still has a long way to go in achieving racial equality.

Today people of colour continue to be disproportionately incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts.

Further, racial disparities in the criminal-justice system threaten communities of colour — disenfranchising thousands by limiting voting rights and denying equal access to employment, housing, public benefits, and education to millions more.

In light of these disparities, it is imperative that criminal-justice reform evolves as the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Some facts include:

l While people of colour make up about 30 percent of the US population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned.

The prison population grew by 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, a rate that is outpacing crime and population rates.

The incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of colour: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.

l According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. Individuals of colour have a disproportionate number of encounters with law enforcement, indicating that racial profiling continues to be a problem.

l Students of colour face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, leading to a higher number of youth of colour incarcerated. Black and Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of those involved in school-related arrests or referrals to law enforcement.

l African American students are arrested far more often than their white classmates.

l African American youth have higher rates of juvenile incarceration and are more likely to be sentenced to adult prison.

African American women are three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated,

l People of colour are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, but they have higher rate of arrests.

African Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offences.

l 13 percent of African American men are denied the right to vote due to felony-disenfranchisement policies.

l Following release from prison, wages grow at a 21 percent slower rate for black former inmates compared to white ex-convicts.

Correspondent Our Children, Our Future
Progress towards global vaccination targets for 2015 is far off track with one in five children still missing out on routine life-saving immunisations that could avert 1,5 million deaths each year from preventable diseases.

In the lead-up to World Immunisation Week 2015 (April 24-30), the World Health Organisation (WHO) is calling for renewed efforts to get progress back on course.

The theme for this year’s immunisation week is “Close the immunisation gap”.

In 2013 nearly 22 million infants missed out on the required three doses of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis-containing vaccines (DTP3), many of them living in the world’s poorest countries.

WHO is calling for an end to the unnecessary disability and death caused by failure to vaccinate.

“World Immunisation Week creates a focused global platform to reinvigorate our collective efforts to ensure vaccination for every child, whoever they are and wherever they live,” said Dr Flavia Bustreo, WHO Assistant Director-General, Family, Women’s and Children’s Health.

“It is critical that the global community now makes a collective and cohesive effort to put progress towards our six targets back on track.”

In 2012, all 194 WHO member states at the World Health Assembly endorsed the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP), a commitment to ensure that no one misses out on vital immunisation. However, a recent independent assessment report on GVAP progress rings an alarm bell, warning that vaccines are not being delivered equitably or reliably and that only one of the six key vaccination targets for 2015 is currently on track – the introduction of under-utilised vaccines.

Many countries worldwide have experienced large measles outbreaks in the past year, threatening efforts to achieve the GVAP target of eliminating measles in three WHO regions by end-2015.

A global collaborative drive for immunisation, begun in the mid-1970s, with the establishment of the Expanded Program on Immunisation in all countries, achieved dramatic results, raising vaccination levels from as low as 5 percent to more than 80 percent in many countries by 2013.

WHO estimates that today immunizations prevent between two and three million deaths annually and protect many more people from illness and disability.

Although progress has stalled in recent years, this early success demonstrates the potential of vaccines, which are increasingly being extended from children to adolescents and adults, providing protection against diseases such as influenza, meningitis and cervical and liver cancers.

The GVAP recommends three key steps for closing the immunisation gap:

l Integrating immunisation with other health services, such as post-natal care for mothers and babies;

l Strengthening health systems so that vaccines continue to be given even in times of crisis; and

l Ensuring that everyone can access vaccines and afford to pay for them.

Dr Jean-Marie Okwo-Belé, Director of Immunisation, Vaccines and Biologicals at WHO, says the organisation will work to increase its support to all countries that are lagging behind in meeting immunisation targets. In May this year, WHO will bring together high-level representatives of 34 countries with routine vaccination (three doses of DTP3) coverage of less than 80 percent to discuss the challenges faced by countries and to explore solutions to overcome them.

Although many countries are already vaccinating four out of five children with DTP3, a full one-third of countries are still struggling to reach the “fifth child”, meaning millions of children remain at risk of illness, disability or death because they are not getting the immunisations they need.

“There is no one centralised approach that can ensure vaccines are delivered and administered to each child. Vaccination plans on the ground need to be adapted not just to countries, but to districts and communities,” said Dr Okwo-Belé.

“What is required is a truly concerted effort and much stronger accountability so that each one of the key players involved fulfills its mandate and helps close the immunisation gap.”

Oliver Mtukudzi . . . his music is popular at weddings

Sekai Nzenza On Wednesday
“They served small plates of food at the wedding as if we are Europeans,” complained our neighbour Jemba after a trip to Harare to attend his niece Chiwoniso’s wedding.

As usual, Jemba sat on the bench in our kitchen hut in the village, smoking tobacco rolled in old newspapers.

He was recovering from a bad bout of flu which he blamed on the wedding planners, the kombi driver, the bride and groom, the church, the caterers and everyone who thinks a wedding in the city is better than in the village.

“That was not a fun wedding. It was a fundraising show to support the costs of the wedding,” Jemba said.

Then he told us how he failed to dance, laugh or feel really happy at his niece’s wedding in Harare a couple of weeks ago.

My cousin Piri kept on interrupting Jemba and adding more information as if she was in the kombi that took Jemba and 15 others from his Moyondizvo family to Harare for Chiwoniso’s wedding.

Chiwoniso is Jemba’s eldest brother’s daughter.

She grew up here and finished her secretarial course at a college in town then got a job as a receptionist with a mining company.

Jemba’s extended family had assembled at St Columbus School at 3am.

Men wore heavy coats, while women covered themselves with blankets because it was freezing cold.

They squeezed into the kombi.

Apart from the driver, everyone fell asleep immediately as the kombi drove along the potholed rocky roads all the way to Hwedza Mountains.

They arrived in Harare at 7am and were dropped off at Tete Mary’s place in Chitungwiza.

Tete Mary is Jemba’s father’s sister.

She is married to a Malawian retired hotel cook and they have a huge house with two toilets, two showers and a bath tub.

Although there was no water in the house and the toilets were not flushing, everyone had a chance to freshen up with water from three small buckets fetched from a nearby communal water pump.

They drank plenty of tea accompanied by white bread with margarine and mixed Sun jam.

When everyone was full, the kombi came back and they went to the wedding, leaving their blankets and bags at Tete Mary’s place.

I saw Jemba arrive with the rest of the village guests.

The church was almost full by the time they arrived.

Jemba wore a checked brown and cream suit, a legacy of his days working at Hwange Safari Lodge.

He also wore a Greek fisherman’s cap that he had inherited from his late brother, Chiwoniso’s father.

His shirt was white complemented by a red tie and pointy white shoes.

The women wore suits in different colours — red, green, blue and burgundy.

Piri saw the village guests coming in and she whispered, “Weddings are good Sis. How those suits survive in the village, I do not know.”

She was laughing softly and holding her mouth.

The service went on for two-and-a-half hours and most people from the village kept on falling asleep.

But the pastor would not stop hammering the message that a good marriage is destroyed by hupombwe, infidelity.

Some people repeatedly said Amen. With his head leaning against the wall and his face covered by the cap, Jemba was sound asleep throughout the service.

After the church ceremony it was time for a photo shoot of the bride and groom, the wedding party, parents of the groom, aunts, brothers and sisters.

The group left for Harare Gardens in the city for the wedding photos.

Everyone else was instructed to go to the reception hall in Hatfield, not too far from the airport.

Jemba escaped from the kombi and joined Piri and I in the car.

“Makachena baba, jealousy down,” Piri said, shaking Jemba’s hand and admiring Jemba’s suit, black belt with silver skeleton buckle, silver chain over the white shirt and white shoes.

“In that thatched bedroom of yours in the village, how do the rats leave this suit alone?” Piri asked.

“Even village rats know that you do not gnaw a good expensive suit. This suit is Italian-made. See?” he pointed to the label on the sleeve that said “Valentino, Milan.”

For another two hours people waited inside the reception hall while others sat outside.

There was a bottle of water labelled with photos of the bride and groom and a note to say “Thank you for sharing our special day with us.”

The wedding team finally arrived just after 2pm.

There was a lot of singing and ululating to welcome them.

It was a grand arrival, with the seven bridesmaids and groomsmen performing synchronised dancing to Oliver Mtukudzi’s song “Shamiso.”

Piri went to the front and danced.

This was the highlight of the wedding.

Later on, Jemba said, if he had a car, he would have left the wedding then.

The food came at 3pm.

By then, the village guests looked tired and their lips were dry.

Piri pushed her way to the caterers at the back of the hall and brought the bad news that there was not enough food because there were too many people, especially children.

And yet the invitation card had specifically said no children. Piri said everyone was going to eat but the food would be rationed.

When the food finally got to us, it was on a paper plate with a small lump of rice, coleslaw, one small piece of roast chicken and plenty of cold brown gravy.

The forks and spoons had run out. We washed our hands at the garden tap outside and used our hands to eat the chicken, rice, gravy and coleslaw.

“Muchato wemabhoyi mudhorobha,” said Piri laughing and making mocking references to African weddings in town.

“We cannot afford to have these expensive European-type weddings in town. Let’s get back to the village and kill the beasts and have a feast the way it used to be.”

Long before the war and independence, people came back from town to celebrate weddings in the village.

Now we go to the city for weddings.

We did not wait to be invited to a wedding.

People came from far and wide.

They ate and drank until they were full.

“These vegetables are cold,” said Tete Mandivava, Jemba’s aunt from the village.

She fingered the coleslaw and frowned. Piri pointed to the salad and said, “This here, Tete, is called coleslaw made from cabbage, vinegar, eggs and something else.

“Europeans eat it like that. It’s healthy. When you come to town, you eat what the town people eat,” Piri said, gently tapping Tete’s shoulder.

“Forget the food Europeans eat. Why not make a big pot of sadza and big pot of meat? Then stop preaching and allow us to dance, ” Tete said, licking the gravy streaming down on her rough hands that are so used to pulling weeds and doing hard village farm work.

“Ah, ya, these weddings are not fun anymore. And I am still hungry,” she said.

“Me too Tete, me too. If only I could find a cold beer to sooth myself and get into this wedding mood,” said Jemba.

Like most churches, there was no beer served at the wedding.

Only water and soft drinks.

Two guys moved around with a crate of soft drinks. When the meal was over, the MC said we were running out of time because the reception hall closed at 5pm. It was time for speeches from the parents, aunts and friends of the bride and groom.

He strongly urged the relatives to make the speeches short. They were not short. The MC intervened each time to stop the speaker from speaking for too long.

After the long speeches, the MC announced that it was time to offer gifts to the bride and groom. Each person was to line up with their present and register it with two clerks who wrote the name of the person giving the present.

Each present was announced so we all knew who gave the smallest and the biggest present.

The parents of the groom gave a stove and $400.

The stove was brought in, still in its original box. Everyone ululated.

Because Chiwoniso’s parents are late, Jemba represented the father. He gave $20 and said a heifer was waiting for the groom and bride back in the village. We clapped hands the loudest. For Jemba, this was such a big effort. That heifer was worth $400, almost the same price as the stove.

For the next hour, the MC announced presents.

There was music in between and people got up to dance. Before the song was over, the MC interrupted it and asked for more presents.

The village guests’ gifts varied from $3 to $20.

Others simply stood there and told the MC that due to transport problems, they could not bring their presents which included buckets of maize, sweet potatoes, chicken and goats to celebrate Chiwoniso’s wedding.

At 5pm, the MC announced that all the village guests who came by kombi should prepare to leave because the kombi was waiting. Jemba asked for a couple of dollars so he could buy beer on the way. I gave him $5.

Then he held Piri’s hand and said, “I want to marry you in the village where there will be drums in the church, no written programme, and no electricity or water problems.

“There will be plenty of beer and meat. Our village wedding will be cheaper and more fun. People will dance, joke, laugh and sing, the way it used to be.”

Dr Sekai Nzenza is an independent writer and cultural critic.

Vincent Van Gogh

Knowledge Mushohwe Correspondent
Teaching art to a wide range of students is not an easy task. A tutor may be tempted to start with the basics such as basic lines and shapes, but that may disadvantage the group of students that already knows or understands the elementary language of visual communication.

Even when all students are on the same wave length, those that have more passion for developing creative products always gain some advantage in the long term.

In fact, in any art class, there is always a clear distinction between those that have a natural talent and those that continuously struggle, regardless of how much work they put in.

This may be because art classes are less about learning how to create an image, and a lot more about improving the technical and theoretical aspects of a gifted student.

It is just like business school, where one is presented with a platform to understand possibilities and the potential of the smaller ideas already in the head.

Schools and parents, however, often view art as a hobby or a stress relief in between the “actual” subjects that are widely viewed as the stepping stones to “real” jobs. But pushing a born artist towards the conventional office jobs cannot be a solution.

Similar to how mathematicians see the world in digits, artists’ thought patterns are almost always made up of images.

While some concede that their artworks are a direct result of the tripartite relationship between the eye, brain and the hand, for most, at least those I know and including me, the hand is only the outlet. The image in this case is made through a combination of observation and imagination, and it becomes part of the big “gallery” inside the head.

After, the image is transformed into a physically perceptible product by the hand.

That process is perhaps the most difficult as the quality of the end product is determined by many variables, including medium, style, time, value and emotion.

The work of 19th century abstract expressionist Vincent Van Gogh, the way its brushwork transformed over a long period, is a clear testament of how emotion can dictate physical appearance of works of art.

The way an artist puts pen to paper after bereavement, or a break-up or when broke, is different from when he or she is in a happier mood.

When younger the thought patterns of an artist are not as vivid and creative as later because of experience.

The artworks are usually low in quality, devoid of detail and the line work is indecisive and bold. However, the potential is always there.

More practice, a clearer understanding of how things around them work and the creation of a better relationship between the hand and the processes around the head may bring better results.

Many have found the images that they create to be good communication tools and have made careers out of their thought patterns.

Advertising agencies and the media are finding out that information packaged with creatively arranged images carry an emotional message that is very important in data dissemination.

Image is part of communication and the need to present a visual equivalent of what can be said in words has opened up career opportunities for visual artists.

Image presentation has the added advantage of having the ability to capture imagination in a direct and immediate manner.

Editing done through the mental process and sometimes combined with digital manipulation ensures that visual information is specific and well suited to a targeted audience.

The creative process starts with an idea and moves into a realm with multiple images moving into many directions.

Depending with the individual, the extension of idea the raw idea may bring fresher ideas that encourage further probing.

But because the extensions move into different directions, some thoughts are abandoned in pursuit of the stronger and more interesting visions.

This process takes up a lot of time and space in the head. This is why visual art cannot be rightly considered to be a hobby.

The visions are so strong that thinking about how to assemble the images into a comprehensible composition becomes a full-time adventure.

In contrast to formal white-collar employment where there is a clear distinction between office work, social time and sleeping, the creative process continues all through the entire experience of the artist.

There are times that the visual mind is occupied by thoughts unrelated to the idea process but interestingly, there are lots of “handles” all around that can trigger the mind to initiate or resume the fine tuning of a visions.

Visual ideas may come from anywhere. Inspiration is provided by anything, including the lived experience, family and friends, or even dreams.

Some artists go to sleep with sketch books on the side of the bed and occasionally get up to put to paper whatever comes to them in their sub-conscious state.

But the biggest resource for creative ideas is the day-to-day experiences of the artist.

A normal conversation, for example, may create layers of thought extensions or alternative meanings that continue to grow and end up creating a composition that has a clear intent.

Images may be informative, entertaining, educative or amusing but the process that ultimately creates them is the same. The transformation from a blurry assortment of images to one complete composition with meaning and purpose is not meant to be a hobby.

It is not meant to be a process for one to discover themselves when holed up in employment or identity crisis. It helps, but its definitive objective is to help the creative mind to decode visual information.

It is also about aesthetic appeal, but beauty without purpose means nothing.

THE REAL CULPRIT . . . Morgan Tsvangirai

My Turn with Tichaone Zindoga
Well, the Afrophobic violence in South Africa is slowly dying down, thanks to the worldwide condemnation that the barbaric acts, and to an extent, the government of that country has received.

Although world powers, save for a few that issued travel warnings and Nigeria’s diplomatic tiff, have come short of publicly slating the South African government for its reaction to the violence, one can bet that stringent actions by the government were due if this embarrassing episode were to draw itself longer than its unwelcome flare-up.

We can only hope that we will not see a repeat of it in future, what with the national soul-searching that is now underway in that country.

But then the causes of xenophobia are so deep-seated and may take years to dismantle being a product of a unique psychological, political, economic and social milieu.

That is why even when some South Africans were urging tolerance and were marching for peace, they ran the risk of being hacked down by machete-wielding thugs.

The same way moderate Hutus were targeted during the genocide in Rwanda.

Those who committed the egregious acts in the past few weeks and in the past years dating back to 2008, at least, and have never been brought to book are likely to do it again.

And their children, too, who witnessed and participated in the violent acts.

We saw them in the pictures and videos.

The culture of violence is likely to get entrenched, unless something drastic happens, which we hope will.

We become sceptical, though, when leaders seem to give caveats and grudging admissions of the appalling state of affairs like telling the world that all countries with populations in South Africa are part of the problem too because there wouldn’t be immigrants to be hacked down by thugs and criminals in South Africa.

And the implication?

They should go back where they came from, which is what the thugs and their commander-in-chief, Goodwill Zwelithini were saying!

But we remain hopeful that the spirit of brotherhood and reasonableness, and economic sense, even for the barely literate, shall prevail so we find lasting peace with ourselves in our African space.

Enter the lunatic fringe

Now, following weeks of righteous anger against what was happening in South Africa, one may have noted that on various platforms of Zimbabwe’s discourse, anger is being now slowly being channelled to the Government of Zimbabwe and President Mugabe.

This is being amplified every day.

Not to worry, though, it’s the usual lunatic fringe.

It is this same lunatic fringe that has saturated the social media space with its bilious attacks on Government and the ruling party, such bile being born out of dismal failure and helplessness as an alternative by the opposition whose face is Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC.

Now, the preoccupation is to blame President Mugabe for xenophobic attacks in South Africa.

We are told that were it not for him thugs would not be burning and necklacing and stoning and robbing Africans in South Africa.

We are willing to engage the lunatic fringe on this one.

First of all, is President Mugabe responsible for what even authorities in South Africa admit as national anger?

More specifically, did he create the evil of apartheid that has left inequalities that are so glaring and frustrating and driving people mad and feeling inferior?

On that score did President Mugabe provide the tyres and petrol and machetes used to brutalise innocents?

And if South Africa were not an angry nation, which is not of President Mugabe’s making, would they be butchering foreigners, and African others only for that matter?

And surely South Africa is not the first country to have immigrants and refugees is it, and if so, why do other nations not behave in such a barbaric manner?

The second point to note is the overemphasis of Zimbabwean presence in South Africa.

The exaggeration of numbers is for pure political propaganda -and every reasonable person knows that.

Credible studies have debunked the myth of Zimbabwe having “between one and two million” Zimbabweans being in South Africa which is clearly a figment of imagination for propaganda purposes calculated first to paint a picture of failure in Zimbabwe and secondly to bear down on SA authorities to aid regime change in the country.

The Forced Migration Studies Programme & Musina Legal Advice Office produced a special report entitled, “Fact or Fiction? Examining Zimbabwean Cross-Border Migration into South Africa”.

One of the claims it debunked was that there are “millions of Zimbabweans flooding into South Africa”.

It noted that “commentators have speculated on the number of Zimbabweans in the country, producing ‘estimates’ ranging from 1,2-3 million persons”.

It called this a “demographic guesswork” and blamed the media which it laid out as playing up these claims based on no or unnamed “official” sources.

The paper noted that, “Reporters undoubtedly face considerable pressure to provide figures to support their research”.

Newspapers made assertions without clarifying sources; failed to reconcile or acknowledge conflicting sources; neglected differences between estimates from the same sources and neglected conflicts with estimates published by their own publication.

In short, the paper threw the bush statistics away that say there are 1,2 to two million Zimbabweans in South Africa.

Blame it on Tsvangirai

Which leads to the next point.

If people are to blame anyone for what has happened economically to Zimbabwe leading to the alleged mass exodus from the country, why not start with Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition who is on record as urging South Africa itself to cut fuel and electricity to Zimbabwe which sanctions would collapse the economy and inevitably cause people to flee she country?

The records are there, in audio-visual, too.

He is also on record as celebrating the suffering of the people gloating that they would suffer more.

Now, why should anybody blame President Mugabe, who was fighting these treasonous designs not the devil Tsvangirai himself?

In fact, the people of Zimbabwe must be thankful that it is the good relations that President Mugabe has with South African leaders which saved this country.

South Africa could well have heeded Tsvangirai and much worse would have joined the Western putsch in Zimbabwe.

Or what happened in Libya, with South Africa and Nigeria’s support.

Now, the greatest sin that Tsvangirai committed against the people of Zimbabwe including and most particularly those that are being killed and brutalised in South Africa, are the sanctions that Tsvangirai’s allies imposed on the country.

They said it would make the economy scream.

The economy screamed, just as the doctor had ordered, and people left this screaming economy for greener pastures, or so they hoped, like South Africa.

We all heard Eddie Cross saying that the country would crash and burn.

Nelson Chamisa was to tell us that the MDC could walk over dead bodies in its march to State House.

We all saw how American ambassadors urged their capital to “stay the course” in tightening pressure on the Zimbabwe Government by maintaining sanctions which caused people to suffer and die including from the cholera outbreak of 2008.

Americans are the hand-holders of Tsvangirai?

Now, he is the one who should be blamed for the necklacing of our people in South Africa.

A fallacious argument is that President Mugabe’s alleged mismanagement of the economy led to the scattering of his people.

This is obvious obfuscation as it does not tell us how he became such a bad manager and Western foe only when he started empowering his people through land reform and implementing projects for economic and empowerment through indigenisation.

In other words, what South Africans are crying for now, namely land and jobs, President Mugabe has laid a foundation for, and provided, albeit inviting punishment from the West.

He must be applauded for being a visionary rather than a short-sighted leader.

Cde Chivende and his wife Rosemary

Tichaona Zindoga Political Editor
For many years, Cde Mudhumeni Nyikadzino Chivende is the oracle of the famous Chinhoyi Battle which took place on April 28, 1966, giving the world a glimpse into the engagement that marked the beginning of the Second Chimurenga.

The Battle of Chinhoyi is one of the most talked about, most revered, but perhaps one of the least documented in the country’s history.

Yet the significance of the battle is not lost, as it kick-started the Second Chimurenga, the armed and decisive phase of the country’s liberation history.

The national resistance to colonial settlers began in the early 1890s.

The Chinhoyi battle was also the first military action against the Ian Smith regime after his infamous and illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence of November 1965.

It is perhaps not fortuitous that the very first shots of the Second Chimurenga were fired on or about the day Ambuya Nehanda, Zimbabwe’s revolutionary matriarch, was executed in 1896 but not before she uttered those famous words that, “My bones shall rise again.”

Recounting the battle in which at least seven guerrillas, Simon Chimbodza, Christopher Chatambudza, Nathan Charumuka, Godwin Manyerenyere, Ephraim Shenjere, David Guzuzu and Arthur Maramba (some accounts state that there could have been as many as 21 guerrillas) has been limited to a couple of people who witnessed the legendary skirmish.

Not even Rhodesian accounts have to date painted the full picture of the battle.

Hence, Cde Chivende and Cde Alex Nharara who witnessed the battle as they were held at a police station where they had been held for assisting the guerrillas, have been holding the key oral links to the historical day.

Unfortunately, Cde Nharara died three years ago at his home in Chinhoyi.

Cde Chivende maybe the last oracle of the historical moment.

The Herald managed to track down Cde Chivende and caught up with him at his farm in Raffingora where he is now based.

“Baba is not feeling very well these days,” explains his wife of 46 years Rosemary.

Age is catching up with the 75-year-old veteran who has had to undergo medical procedures in the last few years.

He sits, sunning himself and absorbing every word and nuance, in his quiet demeanour.

The wife is anxious about the health of her man and any repercussions of being published by the “opposition” media.

Here is a man who was appointed the first Governor of Mashonaland Central, has been a deputy minister and was recently appointed by President Mugabe to the Zanu-PF Central Committee.

The Chinhoyi 7

But the man bears no pity for himself and sets to narrate his tale — which is punctuated by thoughtful moments of silence.

He is unequivocal that there were seven guerrillas involved in the battle which came rather too early and unexpectedly for the fighters who had other plans to tackle the enemy.

“When they crossed the Zambezi River near Chirundu they were part of about four groups of combatants that were making incursions into Rhodesia as it was called then,” said Cde Chivende.

“The seven that came to Chinhoyi had men who came looking for Cde Nharara who was a well-known Zanu member in our area,” he said.

“They stayed in the bush and we looked after them for several days. They planned to destroy the power line from Kariba Hydro-power station which would plunge the country into darkness and act as a signal to other groups that had infiltrated the country in Mutare, Rusape, Chegutu and Mvuma,” he said.

It did not go according to plan, though.

“They intended to blow up a pylon at Lion’s Den, but failed and it only resulted in a minor black out in Chinhoyi,” explained Cde Chivende.

It is said that after the setback the guerrillas consulted the local spiritual leadership which conducted rituals and gave them assurances that all would be well, mission accomplished.

Only it turned out differently.

The settler machinery would be jolted into action and it descended heavily on Chinhoyi.

It so happened that Cdes Chivende and Nharara were sent to Salisbury to collect some goods which included explosives, medicines and cash from Zanu cadres with the point-man being Cde Mundawarara.

They duly went and collected the items and the cash but they saw the first signs of danger.

It was Cde Nharara who suggested that they avoid boarding a bus but board a lorry instead, which they did.

Cde Chivende said he was surprised by the number of police roadblocks on that day.

“We managed to avoid arrest and we went through Darwendale and disembarked at a place called Chaoma from where we walked the rest of the journey,” he said.

They managed to give the contraband to the guerrillas, but on their way to their respective houses, they were arrested and beaten and had their houses searched.

“We were taken to the police cells where we were again beaten and later taken to the bush where we were stripped and beaten and threatened with shooting. We were thrown into the cells and spent the night there,” recalled Cde Chivende.

He recalls that at around 9am they heard the sound of shooting and the buzzing of helicopters.

The battle had begun.

“From the cell we could see the fighting and the planes — about four — that the guerrillas brought down,” claims the witness.

“The two sides exchanged fire the whole day and the seven men stood their ground while the Rhodesian soldiers brought reinforcements.

“Our men were later overpowered after they ran out of ammunition and even then they must have been killed from the air, not by ground soldiers,” he concluded.

The battle ended at around 4pm and the soldiers were carted to an unknown place, and efforts to locate their dishonourable disposal by the racist forces, who were known to cast fallen guerillas in mine shafts and mass graves, have been fruitless.

The site of the battle is where the Mashonaland West Provincial Heroes’ Acre is located.

The number of casualties that Rhodesians suffered during the battle has never been known officially, for obvious reasons.

For their part, Cdes Chivende and Nharara were later taken to an underground cell in Harare and later to Goromonzi before being sent to Sikhombela to serve jail terms of three and five years respectively.

Zimbabwe’s pride

By the end of the tale, one is convinced of the heroism of the Chinhoyi 7.

Zimbabweans talk about the episode with pride, even if it was a lost battle.

The reason is simply because the battle showed Zimbabwe’s resolve to take on the far much superior opponent and lasted the distance to reclaim the space and glory of the people.

One of the things that is also pointed out is that the battle informed the need for change of tactics as freedom fighters could not rely on open confrontation with the well-equipped enemy.

The institutional memory of the liberation war is running out fast and Mrs Chivende believes that such tales must be documented.

Happily, the Chinhoyi Provincial Heroes Acre, which also houses a museum, is a reminder of what the Chinhoyi 7 and others went through for the liberation of the country.

A film about the Battle of Chinhoyi is in the pipeline and may be out next year.

Meanwhile, at the serene Mwala Oyera Farm, Cde Chivende looks towards the dam overlooking the majestic farmhouse.

He may as well be looking into the future.

Zimbabwe on Monday this week experienced one of the severest power outages in a long time, that left only Bulawayo with power. The outage should be a wake-up call, coming as it did, on the eve of the sadc Extraordinary Summit taking place today in Harare, a summit to discuss industrialisation.

The power blackout, which covered most parts of the country, should have a salutary effect on the summit, whose theme centres on industrialisation and regional integration.

Salutary effect in that following the recent outbreak of Afrophobia in South Africa, that issue may compete for focus at the summit.

Indeed, South African President Jacob Zuma told South Africans during Freedom Day celebrations at Union Buildings in Pretoria that he would raise the issue of attacks on African immigrants in a formal report to sadc, the African Union and the United Nations.

While the South African leader condemned the attacks on immigrants, he appeared to fan the flames of xenophobia by blaming fellow African countries whose citizens migrate to South Africa.

While his comments were reprehensible and regrettable in light of the barbaric attacks on foreigners, President Zuma also unwittingly raised important questions, questions that should be answered at the Extraordinary Summit.

He asked why African immigrants were flocking to South Africa, why they were not in their countries, and why South Africa was being criticised as if it manufactured immigrants only to abuse them?

Migration occurs in every part of the world, and at times is not even a manifestation of deficiencies in national economies.

There are always push and pull factors.

South Africa cannot afford an attitude of “splendid isolation” and smugness about the state of its economy in a sea of poverty and unemployment.

It should feel very uneasy when such a big economy fails to deliver jobs for its people.

It is, however, a fact that faster regional integration and balanced development in all parts of the continent would reduce the number of people migrating to South Africa in search of opportunities.

He said; “The promotion of intra-Africa trade, regional integration, infrastructure and other economic interventions is also designed to improve the economic situation in sister countries. The end result will be that brothers and sisters will eventually no longer need to leave their countries in search of a better life” in South Africa.

sadc leaders have acknowledged the need for employment creation in the region through beneficiation and value-addition of products instead of exporting them in their raw state.

They acknowledge that this calls for massive investment in infrastructure, skills, energy, road and rail networks as key enablers to speed up development.

The power outage of Monday highlights the resource limitations of each country trying to go it alone on such massive projects, not to mention that there is already a major energy deficit in the region.

These are the long-term challenges confronting the region which should command the attention of sadc leaders meeting in Harare today.

South Africa’s ability to export more to the region because of the declining value of its currency is not sustainable.

If anything, it creates resentment because it undermines the manufacturing sectors of neighbouring states, hence the loss of jobs.

It is, therefore, our considered view that the recent outbreak of Afrophobia in South Africa should not be allowed to divert the attention of leaders from the theme of the summit.

They should act as a spur to practical measures needed to develop the continent.

They should not be taken as cause for criticism or mockery of each other but as a reminder, if any were required, that Africa’s development agenda is lagging too far behind and breeding mutual animosity among its underclass and unemployed youths, leading to Afrophobia.

Even South Africa cannot escape the ghost of economic inequalities by clinging on to the legacy of apartheid.

It is time to rebuild economies which address African challenges beyond impressive GDPs which serve alien, minority interests.

Virginia Muwanigwa Correspondent
This is the 13th in a series of articles analysing progress on gender equality and women’s empowerment in SADC, Africa and beyond. Among some of the issues up for consideration during the SADC Extraordinary Summit of Heads of State and Government, held in Harare, Zimbabwe yesterday, was gender equality.

This was in the context of the Revised Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP) which provided the overarching regional framework guiding SADC in its efforts to achieve its regional integration, development and poverty eradication agenda.

Gender equality, among other issues, has been cited as a sector intervention area in the revised plan.

While at face value, it would appear that the objectives of the SADC Gender Protocol, gender equality and women’s empowerment, remain largely unmet, there is general consensus that the protocol is one of the better performing legal instruments in the southern Africa regional economic bloc.

Against evidence that since 1992, the SADC region has adopted 35 legal instruments, including the SADC Treaty giving effect to the Community, protocols such as the SGP (2008), Free Movement of People and Goods, charters, declarations, and memoranda of understanding (MOUs) cementing the SADC regional integration agenda.

Once protocols are signed and ratified, they are legally binding on state parties, thereby providing a framework for accelerating and strengthening policy, legislation and other measures in SADC member states.

They set regional norms and standards for enhancing measurable change in the lives of SADC citizens.

The RISDP framework, before revision, outlined the priorities for the SADC Gender Unit whose mandate is facilitate, coordinate and monitor the implementation of SADC Gender commitments at national and regional levels.

These relate to policy development and harmonisation; gender mainstreaming; institutional strengthening; strengthening and capacity building; women’s empowerment programmes including:

Women’s human rights; women and girl child education; violence against women and children; sexual and reproductive health and rights including HIV and AIDS, women’s economic empowerment; media and information; and women in politics and decision making; communication, information sharing and networking; and research, monitoring and evaluation.

With 2015 being the year in which the targets for the SADC Gender Protocol come up for review, it is necessary to tick off areas that have been implemented, outcomes and more importantly, those which remain untouched.

Commemorating the 2015 International Women’s Day, Dr Stergomena Tax, first female Executive Secretary for SADC, noted that the event coincided with, among others, important global processes in the area of gender equality and women’s empowerment, the 20 years of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

Tax highlighted that this is an opportune moment for SADC to join the global community to reflect on progress made towards the implementation of the commitments made in these important instruments.

She also noted that this also comes at a time when the review of the Millennium Development Goals and targets set for 2015 is almost completed and the goals are due to be replaced with the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be deliberated upon and approved by the UN General Assembly in September 2015.

Against a target of 15 countries expected to have signed the protocol by 2015, in 2009, nine countries had done so, rising to 13 in 2014.

Ratification of the protocol was not so easy with only two countries having done so in 2010, this rose to nine in 2011, 11 in 2012, 12 in 2013 and in 2014, only three countries remained outstanding.

These were Botswana, Madagascar and Mauritius.

Although Mauritius has not signed the protocol, it has adopted a clause that requires at least 30 percent representation of either sex in local government.

Of the 13 countries that have signed, Madagascar is still to ratify the protocol. The DRC in 2014 remained the only country to have ratified but was yet to deposit its instruments. Mauritius expressed reservation with the proposal for affirmative action, which was contrary to their constitution.

Botswana was not comfortable with the peremptory and mandatory language in the protocol, as well as the time-frames, which it felt were not realistic.

There is general consensus that the two countries should be respected for taking the issues of gender equality and equity seriously enough to not commit to what they know to be unachievable. This comes against a context in which most of those countries acclaimed for having ratified, have failed to meet the targets, and in some cases, have even retrogressed.

“The SADC Gender and Development Index (SGDI), a measure of progress made by the 15 countries against 23 indicators in six sectors (education, political participation, the economy, health, HIV and AIDS, and the media) increased slightly to 67 percent regionally but dropped in five countries, Botswana, Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Malawi and Zambia,” notes the SADC Gender Protocol Barometer 2014.

While acknowledging the advances made in putting gender equality on the national, sub-regional and international agenda, it is an indictment that the narrative of the preamble to the Beijing Platform for Action, back in 1995, bears an uncanny resemblance to that of today.

Back then and now, priorities include the need to redress feminisation of poverty; ensure gender parity education and training of women; increase women’s access to health; eradicate violence against women; address impact of armed conflict on women; protect, advance and promote women’s participation in the economy; increase women’s representation in power and decision making; set up and strengthen institutional mechanisms to advancement women; recognise human rights of women; improve women’s voice, choice and control over the media; acknowledge women’s agency over the environment; and pay close attention to the Girl Child.

What may be different in the gender mainstreaming strategies of today may be the integration of gender equality in key regional strategies such as the RISDP.

The potential effect is captured by Tax, who noted, that, ‘… we should all endeavour to integrate a gender perspective in our different policies, programmes and activities across all sectors of regional integration so that we can realise the SADC vision of ensuring economic well-being and improvement of the standards of living and quality of life of the people of Southern Africa.”

Virginia Muwanigwa is a gender activist and Chairperson of the Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe which is the focal point to the SADC Gender Protocol Alliance. She is also the Director of the Humanitarian Information Facilitation Centre (HIFC).

Roselyne Sachiti Features Editor
Memory Moyo (29) started using contraception after the birth of her first child six years ago. Her choice, the pill, was the least expensive and easily accessible. Together with her peers she travels once every three months to the nearest clinic, Tongwe in the Gukunde area, Beitbridge, Matabeleland South, for supplies of the contraceptive.

Here they access their chosen methods of birth control.

At a cost of US$2 per three packets, Moyo and others say they simply cannot afford it anymore.

As few husbands have an interest in their wives’ reproductive health matters, there is usually no allocation in family budgets for contraception.

The family planning role is usually left to the woman.

Aware of the implications of unplanned pregnancies and the importance and benefits of child spacing, the women have made arrangements with the clinic to get the pill on credit.

“I usually settle the debt at the end of the year when I have extra money for Christmas shopping. We want Government to provide free contraceptives,” she said.

In dry rural areas like hers, getting a dollar per day is never easy.

Their income usually comes from the sale of cattle or when their husbands relocate to South Africa and send money home.

Yet despite their economic status, women in some parts of Zimbabwe are still expected to pay for contraception which is offered free in other areas.

But in spite of the challenges, Zimbabwe is one of few countries with the most equitable distribution of contraceptive use across socio-economic groups, meaning that more women and girls throughout the country have access to contraceptives regardless of wealth.

The country is a signatory to the 1994 Cairo ICPD/programme and as a result some national policies, strategies and guidelines that include the national guidelines on family planning (2011), among others, were developed for a co-ordinated implementation of sexual and reproductive health (SRH).

Zimbabwe also made some pledges at the Family Planning 2020 meeting in London (2012).

The country committed to increase the contraceptive prevalence rate from 59 percent to 68 percent by 2020; to reduce unmet need for family planning from 13 percent to 6,5 percent by 2020; and to reduce adolescent girls’ unmet need for family planning services from 16,9 percent to 8,5 percent by 2020.

The unmet need for family planning is one of the indicators used to track progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 which aim to reduce child mortality and improve maternal health respectively.

Zimbabwe National Family Planning Council (ZNFPC) assistant director (marketing and communication) Mr Isaac Mukaronda said contraception should not only be a woman’s issue because men also enjoy the benefits of family planning.

“The role of men in family planning is crucial and critical.

“Zimbabwe is a patriarchal country hence the use of family planning methods is determined by the men in most instances. There are also some methods of family planning which require male co-operation and contribution such as condom use.

“Both the male and female condoms cannot be effectively used without involvement and participation by both the men and women,” he said.

Mr Mukaronda added that they offer men’s services such as vasectomy and voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) through provision of comprehensive integrated sexual reproductive health services.

He said one in four women were using family planning to limit the number of children they have.

However, he said, 59 percent of these women were using a modern method with 41 percent on the pill.

“Therefore the family planning method most commonly used is the pill (41,3 percent) followed by injectables (8,3 percent),” he said.

He also revealed that the use of modern contraceptive methods among women increases with age, from 35 percent of women aged 15-19 to 63 percent of women age 30-34, after which it falls to 41 percent of women aged 45-49.

“An increase in the use of the pill is evident in younger age groups from 30 percent of married women age 15-19 to 49 percent in age group 20-24,” he added.

He also explained that use of modern family planning methods was higher among sexually active unmarried women (62 percent) and for currently married women (57 percent).

While 30 percent of sexually active unmarried women use male condoms, only 3 percent of currently married women use them, 18 percent of sexually active unmarried women use pill versus 41 percent of currently married women.

Women in rural areas are less likely to use contraceptive methods than their counterparts in urban areas (57 percent) compared with 62 percent.

Use of contraceptive methods is highest in the provinces of Mashonaland Central (64 percent) and Mashonaland East (63 percent).

Matabeleland South has the lowest contraceptive prevalence rate among currently married women (46 percent).

Contraceptive use is positively associated with women’s level of education. At least 43 percent of currently married women with no education use contraceptives, 67 percent of those with secondary education use contraceptives. Similarly, women in lowest wealth quintile (54 percent) are less likely to use contraceptives compared with women in the highest wealth quintile (65 percent).

Mr Mukaronda bemoaned funding challenges as ZNFP was giving out free contraception.

“In these harsh economic times funding is a problem internationally and nationally and ZNFPC is not spared.

“If in these circumstances the Government managed to set aside 15 percent of the National Budget for the health sector and in turn the Health Ministry also sets aside 7 percent of its budget for family planning the situation would be more comfortable for council,” he said.

He explained how male involvement in family planning would increase uptake and reduce the discontinuation rate of contraceptive use.

“It will increase the acceptability of the permanent method of contraception (vasectomy).

“Zimbabwe will benefit by achieving its family planning goals through a number of ways that include maternal and child health benefits,” he said.

Family planning, he added, helps in preventing pregnancy-related health risks in women and also reduces the need for unsafe abortion.

“Illegal abortions are a danger to lives of women and a major cause of maternal mortality,” he explained.

He added that family planning also has economic benefits.

“By investing in family planning the nation will be saving for the future and allowing one to have the children they want, a number they will be able to sustain and maintain.

“It also allows couples to have more disposable income and time.”

Family planning, he added, also has benefits to other areas of development, such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Secretary in the Ministry of Health and Child Care Dr Gerald Gwinji said despite funding gaps, Zimbabwe has made commendable progress on family planning.

In fact, he said, the country’s family planning coverage is one of the best in the world.

“We have also recorded a reduction in our unmet need for family planning what we now have to do is ensure continued funding.

“There are funding gaps for most health programmes hence family planning has not been spared. We operate in the same constrained environment that most of Government is operating in.

“Funding from partners is also becoming harder and harder to get as they too have begun facing constraints.

“What we seek to do is increase efficiencies to get maximum benefit from whatever comes our way,” he added.

Challenges women face regarding family planning methods are not only confined to Zimbabwe.

Globally, women face similar challenges, too, as explained by Women Deliver Chief Executive Officer Katja Iversen.

“Some of the most common challenges to contraception include: poor access to sexual and reproductive health education, particularly youth-friendly information; inadequate and costly health services, including limited contraception options; and, socio-cultural norms that stigmatise or discriminate against women seeking family planning.

“The good news is that these are all challenges that can be overcome with continued investments in girls’ and women’s health and rights. With a new sustainable development agenda on the horizon, now is the time for policymakers to deliver on their promises to girls and women and renew their commitments to their health, rights and well-being,” she said.

She added that contraception use varies around the world.

“In some countries, women may choose to use intrauterine devices (IUD) and in others, women prefer long-acting injectables – the key word there is ‘choice.’

“Each woman, everywhere, should have access to affordable contraceptive options, so that she can make an informed choice about which family planning method works best for her,” she added.

Of the 1,5 billion women of reproductive age (15-49) in developing countries, 645 million women used modern methods of contraception in 2012. “Contraception use among sexually active women varies across the SADC region: from 76 percent in Mauritius, 60 percent in Zimbabwe to 6 percent in Angola.

“It’s likely that married and unmarried women across the SADC region face a wide range of barriers to contraception – from poor access to sexual and reproductive health education to inadequate family planning services and contraception options.

“What’s clear is that there are serious gaps and inequities in contraception use across the region that must be addressed,” she said.

Globally, she said, men have an important role in family planning.

“Men make up half of the world’s population, and still remain the majority of the world’s leaders. They run the most powerful institutions, companies and governments, and in many places, remain the primary decision makers in their communities and households.

“Yet, too few men are choosing to use their voice to advocate for sexual and reproductive health and rights – for themselves and their partners”.

“Imagine what could be possible if every man in every family, community and nation joined the reproductive health movement and prioritised family planning: fewer girls, women and babies would die during pregnancy and childbirth, and instead, more would survive and thrive,” she pointed out.

By investing in family planning, Zimbabwe is taking positive steps toward improving the health and well-being of girls and women thereby making strides towards realising MDGs 4 and 5.

In other words, investments in family planning services reduce the overall costs of maternal and newborn healthcare, and save lives.

Joseph Ngwawi Correspondent
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is in the process of finalising a draft Regional Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap that provides the framework for major economic and technological transformations at the national and regional levels within the context of deepening regional integration.The strategy and roadmap, whose drafting was spearheaded by a team of regional and national consultants appointed by the SADC Secretariat, aims to accelerate the growing momentum towards strengthening the comparative and competitive advantages of the economies of the region.

An interim report by the consultants was presented to the meetings of the Ministerial Task Force on Regional Economic Integration and the SADC Council of Ministers held in Harare, Zimbabwe in March.

“The development of the industrialisation strategy commenced in December 2014, following completion of the preparatory phase which included resource mobilisation, preparations of terms of references and assembling experts,” SADC Executive Secretary Dr Stergomena Lawrence Tax said.

The interim report identifies industrialisation, competitiveness and regional integration as three main pillars on which the strategy should be anchored.

The strategy will present concrete and innovative short-, medium- and long-term actions for the attainment of the objectives of the three pillars and will be aligned to the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

While there is no one size-fits-all prescription, the interim report proposes a wide range of industrial policy options that are available to the SADC region.

One of the options is the adoption of Special Economic Zones (SEZs).

“These are an attractive option where the logistics are favourable — proximity to markets, ports, modern infrastructure — and where funding is available,” the report said.

“They can form the basis for clustering, including value-chain creation, so that firms can exploit the benefits of external spin-offs such as being located close to input suppliers, repair shops and financial institutions.”

Industrial parks act as a magnet for new entrants and a base for clusters, while also attracting foreign direct investment.

However, the disadvantage is that firms cannot be forced to locate within SEZs and there will always be risks that incentives, such as tax breaks used to attract investors, will prove costly relative to the benefits obtained.

“Moreover, few SADC economies have the fiscal space to spend lavishly, either on investment in SEZs or capital grants,” the report said.

The draft strategy also calls for the promotion of domestic, regional and global value chains as one of the interventions that should be pursued by SADC in its efforts to industrialise. The SADC region could benefit immensely from the experience of the Asian economies in the area of regional and global value chains.

Participation in value chains played a major role in the industrialisation of Asian economies and is, therefore, seen as a promising industrialisation path for the southern African region.

Starting with Japan in the late 20th century, Asia has been one of the regions that have exploited global value chains (GVCs) successfully. GVCs can be credited for China’s rapid industrialisation while also contributing substantially to the Asian region’s rapid growth in incomes, output and employment.

The main Asian exporters rank highly in GVC participation because a large proportion of their exports are imported inputs (foreign value-added) and a similarly large number of their exports are intermediate goods that are used in exports for third countries. Asian exports are, therefore, integrated in GVCs both upstream and downstream.

Promotion of value chains will enable SADC Member States to specialise in those productive processes and activities where they have competitive advantages.

Participation in regional and global value chains also promotes intra-regional trade and opens up access to technology and brand names while also accelerating export diversification and growth.

The report also advocates for a powerful case for SADC governments to invest in the collection of information and knowledge, and to make it readily available to actual and potential investors. — SADC Today.

Christopher Farai Charamba Features Writer
It is simple for one born free to take for granted their freedom and independence. Thirty-five years after the liberation struggle the sacrifices made by brave freedom fighters can easily be lost on the liberated generation. With history not among favoured subjects, the important tale of the war of liberation can soon

be lost on the coming generations. In an effort to combat such neglectful ignorance, the Children of Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association (CZNLWVA) made a trip to Chimoio, Mozambique, to visit the shrine and mass graves that lie there to learn more about Zimbabwe’s history.

As an association comprising children of war veterans, on this their maiden tour as a national association with representatives from six of the country’s10 provinces, many of these individuals were following in their parents’ footsteps to where they were housed during the war.

“Our parents are war veterans and lived here in Chimoio during the liberation struggle. They were trained here and helped free the country from colonial rule. We have therefore made this trip to learn more about our country’s history and pay tribute to those that sacrificed their lives,” said the national chairperson of the association, Cde Innocent Mhlanga.

During the liberation struggle Chimoio was the location of the ZANLA forces headquarters and training camps housing over 20 000 people in 14 different camps.

On November 23, 1977 with help from spies and traitors, the Rhodesian forces bombed the camps killing some 6 000 men, women and children.

“We are here to see the mass graves of the comrades who died during the war. It is humbling to know that so many of these people died so that one day we could be free. Our parents could also have died here. We need to respect and honour the sacrifices these people made for us.

“This is our first time here as the national organisation for children of war veterans and to see these graves and listen to the history of Chimoio is chilling. Sometimes we forget that there was a struggle for the freedom we have today,” Cde Mhlanga went on to say.

Among the near 400 members of the Zanu-PF affiliate association were individuals whose parents survived the 1977 Chimoio bombing. Most grew up hearing about the camp but had never seen the place with their own eyes.

Twenty-six year-old Rangai Manzero is the son of a war veteran who survived two bombings, the first one at Nyandzonia and the second at Chimoio. He was transferred to Percy Ntini base which housed injured comrades who needed rehabilitation.

“My father was injured badly during the Nyadzonia raid and then transferred to Percy Ntini for rehabilitation. That was where he was when Chimoio was bombed but he made it out alive. This was the second raid he survived and only suffered an injury to the leg.

“Some of his comrades were not as fortunate. I am told the whole place was destroyed and as the Rhodesian forces where bombing from the sky there were ground forces sent in to eliminate anyone who survived.

“My father does not talk a lot about the war but I do know some things. Making this trip to Chimoio was important because I wanted to know more about the history of our country and specifically what my father experienced and went through,” Manzero said.

The Chimoio shrines are special not only because of the mass graves but the area is also said to be sacred with various inexplicable events taking place over the years to attest to this.

“We have been told that this area is sacred and that it must be respected and given the right level of reverence so as not to anger the spirits of the fallen comrades resting here,” explains Esirina Mupfudze, a member of the CZNLWVA

“As a child of a war veteran I feel special being here. We are blood of the struggle and so this place is extremely important to me. Our parents made sacrifices for our freedom and coming here has given me a glimpse into what they experienced.

“We came here with the intention of it being a day visit but we have had to spend the night and we had no provisions for shelter or food. Clearly the spirits of those here at Chimoio wanted us to experience some of the conditions our parents went through.

“I believe this is what they mean when they say it is a sacred place. Circumstances beyond our control led us to stay here one night and despite being hungry and tired we had to soldier on through the night. I can only imagine what it must have been like for those that lived like this day in and day out,” she added.

Freeman Asima, the 27-year-old son of a war veteran and student at Great Zimbabwe University, was touched by his first visit to Chimoio.

“This is my first time here and I felt it was necessary to retrace our history and learn more about the place.

“We have only heard that our comrades were trained here and some of them died but did not know what it was like or understood the importance of their sacrifice.

“Seeing the mass graves is something shocking and touching. To know that there are thousands of bodies buried under here is saddening. This is truly a sacred area as these people sacrificed themselves for me and other Zimbabweans,” he said.

Asima went on to stress the importance of recognising such shrines as the one in Chimoio and Nyadzonia as well as for the youth of Zimbabwe to make trips to these places to experience and appreciate the history of their freedom.

Walking the group around different mass grave sites, Cde Future Pariano, a war veteran who was at Chimoio in 1977, was the one to explain the events that took place and why it was important.

“All you see here was dense and thick bush. It was difficult to manoeuvre through and to see that it took the Rhodesians 10 years to discover our site,” she said

“There were 14 different camps, among them Nehanda, Chindunduma, Takawira, Parirenyatwa, Pasi Tigare, Percy Ntini, Tamba Wakachenjera, Chitepo and Zvido Zvevanhu.

“When the raid took place a plane flew over our heads during parade and we thought it was just a surveillance plane that we were used to.

“Moments later the bombing started. We were caught off-guard and suffered many casualties. The camps were not prepared for such an attack. Chindunduma, for example, was a school camp for children of the veterans,” she explained.

Some 6 000 people were killed at Chimoio and this caused a setback in the liberation struggle but did not eliminate the cause but gave the ZANLA forces more resolve to attain independence.

Manicaland Provincial Affairs Minister Cde Mandi Chimene addressed the youths in Mutare upon their return from Chimoio.

“I applaud your efforts in making this trip to Chimoio and I pledge my support as I see how serious you are, evidenced by the different provinces here represented.

“My hope is that you as children of war veterans look for each other and build a bond as an association because the sacrifices made by the fallen comrades must not be in vain and we must not forsake the gains of independence,” she said

The minister urged the association in its future activities to invite children of war veterans from all walks of life as it was important for such history to be shared with all youths regardless of status or class.

For feedback contact: christopher.charamba@zimpapers.co.zw <mailto: christopher.charamba@zimpapers.co.zw> or chrischaramba@gmail.com <mailto:chrischaramba@gmail.com>

Zimbabwe has so far repatriated 830 people from Durban in hired buses via Beitbridge Border Post. Among those repatriated were 105 children and 324 women. Here, some of the repatrees are seen at one of the transit camps

Thupeyo Muleya Beitbridge Bureau
For decades, African women have been active in agriculture, trade, and other economic pursuits. Amajority of them have remained in the informal labour force and always played a supporting role to their spouses. In other words, they carry the social burden; are guardians of their children’s welfare and have explicit

responsibility to provide for them materially.

Furthermore, they are the household managers, providing food, nutrition, water, health, education and family planning to an extent greater than elsewhere in the developing world.

The recent spate of xenophobia motivated attacks that broke out in Durban, South Africa, left over 4 000 immigrants, mainly those from Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Botswana and Tanzania displaced.

The onslaught claimed seven lives and left several others badly injured.

A total of 112 suspects were arrested in connection with the violence.

The majority of victims of these brutal attacks were women who worked as housemaids or supported their husbands employed in and around Durban.

From the different homes the xenophobia victims were forced to seek shelter at two transitional camps at Chatsworth and Phoenix suburbs in Durban.

Some of the camps have closed down but some are still operational.

The traumatised women at the two transitional camps had very sad tales to tell.

They were forced out of their homes in a huff without clothes and blankets and even sanitary wear.

It was a matter of life and death.

They had to vacate the suburbs or face death from the marauding xenophobes.

“The situation here is unbearable. I fled my house with my one-year-old toddler in my arms. I had no time for anything else,” said Ms Talent Nyoni from Zhombe.

“I only managed to take a bag of clothes and my child and hid in the bush when the mob came looking for foreign immigrants in Ntomba area.

“I was at the camp for five days where I could not bath. There was inadequate shelter, controlled meals and the threat of further attacks,” Ms Nyoni said.

“I endured the same food daily. My child was used to a different diet and he was also traumatised. We had limited toilets and they filled up. Above all, we were overcrowded and lacked freedom,” she added.

Ms Nyoni, who was employed as a maid in Phoenix suburb, said most of her property was stolen as she fled from the house.

She was the sole breadwinner for her family back home.

Another Zimbabwean woman, Mrs Elta Zephaniah who was visibly sick, said she was having challenges accessing medication at the sole Red Cross Clinic at Phoenix Camp.

“I was sick for three days and was having challenges in accessing medication at the clinic because there were a lot of people there including those who were assaulted and injured.

“I could not leave the camp because the situation in the suburb was tense. My husband, who is employed as truck driver, was away and there was no one to help me. The conditions at the camp were inhuman. We could not bath and there was no adequate water. Generally everything was controlled and we were not used to that,” she said.

Mrs Zephaniah had been staying in South Africa for two years.

She vowed never to go to back to South Africa after escaping the vicious overnight attack.

She and her neighbours were only saved by their landlord who alerted them to the impeding attacks after getting word from a friend.

“We escaped with a few bags leaving behind electrical gadgets which we could not carry. We slept in the bush. On the following day we sought refuge at the police station before being taken to a camp (Phoenix),” she said.

She said there were challenges with sleeping space and nationalities of different countries were also quarrelling because of different cultures and way of life.

A Mozambican woman, Mrs Martha Chauke, said her stay at in the transitional camp was nothing short of torture because of limited space.

“I wanted to go home. Life was difficult. We had to scramble for food and the little water for bathing and drinking. Some people were even sleeping in the cold and I was worried that many children would be affected by the cold weather,” she said.

Mrs Chauke had been staying with her husband in the 1104 area of Durban where he was employed as a builder.

In the camps, women and children had to stand in long queues three times a day to get food.

Sometimes the queues were made up of more than 600 people.

There were fears of disease outbreaks at the centres as they also slept in crowded tents where other immigrants smoked at night.

The area around most of the ablution facilities was littered with human waste including diapers and produced a stench of urine amid fears of an outbreak of diseases.

The business community around Durban and other civic groups provided food to the displaced immigrants.

“We were sitting on a time bomb. We were overcrowded and struggled for everything including water, food, sleeping points,” said Andrew Shumba, a Zimbabwean.

Other immigrants also complained about the unavailability of decent meals and electricity.

“Women and men were bathing in the open, there were no proper sanitary facilities for both women and children.

“The toilets were filled up and life inside the camp was just not normal. We felt vulnerable,” said a Mozambican man who preferred anonymity.

Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to South Africa, Mr Isaac Moyo, described the conditions at the camps as a humanitarian challenge.

“The conditions at the camps are difficult considering that they are staying in the open where it is drizzling and cold during the night.

“We are doing our level best to ensure that our people are repatriated to Zimbabwe. You will note that people there are enthusiastic about going to their respective homes where they can leave a decent life,” he said.

Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique have since last week been evacuating their citizens from the volatile areas of Durban.

Zimbabwe has since repatriated 830 people from Durban in hired buses via Beitbridge Border Post. Among those repatriated were 105 children and 324 women.

South Africa’s Minister of Social Development, Mrs Bathabile Olive Dlamini, told journalists during a tour of the Primrose Camp in Johannesburg recently that they had agreed with community leaders to re-integrate some of those who had been displaced.

“The leadership in various communities has taken it upon themselves to ensure the safety of the immigrants and we want to warn those involved in criminal activities that the law will take its course,” she said.

She added that they had engaged people from the Nelson Mandela Foundation to help with the training of people from local government level on issues around conflict resolutions.

“This is a process we need to approach collectively and we have taken the necessary steps to prepare our communities to co-exist with immigrants. We don’t want to push people to communities which are not ready to integrate them.

“As a government we have made commitments to ensure the safety of all the people within our communities and we will stick to that,” said Mrs Dlamini.

She said the SA government would work with the International Organisation for Migration “as we escalate the facilitation and involvement of the communities in this process (integration)”.

Morgan Tsvangirai

Why have you become the darling of the historical oppressors of our people both at home and abroad Morgan? How come now even the Western media, that never for once praised the heroism of our people in the liberation struggle now appears to regard you as the Messiah? What are you doing for them Morgan? AT Independence, the new majority Government set to reconfigure the labour market, expand labour rights and upgrade labour laws and harmonise worker representation. Thus, on February 28, 1981, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions came into being as a merger of six black labour bodies. For the first one-and-a-half decades, the labour movement represented genuine worker interests until the secretary-general of the labour body since 1988, Morgan Tsvangirai, sold out labour struggles to become a political tool of the West who thrust him to the leadership of the Movement for Democratic Change on September 11 1999, our very own 9/11.The interests of the worker have been on the back burner ever since. Former Editor of The Herald Charles Chikerema, himself a trade unionist, wrote a damning article on Tsvangirai’s betrayal on March 12 1998, which we republish ahead of Workers Day commemorations tomorrow.

We had hoped to stay away from it all. We had hoped we would not have to cross swords as it were with the leadership of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.

Even as we do it now, we do so with reluctance. After all, we once sat in the General Council together and were quite a formidable faction with other colleagues.

Together we influenced the adoption of pertinent resolutions. Native to the requirements and consistent with the basics and fundamental tenets of Zimbabwe’s labour movement against the background of the war of liberation which had seen us achieve political power.

You were good in the meetings of the General Council those days. And there were times we wondered: “Where does he come from within the framework of the political traditions and trends of this country?” The truth is we are still wondering.

We recall in particular the congress in Gweru. We fought side-by-side, so you should become secretary-general.

Together we worked hard at resolutions that were adopted by the congress. We chastised the Government for what we regarded as dragging its feet on the land issue.

We would pressurise the Government to acquire land for the majority of the people and thus fulfil the expectations of the African people, so they could realise they had not fought a gruesome war and paid ultimate sacrifices in vain.

We would push the point that the policy of reconciliation had been misunderstood by the minority so much that they believed that economically speaking and as far as the land issue was concerned, matters should remain as they were.

We were to intensify the organisation of farm workers as they were among the most exploited in the country, yet were at the same time working for a handful of commercial farmers who made billions of dollars per year in agriculture.

Whatever happened to that programme, Morgan? We pushed it so hard with other leaders of the ZCTU. It was so popular no one could stand in your way for the post of secretary-general.

But what have you done to the programme? You will say times have changed both at home and abroad and that developments in the socio-economic order of societies are presenting the labour movement with new equations.

But could that explain it all? Why have you become the darling of the historical oppressors of our people both at home and abroad Morgan? How come now even the Western media, that never for once praised the heroism of our people in the liberation struggle now appears to regard you as the Messiah? What are you doing for them Morgan?

We will return to that later.

On March 9, 1988 you faxed to all and sundry a resolution the General Council had made to the effect that starting from today The Herald should not be read on Thursdays and Fridays until further notice.

The reason for this decree is that, as far as you and those who think like you are concerned, this paper “dis-informed” the nation regarding the two-day stay-away events. We did nothing of the kind.

Against this background of the rioting and violence that took place during the two-day labour-organised actions, previously, the big story during your two-day stay-away was the peace and tranquillity that prevailed, Morgan.

And that is what we said.

The whole nation except our enemies at home and abroad heaved a sigh of relief because there was no bloodshed, there was no looting and there was no smashing and destruction of business premises of struggling and marginalised black businesspeople.

The high-density areas were not turned into a burning inferno like the last time.

And that was the big story Morgan, not what you and your admirers wished to hear and read about yourselves.

And we reported it all the way it came. Where there were total closures, we said so. Where there were workers who turned out and found their workplaces closed by your new-found allies — the employers — were reported accordingly.

There are those who have accused you of crass opportunism Morgan and that you have virtually turned the ZCTU into storm troopers for the interests of the defunct Rhodesia Front along with all its shades and patterns of reasoning and idiosyncrasies. Could they have a point here?

Otherwise, how do you explain the fact that, of all the commodities and products basic and indispensable for the well-being of our people, the first item you call upon them to boycott is The Herald and not food items whose prices they cannot afford.

You have moved up in high circles over the years. You now rub shoulders and are familiar with all those charlatans and hypocrites who have perfected the art of talking about democracy and the need for diversity and pluralism without meaning a single word of what they talk about.

You have become one of them.

Otherwise, how do you explain, Morgan, the fact that with one side of your mouth, you speak eloquently about democracy, freedom etc, while with the other side of your mouth, you order your followers to boycott The Herald because the views expressed therein do not square up to your over-developed sense of self-esteem?

Which one is the true ZCTU spokesman?

Is it the fluent advocate of democracy, pluralism and diversity or is it the ruthless, calculating charlatan in the form of a tin-pot dictator in the making which you are fast becoming Morgan?

So you will order Zimbabweans as to which paper they will read and what they will not, and for what number of days?

If you start with The Herald, then which newspapers will be next? Which radio and TV station will be next?

Could someone not conclude that you have singled out Thursday and Friday as the days on which The Herald should not be read as a reward and gesture of appreciation to our competitors who publish on those days for having covered the two-day stay-away in a manner that pleased you? So you do love feel-good journalism after all?

So from now on everyone must tremble and write stories that make you feel good.

You wanted us to say the stay-away was a “resounding success?”

For whom? You were not alone Morgan. You came as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The industrialists were behind you. And we understand the history of the liberation struggle of this country enough to ever applaud you for a stunt like that.

And that brings us to a point we raised earlier on. We said we would return to it later.

It was to our amazement that all the forces that once oppressed the people of Zimbabwe now regard you as their last hope.

Now you never achieve that status by being a true spokesman of the toiling majority.

You never achieve that status by fighting for their dignity and well-being. In fact, you get bludgeoned to the ground for doing that.

But for you it’s different Morgan.

All the minority commercial farmers who own most, if not all, the fertile land in this country love you. Some of them ferry workers to join demonstrations.

All the industrialists or most of them “love” you. When you call for a strike, they close up their businesses in solidarity. And tell their workers that they will pay them even if they do not turn up for work.

What have you done for them? It is simple. You have been of great assistance to them. You have kept yourself aloof from the struggles of the workers against racism and for their dignity at their places of employment. But you have kept an eagle eye open for any problems involving the Government and its employees. Oh there you are sharp, Morgan.

You have kept silent where the farm workers are concerned. You have not thrown book, bell and candle at the commercial farmers for keeping their workers in a perpetual state of bondage since the days of Cecil John Rhodes and then throwing them into destitution when they are old and weary. When the workers have gone on strike, be it in Mashonaland Central, Chipinge and Matabeleland, you have kept silent.

And when the land question became a national issue with the international and national white community, including the South African newspapers howling and crying foul, you employed all the ingenuity at your disposal to divert the attention of the people onto issues thereby strengthening the hand of our traditional detractors in their efforts to thwart the country’s drive for land acquisition.

You have declared the Government as the enemy number one. And so have the landlords in England.

As we said earlier on, you move in high circles nowadays.

Never in the history of all this country has a labour movement so collaborated with employers the way you are doing and, believe us when we say we have seen quite a few treacherous labour movement leaderships come and go in this country over the years Morgan.

You do not have the interests of the workers at heart at all.

You are just using them and exploiting them the way their employers do.

And whatever the outcome, you should know better than to think we could regard you as a hero of the working class.

Never ever, Morgan! You are hero to the owning and exploiting class in this country.

Mozambique national Emmanuel Sithole is attacked in Alexandra township at the height of anti-immigrant violence

Beauregard Tromp, Khanyi Ndabeni and Simphiwe Nkwali
What turns a young man with a loving mother into the kind of person who mercilessly attacked Emmanuel Sithole? Sunday Times reporters visited four homes in Alexandra to find tales of loss, poverty, despair and absent fathers. “Killa”. The word is etched on the wooden table as Tshitshi Bhengu fumbles her hands in the lap of her hand-sewn dress, trying to figure out where to start.

She has been thinking of killing herself. The shame.

Last Saturday morning, after a night of drinking at Madala Hostel and looting nearby foreign-owned shops, her son Mthintha Bhengu plunged a knife into Emmanuel Sithole.

Hours later he joined his mother and seven siblings, cracking jokes, waiting for Tshitshi to finish cooking their meal.

After the deaths of her husband and other close relatives, Tshitshi could no longer provide for her herself and her four children by selling bundles of wood by the roadside at their home in Msinga, near Tugela Ferry in KwaZulu-Natal. So she headed to Jozi.

It had to be better there. Neighbours had long stopped lending her money or giving her food. Without a man to support her, how would she repay them, they argued.

At Madala Hostel, where tribal tradition is infused with township hustle, Tshitshi and her children were offered refuge in her husband’s old room. Here, she believed, her children could go to school and have a better life. That was 13 years ago.

“I couldn’t even afford to buy my children school uniforms,” she said.

“I thought life would be much better here. My aim was to get a job and raise my children properly and send them to school, as I never went to school.”

Work was hard to find. She met a man with whom she had four more children.

She remembers her children’s births by the historic events of the time – the release of Nelson Mandela, the first democratic election, the Soccer World Cup.

The child-support grants were hardly enough to feed the family, who all shared that single room. Her older children dropped out of school, trying to find work to help the family.

Mthintha made it as far as Grade 4. Known for his short temper as a boy, he landed in trouble with the authorities for assault and spent six months in jail.

After he was released in 2013, Mthintha never held down a job for longer than a few months. One year after his jail stretch, he moved out of the room he shared with three of his brothers because it was too small.

He moved to a new place, and on Monday police broke down the door of that room. Two days later, one of his roommates, a man in a red T-shirt and sleeper earrings, said: “We never saw him on Friday.”

Another roommate concurred. Their eyes moved shiftily up and down a passageway strewn with broken furniture and rubbish. Later the man in the red T-shirt admitted they were together on Friday night, drinking at Madala Hostel.

“But I left early to go home to sleep,” he said. Mthintha was a good man and worked with them at the nearby carwash, his roommates said.

Police traced Mthintha to his mother’s room in Madala hostel, yanking Tshitshi (above)around, demanding answers. Then he strolled in.

“They never even knew it was him they were looking for, until he gave himself up,” Tshitshi said.

On Friday, Mthintha’s older brother, Gadonkuhle (25) had warned him to be careful. Gadonkuhle said on Saturday, just like any other day, Mthintha had shown up at the family’s room, showing no sign of what had happened earlier that morning. Even now, Gadonkuhle believes it was just a mistake.

On Tuesday, watching a neighbour’s TV, Tshitshi saw the pictures of Mthintha that were taken during the attack on Sithole.

“I could see it was him holding the knife. I know him. He’s my child. I knew he had anger problems but didn’t know which door to knock for help,” she said.

She wishes she could apologise to the Sithole family for her son’s actions, but she is too ashamed to face them. For once, her belly is not aching with hunger, because she is numbed by the pain of her son’s deeds.

“Maybe if we had a father things would have been better,” said his brother.

‘I knew the man they killed’

Fikile Sibiya’s display cabinet is filled with pictures of her children. One of them is Ayanda (17) bright-eyed in his crisp school uniform. His Grade 11 school books fill the bottom of the cabinet.

Outside his mother’s tiled shack, in the narrow alleys that zig-zag in the shadows of Madala Hostel (above), he is known as “Zakes”.

It was Zakes who sprinted up to Sithole, who was already on his knees, and landed a kick on the Mozambican on Saturday morning. Then Zakes pulled out a butcher’s knife. A hand clutching his wrist prevented him from doing more.

“I knew the man they killed. Every morning I would buy sweets from him before catching a taxi to work,” said his mother.

A fridge, the display cabinet, a narrow couch and a double bed are crammed into the room. Because of the lack of space here, Ayanda, the eldest of Fikile’s three children, slept at the hostel with relatives.

But the rest of the time he could usually be found at his family home, fetching his sister from crèche, doing chores or watching movies.

Fikile is a strict mother who gave Ayanda little room to get caught up in mischief. But last year she noticed he was keeping company with a group of mostly unemployed young men in their 20s.

“I asked him: ‘If I had to look for you and ask who are your friends, your real friends, what can you say?’”

Still, her son never smelt of alcohol or cigarette smoke and remained obedient. Then came the rap at the door. It was the police.

Fikile came to this room in Alexandra 11 years ago, also from Msinga. She was going to build a life for herself and her son, away from the misery and poverty of home. Looking up from her TV, Fikile is unforgiving.

“I brought him here to get a better education, so that he can speak better English than me and have a better job. My child … how much I struggled raising him alone,” she said.

“The law must take its course. If he is guilty, he must be punished.”

“A better life”

In the picture the two young men pose before a lush fir forest, blue-grey mountains rising beyond and the open sky speckled with clouds. At their feet lies a knock-off Persian rug. The picture of Sfundo Shezi and a friend was taken recently, in an unknown photographic studio.

On Sunday, Sfundo was also in a picture, this time wielding a wrench, striking repeatedly at Sithole.

Music blares in the house as his mother, Zamile Mzimela, watches Soccer Zone on a discoloured TV screen. The hashtag “saynotoxenophobia” flashes repeatedly.

A week ago on Friday night, over supper, Sfundo told his mother he was going to sleep at Madala Hostel. She warned him not to get involved in the looting.

“I told him even though I’m poor I do not want anything stolen in this house,” she said.

“I didn’t like what these people were doing and even said he must not even think of bringing stolen goods in this house.”

When she saw him on Saturday, he was limping. “He said he dislocated his ankle joint from running. He didn’t say what he was running from.”

It has been 16 years since Zamile moved from her home in Nkandla to try to eke out a better life for herself and her sons here in Alexandra. She has also been supporting her ailing mother back home.

Her husband was shot dead during a family feud when Sfundo was six months old. Initially her boys stayed at their rural home with their grandmother, and Sfundo only joined his mother in Alexandra three years ago.

As a cleaner at a construction company, Zamile earns R790 every fortnight and pays R200 rent for her tiny room.

Sfundo dropped out of school in Grade 7 and has since worked as a painter. His mom has been saving up so that he could get a driver’s licence and possibly get a better job.

Sfundo’s elder brother, Sabelo, has a job, and the family get by. The two brothers share the double bed while Zamile sleeps on the floor beside them. This is how they slept on Saturday night.

As she sits on the bed fingering her “I love Jesus” bracelet, Zamile’s eyes well up.

“A good boy”

Through the only hole in Jannette Maseko’s roof a ray of sunlight comes to rest inside an empty bucket at her doorway. There is food on the stove but Jannette cannot eat. They say her son is a killer.

She only realised there was trouble when neighbours up the road started complaining that police were beating them, looking for Sizwe Ngomezulu.

By the standards of many of her neighbours, Jannette’s home is spacious. There is room for two beds, two wardrobes, a kitchen table and even a kitchen counter.

This is the home Sizwe (20) was raised in. When he was young his father still lived with the family, being absent only when his job as a long-distance truck driver took him away. But now his father has other wives.

The only time Jannette has contact with him is when she has to go to court to demand more maintenance to look after their five children. Jannette is largely immobile as a result of illness.

In 2012, when he was in Grade 9, Sizwe dropped out of school to care for his mother and younger siblings.

At 10am on Saturday, barely an hour after Sithole was declared dead, Sizwe was at home to prepare food for his mother. He spent most of the rest of that day entertaining his younger nephew.

“I asked him to fix my TV aerial. He didn’t show any signs of being terrified,” said Jannette.

He did not tell them what he had been doing earlier that day. Sizwe had been with Mthintha, Sfundo and Zakes.

When the other three attacked Sithole, Sizwe repeatedly reached into his belt – it is not clear what he was reaching for.

Perhaps it was the man in the overalls who tried to intervene, perhaps it was the man in the black leather jacket who shouted for them to stop, or perhaps it was the presence of photographer James Oatway, capturing their actions on camera, that gave Sizwe pause. But at that stage of the attack, his hands remained empty.

Jannette refuses to believe that her son could have participated in the attack. He is a good boy. -www.sundaytimes.co.za

Obert Gutu

Tichaona Zindoga Political Editor
The reader may be surprised to learn that there was a failed demonstration by the opposition MDC-T on Tuesday this week in its bid to grab the attention of regional leaders who attended the Extraordinary Sadc Summit in Harare on Wednesday. Many of us neither saw the demonstrations, nor heard echoes of it, for the simple reason that a demonstration by a handful of drunken youths cannot seriously be taken as a political statement, let alone strategy.

Granted, huge international forums such as meetings of leaders and even sports games or tournaments are taken advantage of by people with all sorts of ideas and agendas — including campaigning for homosexuality.

Zimbabwe is no stranger to this.

During the inclusive Government and the inter-party negotiations that preceded and subsisted with it, we especially saw a spike in these activities as MDC-aligned, quasi political groups calling themselves civic society sought to get the attention of regional and continental leaders.

Some even arranged meetings and seminars and distributed various materials to try and influence leaders and set the agenda for them.

These activities died with the defeat of the opposition in the SADC-monitored elections.

The MDC and its allies were baffled by the results of July 31, 2013.

MDC-T has only recently been trying to wake up from its knock-out.

One of the ideas that the party and its leader have had is to stage demonstrations that will render the country ungovernable.

They like to call it mass action and we were told that this mass action would take place soon after the party’s congress last November.

Tsvangirai must have promised us that he would lead the same “from the front”.

These demos have not taken place, the most plausible explanation for which is that Tsvangirai has failed to muster the numbers and, more importantly, a good strategy to go with such a plan.

See, Tsvangirai cannot see beyond his short African nose.

Instead, the party has been encouraging, nay, sponsoring sporadic and poor demonstrations by youths, which demonstrations have never made any impact, predictably.

You cannot be taken seriously by anybody, can you, when you demonstrate and have banners with messages like these: “SADC save us from Mugabe ISIS”, “Zanuphobia in Zimbabwe”, “Mugabe should go now SADC”, and “Bob is election rigging machine”.

These silly and nonsensical coinanges are the best Tsvangirai and his team could muster.

How pathetic!

Meanwhile, Tsvangirai has been seeking political capital out of boycotting by-elections which he was sure to lose, even though he precipitated the same by-elections by instigating the removal from Parliament members of the rival Renewal Team.

Anyone who follows Zimbabwean politics knows that Tsvangirai has next to zero strategy after the boycott.

Life will just go on after his moment in the sun of announcing the polls, which by the way justifies some travelling around the country and maybe replenish his pockets.

But let’s go back to the failed demonstration on Tuesday and how the media reported it.

One daily told us that “MDC-T ambush shames Mugabe”.

It is said, “MDC-T supporters yesterday besieged the venue of the ongoing Southern African Development Community (Sadc) summit in Harare, demanding President Robert Mugabe’s resignation.”

We are told that the “protests took the usually alert police by surprise” and was “brief”.

On the other hand, we are told, MDC-T spokesperson Obert Gutu said party leader Morgan Tsvangirai would embark on a “diplomatic offensive”.

Said Gutu: “Of course, the MDC is going to take advantage of the summit in Harare this week in order to push ahead with our diplomatic offensive. (MDC-T) President Morgan Tsvangirai will be paying courtesy calls on the visiting Heads of State and Government in order to fully explain to them the deteriorating political and economic situation in the country…He will be outlining the reasons why the MDC is calling on the Zimbabwe crisis to be placed on the Sadc agenda.”

This is what the whole opposition could muster: a handful of drunks sneaking to the summit venue and its leader embarking on an improbable and ill-fated diplomatic offensive.

To Sadc and all right thinking people, the Zimbabwe question ended with the July 2013 election which the regional body, which designed and oversaw the implementation of a roadmap, declared free and fair.

South African President Jacob Zuma, then the appointed the region’s mediator, washed his hands after the poll.

He had done his job.

The region had done its job.

For Tsvangirai to try to drag the body against its better understanding, and indeed, against its chairman, is not just naïve.

It is political madness.

There is nothing in this to “shame” President Mugabe, as his detractors would want the world to believe.

In fact, the ones who should be ashamed are the cheerleaders of a clueless guy like Morgan Tsvangirai who jumps from one blunder to another and whose leadership qualities are so glaring.

And spare a thought for poor Obert Gutu, an otherwise fine gentleman who has to daily mouth these silly things he does to be relevant in the political playground he does not have the gravitas to play in.

And spare a thought for the moribund Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), too.

This labour union, which is thoroughly discredited besides being redudant, was trying to gain some relevance by “appealing” “to the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) leaders meeting in Harare this week to quiz President Robert Mugabe over human rights abuses in the country.”

As the world approaches Workers Day, this is what the country’s “biggest” labour body has reduced itself to — a labour body that already cursed this nation with Tsvangirai.

Zimbabwe needs to move forward without being held back by losers like Morgan Tsvangirai who has not added any value to the political landscape of the country.

His lust for power, even through the back door, has not been matched by any demonstrable leadership capacity especially when it is clear that he cannot even run his ever-splintering party.

Harare needs to see tens of thousands of new homes built as soon as possible simply to satisfy existing demand by people already living and working in the city, let alone the new families that will arise as children reach adulthood and the continuing movement of rural people into the capital. So the news that the city council is finally examining building codes to see what can be done to make these houses more affordable is welcome. But the Model Building By-laws already in existence allow a great variety of building materials and technology, although not all are accepted within local plans. The by-laws can easily be amended to incorporate new technologies, since they set standards for each type of material to ensure structures are sound rather than prescribe materials.

The critical problem is a lack of imagination. For some reason a “real house” in Zimbabwe is regarded as a box built with industrial bricks under a heavy high-pitched roof designed to allow deep falls of snow to slide off. English suburban architecture of the early 20th century is not necessarily the obvious standard for anyone’s building preferences, let alone those of Zimbabweans.

What is worrying is the council not showing much imagination. We are told that they are considering allowing burnt farm bricks for internal walls. If this is the extent of their daring we are in trouble. The by-laws allow such bricks for entire structures, and lay down standards for burned-lime mortars rather than cement mixes. This is fortunate considering the growing number of buildings in Harare are more than 100-years-old that were built with hand-made bricks fixed with lime mortar.

Archaeologists are continually digging up “farm bricks” made and burned thousands of years ago, and still sound. There are buildings in Britain, almost 1 000-years-old, built of Roman bricks made 2 000 years ago.

These are not modern industrial products but hand-made “farm bricks”.

What is needed with hand-made bricks, as well as many other technologies both new and old, are simple and easy tests to ensure that the products meet set standards. These should be possible to devise and such standards, where they do not exist, need to be created by the Standards Association of Zimbabwe. In some cases there are standards, but fancy equipment is needed. What is wanted are simple tests that a buyer or building inspector can apply on site.

Packed earth walls are another old technology. There are adobe walls and buildings hundreds of years old in Spain and Mexico and still sound. Someone got the mix right. There is a tendency for people to go for all out on pure earth, although experiments show that modest additions of cement make a lot of difference.

It is here that practical standards and tests need to be in place.

Roofing is quite often a very expensive addition to a house. Yet in Zimbabwe we only have to cope with rain, so the roof has to be leakproof, the occasional storm, so it needs to be firmly fixed, and a very occasional hailstorm, so it has to be adequately pitched so the hailstones slide off. Many roofs are over-engineered and so over-priced for these simple needs.

It is this need to get back to basics. Solid walls, adequate roofs, decent windows and doors. And the whole thing to last a couple of centuries with modest maintenance. Different technologies can be developed for each need and it should be possible for a house owner and the builder to mix and match technologies, such as adobe walls with an aluminium roof.

The city council’s building experts need to consult widely and the civil engineering profession needs to think through the problems. We cannot see why existing technologies already developed in history and in modern times from around the world cannot be examined and adapted for Zimbabwean needs, and then clear standards, enforced through easy and cheap tests, are laid down.

Heads of State and Government and senior officials pose for a group photo at the Rainbow Towers after the Sadc meeting in Harare yesterday. — (Picture by John Manzongo)

COMMUNIQUÉ OF THE EXTRAORDINARY MEETING OF THE SADC SUMMIT OF HEADS OF STATE AND GOVERNMENT HARARE, ZIMBABWE APRIL 20151. An Extraordinary Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) was held in Harare, Republic of Zimbabwe on 29th April 2015 and considered the Sadc Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap as decided by the 34th Ordinary Summit held in August 2014 in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.

2.The Strategy and Roadmap operationalises the theme of the 34th Summit “Sadc Strategy for Economic Transformation: Leveraging the Region’s Diverse Resources for Sustainable, Economic and Social Development through Beneficiation and Value Addition.”

3. The Extraordinary Summit was attended by the following Heads of State and Government and/or their representatives.

Botswana: HE President Lt Gen Seretse Khama Ian Khama
Lesotho: Rt Hon Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili
Madagascar: HE President Hery Rajaonarimampianina
Mozambique: HE President Filipe Jacinto Nyusi
Namibia: HE President Dr Hage Geingob
South Africa: HE President Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma
Swaziland: HM King Mswati III
Zambia: HE President Edgar Lungu
Zimbabwe: HE President Robert Mugabe
United Republic of Tanzania: HE Vice President Mohamed Gharib Bilal
Angola: Hon George Rebelo Pinto Chikoti, Minister of External Relations
DRC: Hon Raymond Tshibanda N ‘Tungamulongo, Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Cooperation and Francophonie
Malawi: Hon Dr George T. Chaponda, MP Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation
Seychelles: Hon Vincent Meriton, Minister of Community Development
Mauritius: Ambasador Mrs Usha Dwarka-Canabady, Acting Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Sadc National Contact Point.

4. The Extraordinary Summit was also attended by Sadc Executive Secretary HE Dr Stergomena Lawrence Tax.

5. H.E Robert Gabriel Mugabe, President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Sadc Chairperson and host of the Extraordinary Summit welcomed the Sadc Heads of State and Government and other delegates to the Republic of Zimbabwe. Opening the Summit, President Mugabe applauded the collective resolve by Sadc to the industrialisation of the region. He underscored the critical importance of industrialisation of beneficiation and adding value to the abundant resources of the region in the quest for socio-economic development and poverty eradication among the people of the region.

6. Summit commended the people and governments of Six (6) Sadc Member States namely Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Mauritius, Zambia and Lesotho for holding peaceful, free, fair and credible elections.

7. Summit congratulated Their Excellencies, President Lt Gen Seretse Khama Ian Khama of Botswana, Rt Hon Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth of Mauritius, President Filipe Jacinto Nyusi of Mozambique, President Edgar Lungu of Zambia, President Dr Hage Geingob of Namibia and Rt Hon Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili of Lesotho for emerging victorious in the elections held in their respective countries.

8. Summit witnessed the handing over by the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, His Excellency Robert Gabriel Mugabe, of the Regional Peacekeeping Training Centre, a facility established in Zimbabwe to harmonise peacekeeping training in the Sadc region. In her acceptance speech, the Sadc Executive Secretary, Dr Stergomena Lawrence Tax, thanked the Republic of Zimbabwe for the generosity of donating the Centre to Sadc as it plays a pivotal role in the maintenance of peace, security and political stability in the region, which are prerequisites for development.

9. Summit approved the Sadc Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap and reaffirmed the importance of industrial development in poverty alleviation and the economic emancipation of the people of the region.

10. The Sadc Industrialisation Strategy is anchored on three pillars, namely Industrialisation, Competitiveness and Regional Integration, and premised on a three-phase long perspective covering 2015-2063. The Industrialisation Strategy is aligned to the Continental Vision, Agenda 2063, a global strategy aimed at optimising the use of Africa’s resources for the benefit of all Africans.

11. Summit underscored the critical importance of infrastructure in support of industrialisation and the need to explore appropriate funding mechanisms to support the implementation of the Industrialisation Strategy.

12. Summit directed the Secretariat to finalise the development of a costed Action Plan to facilitate the urgent implementation of the Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap.

13. Summit directed that the industrialisation strategy be accorded top priority in the implementation of the Revised RISDP (2015-2020.)

14. The Summit commended the Council of Ministers, the Ministerial Taskforce on Regional Economic Integration, the Experts and the Sadc Secretariat for an excellent job in finalising the Industrialisation Strategy in record time.

15. Summit approved the Revised Regional Indicative Strategy Development Plan (2015-2020) that will guide the implementation of Sadc programmes in the next five years, with four major priority areas, namely Industrial Development and Market Integration, Infrastructure in Support of Regional Integration, Peace and Security Co-operation as a prerequisite or regional integration and Special Programmes of regional dimension.

16. Summit noted progress on the Comesa-EAC-Sadc Tripartite initiative and the launch of the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) by the Tripartite summit, which is scheduled to take place in June 2015. In this regard, Summit noted the draft Declaration Launching Phase II Negotiations for the TFTA and endorsed the principles to guide Sadc in the finalisation of the Declaration.

17. Summit noted progress on the Tripartite Industrialisation Pillar and urged Sadc, Comesa and EAC to urgently finalise the Roadmap and programme of work on Industrialisation.

18. Summit also noted the state of preparedness for the launch of the negotiations for the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) and adopted a common Sadc position on industrialisation within the context of the CFTA negotiations.

19. Summit conveyed heartfelt condolences to the family, the people and Government of the United Republic of Tanzania, on the death of Brigadier General Ambassador Hashim Mbita (Rtd), former Secretary General of the then Organisation of African Unity Liberation Committee, during which he immensely contributed towards the liberation of the Sadc Region in particular, and Africa in general.

20. H.E President Jacob Zuma of the Republic of South Africa briefed Summit on the recent attacks against foreign citizens, including those from Sadc Member States that occurred in parts of Durban and Johannesburg communities of South Africa. While condemning the attacks, Summit commended the measures that the Government of South Africa has put in place and resolved to work together to deal with the situation and ensure it does not recur.

21. Summit received a Report on the progress made with the Madagascar National Reconciliation process. Madagascar expressed appreciation to Sadc international support in this process.

22.The Extraordinary Summit was officially closed by the Sadc chairperson H.E President Robert Gabriel Mugabe of the Republic of Zimbabwe.

Summit expressed its appreciation to the Government and people of Zimbabwe for hosting the Summit and for the warm hospitality extended to all the delegates.

Done at Harare, Zimbabwe

April 29 2015

Alfred Makwarimba
As workers in Zimbabwe we are celebrating this May Day against the backdrop of serious economic challenges which have impacted negatively on our workers, we are experiencing serious job losses due to company closures and workers are at times going for more than six months without pay but strangely are forced to report for duty everyday.

As ZFTU, we are aware of the negative impact caused by the illegal sanctions on our political leaders and companies by the West. The unwarranted sanctions are not affecting leaders but the Zimbabwean worker and ordinary person.

This is manifested by the scourge of non-performance in FDI sector and the unavailability of direct lines of credit.

This has resulted in the closure of companies and non-payment of wages.

As ZFTU we would like to urge the west in particular EU and USA to immediately lift unconditionally and unreservedly all the illegal sanctions that have caused so much suffering to our workers.

ZFTU is also fully cognisant of the fact that some of the remaining industries are controlled by unscrupulous individuals who are bent on profiteering through exploiting the workers hence a syndrome that goes by the saying “Mbudzi inodya payakasungirirwa”.

We all have witnessed how looting by management took place at such enterprises as Air Zimbabwe, ZBC, Zesa, Cotcco, PSMAS to mention just but a few.

As reflected by our theme this year which is: “Workers united, more informed as ready to embrace Zim Asset”, which translates to our workers taking charge and control of all industries, it is prerequisite in any country under the globe that “workers are the vanguard of the economy.”

This is further echoed by the teachings of Lenin that, “he who does not work neither shall he eat”.

The 21st century has come about with a new world order which speaks to a win-win situation in commerce, finance and social well-being.

We are now living in a society that is free from colonial bondage, free from imperialism and free from enslavement which was imposed on man by man.

We have a mammoth task ahead of us as a mother body to fight against the now-emerging predatory capitalists who are now trying to smuggle in through the back door, shameless efforts of repealing our labour laws to suit their cheap labour and slavery machinations hence the call for (EPZ) Export Processing Zones.

As ZFTU we are urging the Government through the Ministry of Labour to immediately resume the TNF where all issues will be dealt within the context of a Zimbabwean solution.

The panacea to all our economic misfortunes in our view can only be addressed through the TNF engagement.

As ZFTU we urge the Head of State and Government to take stock of his cabinet ministers in areas of performance and delivery towards the realisation of the Zim Asset programme.

We encourage the President to put to test his ministers in critical ministries to produce results that are short-term based and long term based. It is our wish to engage at full throttle with all the key ministries for us workers to input into the Zim Asset economic blue print as a stakeholder.

Lastly, ZFTU would like to register our appreciation to President Mugabe for his concern for the welfare of workers particularly when he recently dismissed the unwarranted and unresearched declaratory statement on civil servants bonus and allowances by one of his ministers.

ZFTU is urging all the NECs that sit with our affiliates to immediately complete all their negotiations on wages and salaries and we are agitating for a minimum benchmark of US$300 inclusive across all sectors of the economy as a yardstick.

Alfred Makwarimba is President, Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions.