Bad roads in rural Zimbabwe mean the community have to rely on donkey carts and jalopy cars as bus operators are not prepared to travel there. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
MWENEZI, Zimbabwe, Mar 15 2023 (IPS)

From the Masvingo-Beitbridge highway in Zimbabwe at a spot popularly known as Turn-P, the road passing through Neshuro Township has been degraded, disused, and derelict for over two decades, with buses avoiding the route. Now donkey-drawn carts that operate alongside jalopy vehicles have become the new alternative for remote travellers around Mwenezi villages.

The scotch carts have become even more common in areas around Maranda and Mazetese in Mwenezi as villagers switch to them for transport to hospitals and clinics.

Such has become a life for 64-year-old Dennis Masukume of the Mazetese area.

The diabetic patient is forced to use alternative means of transport.

“I board a scotch cart every time I want to travel to Neshuro hospital for my medication, which means I use the scotch cart up to somewhere in Gwamatenga where I then get some private cars that ply the route to Neshuro at nominal fares,” Masukume told IPS.

At Tsungirirai Secondary school and Vinga Primary school in the Mwenezi district, the rare availability of public transport means that even teachers have to cope with scotch carts each time they have to travel to Maranda, where they catch jalopies to the Masvingo-Beitbridge highway on paydays.

In fact, with road infrastructure badly damaged in most rural areas in Zimbabwe, villagers are resorting to olden ways of transport-using scotch carts and walking to reach places where they can access essential services like health care.

The unpaved rural roads have become impassable for buses.

Now, some villagers are capitalizing on the crisis, using their scotch carts to earn a living.

Mwenezi district, located in Masvingo Province, south of the country, has become famed for routes plied by scotch carts.

Entrepreneurs have turned to making easy money from scotch carts. Twenty-four-year-old Clive Nhongo, who resides closer to Manyuchi dam in Mwenezi, said the bad roads had meant good business for him.

“I’m charging a dollar per passenger every trip I make with my scotch cart taking people anywhere around my area, and I can tell you I make about 20 USD daily depending on the number of customers I get, considering that villagers rarely travel here,” Nhongo told IPS.

While many villagers fume at the damaged roads and lack of a proper modern transport system, many, like Nhongo, have something to smile about.

“I provide the alternative transport, and until roads are rehabilitated and buses return on our routes, I might remain in business, which is fine for me,” said Nhongo.

He (Nhongo) has made wooden seats and installed them on his scotch cart to accommodate passengers.

More and more villagers, cornered with transport woes amid derelict roads in villages, are now having to rely on donkey-drawn scotch carts owned by village entrepreneurs like Nhongo.

Public transport operators like 56-year-old Obed Mhishi, based in Masvingo, Zimbabwe’s oldest town, said there was no way he could endure damaging his omnibuses plying routes with defunct roads.

Donkey-drawn carts have taken over.

“It’s not only me shunning the routes the ones in Mwenezi and its villages, but we are many transport operators shunning the routes owing to deplorable roads, and yes, scotch cart operators are capitalizing on that to fill the vacuum. That’s business,” Mhishi told IPS.

Yet even as scotch carts operators cash in on the growing crisis in the Southern African country, local authorities have said donkey-drawn scotch carts have never been regularized to ferry people anywhere in Zimbabwe.

An official working at Mwenezi Rural District Council, who said he was not authorized to speak to the media, said, “scotch carts don’t pay road tax, nor do they have insurance for passengers.”

But for ordinary Zimbabwean villagers in Mwenezi, like 31-year-old Richmore Ndlovhu, with dilapidated roads that have been neglected for years, the scotch carts have become the only way—insurance or not.

Buses that used to reach areas like Mazetese now prefer not to go beyond the Masvingo-Beitbridge highway, where scotch carts and a few jalopy vehicles scramble for passengers alighting from buses. These are the passengers wanting to proceed with their journeys into villages.

Zimbabwe’s rural roads in districts like Mwenezi have remained unpaved for more than four decades after gaining independence from colonial rule.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwean President Emerson Mnangagwa has been on record affirming that his country would become a middle-income state by 2030, just about seven years from now.

Yet for opposition political activists here, like Elvis Mugari of the Citizens Coalition for Change, Mnangagwa may be building castles in the air.

“With corruption in his government and the sustained hatred for the opposition, Mnangagwa won’t achieve a middle-income Zimbabwe. That is impossible,” Mugari told IPS.

Batai Chiwawa, a Zimbabwean development expert, blamed the regime here for taking the whole country backwards.

“Is it not taking the country to the stone age era when villagers now have to use scotch carts as ambulances? Is it not a return to the dark ages when people now have to walk long distances because there is no public transport in their villages? This is embarrassing, deeply embarrassing, when people start using scotch carts as public transport in this day and era,” Chiwawa asked when commenting to IPS.

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Zimbabwe is losing 262 000 hectares of forests destroyed every year. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Feb 28 2023 (IPS)

In New Ashdon Park, a medium-density area in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, at new homes that have replaced a once thriving forest, makeshift fireplaces have become common sights as residents solely depend on firewood for energy.

City dwellers like 34-year-old Neliet Mbariro, a married mother of four, live in a house that has not yet been connected to electricity.

Like many of her neighbors, Mbariro has had to depend on cutting down some trees just across an unpaved road near her home.

“We cut the few remaining trees you see here so we can make fire for cooking every day. We can’t do anything about it because we have no electricity in this area,” Mbariro told IPS.

Hundreds of trees that used to define Mbariro’s area, where homes have fast emerged, have disappeared over the past two years since construction began.

As building structures rise, vast acres of natural forests are falling as construction of dwellings and indigenous industrial facilities gather pace in Zimbabwe.

Arnold Shumba (32), a builder operating in New Ashdon Park, said with his team working in the area, they have had to do away with hundreds of trees to build homes for their clients.

“I remember there were plenty of trees; in fact, there was a huge forest area here, but those trees are no more now because as we worked, we cut them down. You only see houses now,” Shumba told IPS.

According to environmentalists, the impact of deforestation is problematic.

“Very soon, towns and cities will have no more trees left as buildings take their place,” Marylin Mahamba, an independent environmental activist in Harare, told IPS.

For instance, as Mahamba notes, Harare is no longer the same, with scores of open urban spaces taken over for construction and trees uprooted.

Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, is even worse, with Mahamba claiming the city has been pummeled by deforestation left, right, and center as more residential areas rise.

Yet it is not only the rise of more buildings across towns and cities here that has led to deforestation but electricity deficits, according to climate change experts.

“The Zimbabwe Power Company is also to blame for failing to provide enough electricity. Gas is expensive, and many people can’t afford it. They opt for firewood because it is cheaper, and that’s why more urban trees are now vanishing,” Kudakwashe Makanda, a climate change expert based in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

But Makanda also pinned the blame for urban deforestation on rural-to-urban migration.

“There is now excessive expansion of towns in Zimbabwe. Obviously, this does not spare the forests. By nature, people would want to settle in urban areas, and by virtue of people wanting to settle in towns, people cut down trees establishing homes,” said Makanda.

Makanda also blamed local authorities for fueling urban deforestation, saying, “the town councils are to blame. They allow people to occupy land not suitable for occupation resulting in trees being felled.”

With joblessness affecting as many as 90 percent of Zimbabwe’s population, according to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Makanda said in towns and cities, many have switched to firewood for livelihood.

“People are making a livelihood out of firewood, meaning more trees are disappearing in towns as dealers sell firewood which has become a source of income for many who are not formally employed,” said Makanda.

But for areas like New Ashdon Park with no electricity and with many residents like Mbariro having to depend on firewood while other areas contend with regular power outages, Makanda also said, “power cuts are causing deforestation in towns, especially in areas with no power connection, people rely on firewood.”

Yet stung by joblessness, Makanda said urban dwellers are clearing unoccupied pieces of land to farm in towns and cities, but at the cost of the trees that must be removed.

To fix the growing menace of urban deforestation in Zimbabwe, climate change experts like Makanda have said, “there is a need for incentivizing alternative power sources like solar so that they become affordable in order to save the remaining urban forests.”

Denis Munangatire, an environmentalist with a degree in environmental studies from the Midlands State University, claimed 4000 trees are getting destroyed annually across Zimbabwe’s towns and cities.

According to this country’s Forestry commission, these are among the 262 000 hectares of forests destroyed every year in Zimbabwe.

Like Makanda, Munangatire heaped the blame on local authorities in towns and cities for fueling deforestation.

“Urban councils are responsible for the disappearance of trees in towns and cities because they are leaving land developers wiping out forests, leaving few or no trees standing in areas they develop,” Munangatire told IPS.

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Forty-year-old Admire Gumbo has invested in cattle back home in Zimbabwe's rural Mwenezi district. The picture shows Gumbo's cattle in Mwenezi. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS.

By Jeffrey Moyo
MBERENGWA, Nov 25 2022 (IPS)

In 2007 as inflation walloped the Zimbabwean currency, rendering it valueless, then 54-year-old Langton Musaigwa of Mataruse village west of Zimbabwe in Mberengwa district switched to cattle as his currency.

He wasn’t alone; scores of other villagers in his locality followed suit.

In no time, cattle became a new currency as the Zimbabwean dollar went down the drain, pounded by inflation.

“We had no choice. It appeared cattle was the only money we could stare at and not the real Zimbabwean bank notes, which were now losing value every day as prices skyrocketed,” Musaigwa told IPS.

Many villagers like Musaigwa, pummeled by inflation then, found the panacea in their livestock like cattle.

The cattle, said Musaigwa, could be traded by villagers for any valuable goods or services.

One such villager whose life was saved by her cattle is 67-year-old Neliswa Mupepeti hailing from the same village as Musaigwa.

“I fell sick very seriously and was no longer able to walk on my own. I had to use one of my cows to pay a local school headmaster to transport me using his car to Zvishavane to get medical treatment in 2008,” she (Mupepeti) told IPS.

Then, Zimbabwe’s inflation peaked at 231 percent.

Zvishavane is a Zimbabwean mining town located in the country’s Midlands Province, south of the country.

Fourteen years later, inflation has resurfaced in the southern African country, and cattle have again turned into a currency as people evade the worthless local currency.

But from 2009 to 2013, during the country’s unity government that followed the disputed 2008 elections, Zimbabwe enjoyed some currency stability because authorities allowed the use of the USD and many other regional currencies.

Many Mberengwa villagers, like Musaigwa and Mupepeti, had been visited by inflation before, and they know the survival tricks.

“We have just had to return to using cattle as our money. I can tell you I have recently managed to buy a cart and a bicycle using just one cow here because villagers can’t accept the local currency. Many don’t have the popular USD, and cattle have become the readily available currency,” said Musaigwa.

Zimbabwe’s inflation currently stands out at 269 percent, according to the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, with the local currency ever falling against international currencies like the USD.

As cattle turn into currency, just a single cow in Zimbabwe ordinarily costs about 400 US dollars.

In order to store the value of their worth, many Zimbabweans who can at least access US dollars, like Mwenezi district’s 67-year-old Tinago Muchahwikwa, whose children working abroad send him money for personal upkeep, have had to buy more cattle.

“Money, either USD or any other currency – tends to lose value at any time, but cattle, for as long as they are well-fed and regularly treated for any diseases, remain with their value, and one can trade them off when a need arises,” Muchahwikwa told IPS.

For Muchahwikwa, cattle are the currency he can rather trust than any money, worse the Zimbabwean dollar, he said.

Even for 40-year-old Admire Gumbo, a Zimbabwean based in Cape Town in South Africa, investment in cattle has become the way to go back in his village home in Mwenezi as Zimbabwe contends with an inflation-ravaged currency.

“Back home, the money I send is buying cattle because when I settle back home, I don’t want to suffer. As my herd of cattle increases, that also means the increase of my own worth in terms of money,” Gumbo told IPS.

A worker at a grape farm in Cape Town, Gumbo bragged about owning a herd of 15 cows that he had bought back home.

As many like Gumbo surmount inflation in Zimbabwe using cattle, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), has been on record saying livestock accounts for 35 percent to 38 percent of this Southern African country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Faced with a collapsing Zimbabwean dollar, cattle seem to have become a more stable currency than the local currency for many, like Gumbo.

“I have made sure my mother buys cattle for me and not keep the money when I send cash to her because of the risks faced by the local currency back home, which has kept losing value, meaning even if one changes money from Rands to Zimbabwean dollars, it won’t make any sense as the manipulated exchange rate there would still mean one remains with nothing meaningful,” said Gumbo.

For agricultural experts, with inflation ravaging Zimbabwe’s currency, cattle have become the alternative currency.

“Inflation has meant that many people now abhor the local currency and rather prefer foreign currencies like the USD, but many have no access to the USD, and cattle have become the readily available currency,” Steven Nyagonda, a retired agricultural extension officer in rural Mwenezi, told IPS.

To Nyagonda, as long as cattle are well-fed, it means they gain more weight and, therefore, more value if one wants to trade them off.

Pummeled by inflation here, even urban dwellers like 51-year-old Kaitano Muzungu are having to hoard things like solar panels, which they trade off with cattle in the villages while they shun the worthless local currency.

“When I get the cattle on trading off my solar panels in the villages, I feed the cattle in order to increase their weight so that I sell them to butcheries in the city in Harare in USD to business people here, save the profits and keep ordering solar panels to keep trading in the villages where I get cattle currency,” Muzungu told IPS.

With cattle currency gaining traction across Zimbabwe, entrepreneurial Zimbabweans have formed cattle banks, where investment in cattle has become a sensation.

According to Ted Edwards, who is the chief executive officer of Silverback Asset Managers, one emerging cattle bank in Zimbabwe, they have established a unit trust investment vehicle where Zimbabweans can invest in cattle using the local currency.

In this model, when a cow produces offspring, the value of that calf is added to the client’s portfolio, meaning a rise in worth for a particular cattle investor.

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Artisanal miners are cutting down trees to process gold and climate change experts are concerned about the forests. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
MAZOWE, Zimbabwe, Oct 29 2022 (IPS)

With homemade tents scattered about, hordes of artisanal gold miners throng parts of Mazowe village in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland Central Province, where they have cut down thousands of trees to process gold ore.

Patrick Makwati (29), working alongside his 23-year-old cousin, Sybeth Mwendauya, are some of the miners who mine without a permit that have descended on Mazowe village, cutting down trees for processing gold.

The two cousins said they are using the trees to process the gold that they mine as they claim that they could not afford coal which could have been an alternative for them.

Illegal gold miners, like Makwati and Mwendauya, claim to only use wood when processing gold.

Yet, while the cousins camp in the bushes of rural Mazowe and cook their meals, they have also switched to woodfire.

“We depend on the trees we cut because we can’t afford coal while we also don’t have access to electricity,” Makwati told IPS.

In Zimbabwe, a tonne of coal costs 30 US dollars before transport costs are factored in, which illegal gold miners like Makwati and Mwendauya cannot afford.

The two cousins, like many other illegal gold miners, solely depend on woodfire to heat up the gold ore.

In areas like Mazowe, forests have already fallen, thanks to the gold miners, and now the areas look like a mini deserts.

Forestry officials from the Zimbabwean government lament the constant loss of forests every year.

According to the Forestry Commission here, this country loses 262,000 hectares of trees every year for different reasons.

Illegal gold miners have been factored in as one of these.

Thirty percent of the forest is lost to illegal mining, says environmental activist, Monalisa Mafambirei, based in the Zimbabwean capital Harare.

“You speak of Mazowe as a case study, but, of course, this is not the only area losing trees to illegal gold miners. In fact, this problem facing our forests is widespread as gold miners are all over the country where gold is mined, and trees have continued to be the casualties as gold miners cut them down rather carelessly either for use when processing the gold ore or as they clear the land upon which they mine,” a government climate change officer here who said she was not authorized to give media interviews, told IPS.

Even environmental campaigners in this southern African country, like Gibson Mawere, heaped the blame on the artisanal gold miners for fanning deforestation in the country.

“Illegal gold miners are unregulated, and they cut down trees, clearing areas on which they mine for gold, and also they use firewood to then process the gold ore because you should remember that these miners have no access to electricity nor coal to use in place of firewood,” Mawere told IPS.

As the blame game plays out, it may be years before a solution is found to stem the deforestation fanned by illegal gold miners in Zimbabwe.

For the artisanal gold miners, the answer lies in formal employment.

Without that, they say, forests may have to continue to suffer.

Gold miners like Makwati and his cousin place the blame on the country’s struggling economy.

“If we don’t cut the trees, we will have no money at the end of the day. We use fire from the trees we cut to process the gold ore before we sell pure gold. With formal jobs, we wouldn’t be harming the environment nor destroying trees,” Makwati told IPS.

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Edious Murewa, resettled farmer, is on his farm where his barns are empty and have been for years. Experts blame climate change and a lack of farming know-how for the resettled farmers’ woes. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
MWENEZI, Zimbabwe, Oct 17 2022 (IPS)

Edious Murewa has for years boasted of owning a 10-hectare piece of land, but now the 52-year-old is full of regrets. He faces poverty years after he invaded part of a farm once owned by a white commercial farmer.

He (Murewa) was 30 years old when he abandoned his ancestral home in the Mazetese area in the Mwenezi district, in Zimbabwe’s Masvingo province and headed west to get his own piece of land at the height of this country’s chaotic land seizures from white commercial farmers.

Even as Murewa and several other resettled farmers in Mwenezi are beneficiaries of this country’s agricultural inputs like fertilizer and maize seeds, for years, they have had no success in farming on the seized pieces of land as they get next to zero yields each harvest season.

For Murewa, together with his family – his wife and five children that never finished school because they were required to toil on their 10-hectare piece of land, poverty has turned into their daily foe.

“When I was still at my old home before abandoning it to come here, life was better. I used to send my children to school from the crop yields I was getting each harvest season, but that is no more now as our crops fail now and then,” Murewa told IPS.

Now, alongside several other resettled farmers in the drought-prone Zimbabwean district, Murewa has become a habitual charity case.

He and his family depend on donor food handouts and maize meal donations from the Zimbabwean government.

Murewa says the country’s governing party, the Zimbabwe Africa National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), has for many years stepped in to rescue him and his family as drought impacts their farm.

As a result, fearing losing his piece of land, Murewa has to pay back the ruling party with his vote at each election.

“I vote for Zanu-PF every election because it’s Zanu-PF that feeds me; it’s Zanu-PF that has given me land,” said Murewa.

So, decades after seizing land from white farmers, many of Zimbabwe’s resettled farmers like Murewa are having to contend with gruelling poverty, with some of them dwelling in slums on the farms they invaded.

Some, like 56-year-old Nyson Dewa, a resettled farmer at a farm outside Bindura in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland Central Province, have given up on farming.

As others benefitted from farm inputs from the government, Dewa claimed he had always been left out, which has led to him failing as a resettled farmer.

For him, just like Murewa in Masvingo, life was better before he decided to join the wave of land invasions here.

“I’m now poorer than before,” Dewa told IPS.

He (Dewa) pinned the blame for his agricultural failures on his support for the country’s number one opposition, the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC), which has resulted in him being denied access to farming inputs from government.

Poverty has not spared him, and his cry for help has often fallen on deaf ears.

In 2000, the late former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe turned the country’s agricultural sector upside down with his extremely contentious fast-track land reform program, parceling land to farmers like Dewa and Murewa.

Then, over seven million hectares (17.3 million acres) of land were redistributed to the country’s now poor resettled farmers like Dewa and Murewa.

For the late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, parceling out land to his black citizens was compensation for colonialism. About 4,500 white farmers were dispossessed, often violently, resulting in one million black Zimbabweans being resettled on the seized white-owned farms.

Yet, that for many has not made their lives any better.

Climate change experts like Happison Chikova blame growing climate change impacts for the continued failure of many of this country’s resettled farmers.

“Unpredictable weather patterns owing to climate change have worsened the poverty situation of the resettled farmers who have limited understanding of the changing climate,” Chikova told IPS.

Instead, resettled farmers like Murewa pounded left, desperately consult self-styled prophets for weather forecasts.

But these have not helped, misleading the poor farmers each farming season.

Even traditional healers like 88-year-old Kumbirai Chikwaka, who claim to conduct rain-making ceremonies around Masvingo, have not made the situation any better for resettled farmers.

“These traditional healers rob us of our little resources claiming to perform rituals to bring the rains, but we still rarely have any rain. It’s like the white farmers took the rains away with them,” said Murewa.

Agricultural experts blame a lack of technical skills for resettled farmers’ failure on the land they seized from white farmers.

“The resettled farmers suffer because they allocated themselves large farms without technical know-how in terms of serious farming, and that’s why most of them are now very poor,” Denzel Makarudze, an agricultural extension officer in Masvingo, Zimbabwe’s oldest town, told IPS.

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HelpAge Zimbabwe director Priscilla Gavi is concerned about the elder abuse in Zimbabwe, especially as many are reliant on their families for support. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Sep 28 2022 (IPS)

At his house in Mabvuku, a high-density suburb in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, 86-year-old Tinago Murape claims his grandchildren starve him.

Not only that, but Murape, who now walks with the support of a walking stick, said his three grandchildren – grown-up men with their wives and children living in his house, accuse him of bewitching them.

Murape’s wife, Sekai, born in 1941, died two years ago after she contracted COVID-19.

All of his three children, two sons and a daughter, succumbed to AIDS decades ago, Murape told IPS without beating about the bush as he tapped on the ground with his walking stick.

Faced with joblessness and leading lives as domestic part-time workers in the affluent suburbs of Harare, his grandchildren strongly believe their grandfather cast spells on them, resulting in them failing to get formal jobs even though they are educated.

Now the grandsons, and their wives, have reportedly slapped Murape with sanctions – denying him food as a way of punishing him for causing their economic misery, according to him.

The grandchildren have vehemently denied the accusations.

“That’s not true. It’s old age pushing him to think like that,” one of the grandchildren told IPS.

Yet, for Murape, the abuse has gone on for years as he claims well-wishers and neighbours have often fed and clothed him.

The three grandsons, 27-year-old Richard, 29-year-old Benito and 32-year-old Tamai Murape, have never been formally employed after they completed their technical courses at Harare Polytechnic College.

According to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, 90 percent of Zimbabweans are unemployed.

Murape’s grandsons are part of the country’s unemployed, although they blame witchcraft, which they pin on their aged grandfather, for their joblessness.

Director for HelpAge Zimbabwe, Priscilla Gavi, said: “Older people are wrongly accused of practising witchcraft, which sees them blamed for deaths, drought, floods, disease and other calamities.”

In some instances, said Gavi, older persons are set upon by community members with beatings that may be fatal or leave them with disabilities or are burnt in their houses.

But Murape has said he has learnt to make do with the abuse.

“Sometimes they shut me out of my own house on top of denying me food, knowing I have no source of income and well-wishers have become my saviours every day,” Murape told IPS.

In fact, with many aged Zimbabwean citizens like Murape putting up with abuse, the abuse of the country’s senior citizens has turned into a growing trend.

In 2021 alone, police in Zimbabwe claimed they handled 900 cases countrywide related to the abuse of aged persons.

Like Murape, many aged persons in Zimbabwe taken care of by relatives claim they have become victims of physical and emotional abuse, with some claiming even to have been sexually abused.

Aged rape victims are many, like 76-year-old Agness Murambiwa in Harare, who claimed her 22-year-old grandson raped her before he fled to neighbouring South Africa earlier this year.

Gavi said aged persons are not spared from sexual abuse.

“Cases of rape of older women by much younger men are increasing in parts of Zimbabwe. In some instances, these arise from the mistaken notion that having sex with an older woman can cure one of terminal illnesses,” Gavi told IPS.

But the wounds remain for Zimbabwe’s aged rape victims like Murambiwa.

“Earlier this year, Themba, my grandson, attacked me while I slept in my bedroom, threatened to kill me if I made any noise before he raped me. It pains me that my own blood did this to me,” Murambiwa told IPS.

Murambiwa is taken care of by her two daughters, both of whom divorced their husbands and one of whom is Themba’s mother.

The daughters are also strained taking care of their aged mother.

“It’s not easy looking after an aged parent. We have limited resources, and she always complains that we are not doing enough, yet none of us is employed. We are vendors living from hand to mouth,” 52-year-old Letiwe, one of Murambiwa’s daughters, told IPS.

But many aged Zimbabweans like Murape and Murambiwa said they could not fight off their abusers because they were in desperate need of care.

With limited resources to support its senior citizens, Zimbabwe has no social grants for the aged.

This means aged persons like Murape and Murambiwa are on their own as they bear the brunt of abuse in the twilight of their lives.

Yet the Constitution of Zimbabwe protects the elderly, defined in Section 82 of the Constitution as people over 70.

Many of Zimbabwe’s aged citizens have no money after the 2008 hyperinflation eroded their savings.

This time, a new round of inflation has not helped the country’s growing number of abused aged persons who depend on their relatives.

Inflation currently hovers above 257 percent in Zimbabwe, with food prices skyrocketing, meaning the lives of aged persons such as Murape could even worsen.

Other than inflation, for aged men – widowers that have remarried, according to HelpAge’s Gavi, abuse could be even worse.

“Some older men have also faced abuse from their younger wives who mistreat their spouses wantonly, leading to some of these men finding themselves on the streets,” said Gavi.

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Nesbit Gavanga, who mines sand illegally and sells it to builders, says he has few other economic options in Zimbabwe. Environmentalists, however, are concerned about land degradation. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
CHITUNGWIZA, Zimbabwe, Sep 7 2022 (IPS)

In Chitungwiza, right next to the highway, 36-year-old Nesbit Gavanga and his five colleagues use shovels as they load trucks with sand.

The six apparently are in the business of sand-poaching and openly explain that every other day they engage in running battles with environmental officials who seek to curtail land degradation here. The group’s informal sand quarry lies 25 kilometers southeast of the Zimbabwean capital Harare.

For Gavanga and his colleagues, sand-poaching has been a source of income for years as the gang has never been formally employed.

Gavanga, with the others, invaded a patch of land in Chitungwiza to begin mining sand about eight years ago.

“This patch of land has given us money over the years, and we can’t afford to leave it. We are here to stay, and we are here to turn the sand into money,” Gavanga told IPS.

Gavanga is unfazed by the severity of damage he and his colleagues have unleashed on the giant swathes of land they have invaded in Chitungwiza.

What they care about is money, and Gavanga, with his colleagues, has managed to establish a huge customer base over the years.

“We just bring our picks and shovels here, and customers come with their trucks, and we fill the trucks with the sand we sell. Yes, this isn’t our land, but we have to survive from it even though (the authorities say) we are not allowed to mine,” 34-year-old Melford Mahamba, one of Gavanga’s colleagues, told IPS.

Gavanga claimed they make at least 30 to 40 US dollars daily from the enterprise.

But that is bad news for the environment.

Sand poachers have wrought huge scars on land across Zimbabwe as they harvest the river sand. These poachers leave uncovered pits.

Their customers are desperate individuals building urban homes.

According to the Environmental Management Agency (EMA), Zimbabwe’s statutory body responsible for ensuring the sustainable management of natural resources and protection of the environment, approximately 1694 hectares of land are affected by sand-poaching in the country, with Harare contributing to over 850 hectares of the statistics.

EMA has not been successful in stopping the sand poachers.

“Authorities chase us away from the places we mine for sand, but we always return in no time, even as they arrest us at times. We just bribe the officials and continue with the business,” Mahamba said.

Environmentalists like Happison Chikova, based in Harare, blamed Zimbabwe’s poor economy for the land degradation unleashed by sand poachers.

“These people have no jobs. They think by digging up sand soils for sale, believing they may break free from bankruptcy and poverty, but alas. They only make the environment suffer as they get very little money that hardly changes their lives,” Chikova told IPS.

But for the sand poachers like Mahamba, the profits are significant.

“The profits are huge since sand sells for 6 to 8 US dollars a cubic meter. We sell to clients using their own transport,” said Mahamba.

The sand poachers, in fact, incur very few costs, and the only costs they have to shoulder are the bribes given to council police.

Council authorities, for instance, in Chitungwiza, even though they conduct regular raids on sand poachers, are not fully capacitated.

“We conduct raids on sand poachers, but we don’t do that always due to insufficient resources, and so the sand poachers always go back to their illegal activities. It is like a cat-and-mouse game,” said Lovemore Meya, the Chitungwiza Municipality public relations officer.

For environmentalists like Chikova, sand poachers “damage vegetation while they dig out wide and deep pits which subsequently get flooded each rain season.”

Amid growing sand poaching in Zimbabwe, environmental lawyers insinuate that the practice contributes to climate change.

“Sand poaching increases Zimbabwe’s vulnerability to flooding in areas receiving high rainfall, with the practice of sand poaching also threatening wetlands, but sand poaching also affects water availability downstream, which then affects water use for climate adaptation purposes,” Ray Ncube, an environmental lawyer in private practice, told IPS.

EMA statistics have shown that as of December 2019, 9.5 million square meters of land across Zimbabwe had degraded due to illegal sand poaching.

As vast swathes of land fall to degradation, environmental activists like Kudakwashe Murisi in Masvingo, Zimbabwe’s oldest town, has blamed the country’s polarized politics for enabling sand poachers to do so as they please with the environment.

“Sand poachers are often youths with links to the ruling Zanu-PF party, obviously shielded by their political leadership, making it difficult for anyone to call them to order when they start digging up everywhere for sand soil,” Murisi told IPS.

In power for 42 years, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) is this Southern African nation’s governing political party.

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Rising inflation and the Ukraine war has added to the woes of Zimbabweans, where even the middle class struggle to buy a loaf of bread. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
Harare, Aug 19 2022 (IPS)

With inflation at 256.9 percent, 49-year-old Dambudzo Chauruka can no longer afford to buy bread despite working as a civil servant in Zimbabwe.

A father of six school-going children, Chauruka earns 126 000 Zimbabwean dollars monthly, the equivalent of 157 US dollars (USD).

Bread now costs 1,30 USD in Zimbabwe, up from 0,90 cents five years ago when former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was toppled from power in a military coup.

Not only that, but the cost of a kilogram of choice beef has risen to 9 USD, while five kilograms of chicken drumsticks now cost 21,000 Zimbabwean dollars, about 22 USD.

“I can’t afford bread every day. If I spend money buying bread every day, I will run out of money to pay rent and buy groceries for my family,” Chauruka told IPS.

In May 2022, the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe said a family of five required 120 000 Zimbabwean dollars a month in local currency to survive, about 300 USD. Still, it could be much higher this time amid ever-rising inflation.

Amidst galloping inflation, petrol price in Zimbabwe has fluctuated, a major determinant in the pricing of basic goods and services here.

From 1.77 USD per liter recently, petrol now costs about 1.60 USD even as it was pegged at 1.41 USD in January before war broke out in Ukraine following the invasion of the East European nation by Russia.

Zimbabwe’s inflation shot from 96 percent to 132 percent in May, with food inflation alone climbing from 104 percent to 155 percent. The country’s monthly inflation spiked from 15.5 percent in April to 21 percent in May.

As a result, for many underpaid working Zimbabweans like Chauruka, starvation has pounced as they grapple with the country’s galloping inflation and subsequent poverty in the towns and cities where they live.

Chauruka and his family are residents of Kuwadzana high-density suburb in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare.

Now with the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war slowing down food exports to many developing countries like Zimbabwe, many urban dwellers like Chauruka and his family have had to contend with starvation amid rising food prices.

Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, according to the Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe (GMAZ), wheat prices have surged from 475 USD to 675 USD per tonne.

As a result, bread for many urban dwellers known for years to afford it has suddenly turned into a luxury.

But come July 22, Russian and Ukrainian officials signed a deal to allow grain exports from Ukrainian Black Sea ports.

Key witnesses to the agreement, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said the agreement would help ease a global food crisis.

For urban Zimbabweans who have to party with their hard-earned money to put every morsel of food on their tables, the agreement would import smiles as well.

One Zimbabwean, relieved at the news, is 57-year-old Nyson Mutumwa, a senior government employee.

“Now, I’m optimistic the Russia-Ukraine deal to unblock food passages to countries wanting food imports would relieve many nations of food shortages and cause a fall in food prices,” Mutumwa told IPS.

Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s biggest food exporters, especially wheat, to developing countries like Zimbabwe.

Yet Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year led to a de-facto blockade of the Black Sea, resulting in Ukraine’s grain exports sharply dropping.

With the new agreement between the warring countries, even retail shop owners in Harare, like 48-year-old Jonathan Gunda in Mbare, the oldest township in Harare, are in high spirits.

“I had suspended the selling of bread and buns. In fact, I had canceled selling off all wheat products, but with the new agreement between Russia and Ukraine, this may mean I will be back in business,” Gunda told IPS.

Yet amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war blamed for causing food shortages and stoking inflation, World Food Program Southern Africa Director Menghestab Haile, in May this year, urged Zimbabwe and surrounding countries to increase food production.

“SADC region has water, has land, has clever people, so we are able to produce in this region. Let’s diversify and let’s produce for ourselves,” WFP’s Haile said then.

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Pictured at her home in Harare, 91-year-old Idah Hanyani, better known as Gogo Chihara, a staunch opposition supporter in Zimbabwe, dons a yellow T-shirt adorned with the portrait of the country’s top opposition leader Nelson Chamisa whom she has vowed to back as she fights for political change in this Southern African nation. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS.

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 4 2022 (IPS)

Idah Hanyani, popularly known as Gogo Chihera, has backed the opposition since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980.

Born in Wedza, a district in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland East province, the 91-year-old first supported United African National Council (UANC).

At home in Glenview, Harare’s high-density suburb, Hanyani told IPS she has featured at opposition rallies for years. During her interview, she was reclining on her brownish leather sofa donated to her by the opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) president Nelson Chamisa.

She said she has never missed a single major opposition rally since she waded into opposition politics following this Southern African nation’s independence four decades ago.

“I’m not new to opposition politics. I supported the opposition UANC led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa before he (Muzorewa) handed me to Morgan Tsvangirai when the MDC was formed in 1999. Muzorewa announced that a new political party had been formed before he personally handed me to Tsvangirai to back his party at its formation, which I have supported until Tsvangirai died in 2018,” Hanyani told IPS.

A mother of four, three of whom have died, Hanyani said she has eleven grandchildren. The country’s economic crisis has not spared her family, so they cannot support her.

“This is why I have told them to register to vote in the coming 2023 elections, and most of them have heeded my advice,” said Hanyani.

Hanyani said only Olga, one of her grandchildren based in the United Kingdom, is supporting her.

Her husband died in 2004.

Hanyani said she has become popular all over the country, featuring at opposition CCC rallies, backing the opposition through thick and thin as one of the country’s senior citizens who have thirsted for political change in the face of Zimbabwe’s deteriorating economy.

On February 20 this year, she (Hanyani) was part of a sea of supporters that thronged Zimbabwe Grounds in Highfields poor income suburb where her party, CCC had a rally addressed by the party’s leader Nelson Chamisa ahead of the March 26 by-elections.

In March this year, Gogo Chihera was also featured at the CCC rally in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city.

“At every CCC rally I attend, I sit next to my son, the President, Chamisa and the chairperson of the party,” she said, balancing her chin on her hands that held her walking stick.

Hanyani said she knows she has become a sensation in the opposition CCC, even occupying the high table at every major opposition rally.

For her, the opposition rallies have become a great source of joy.

“At every CCC rally, I feel overjoyed, like I am being possessed like I am being filled by some strange supernatural powers. At rallies where I go, people scream when they see me walking and, at times, dancing with the support of my walking stick. People shout – Chihera, come on, Chihera, come!” she said.

Not spared by Zimbabwe’s worsening economic hardships, Hanyani said the opposition CCC president Chamisa had stepped in to directly supply her with food parcels every month.

Not only that, but her outstanding support for Chamisa has seen her receiving a gift of sofas from the youthful 44-year-old leader earlier this year.

“Chamisa buys me food every month. With just a phone call to him, Chamisa can send someone with food to me. Just last month, Chamisa bought me these leather sofas. He is a leader motivated by love. I love that boy; he is a great leader,” said Gogo Chihera.

Hanyani’s support for Zimbabwe’s youngest opposition leader has become undying.

“I love Chamisa’s leadership dear. He has love and mercy like Jesus. Come what may, I love Chamisa until I die. I don’t fear anything or anybody else. I support Chamisa with all my heart, with all my mind. I can even stand out now in the street or climb a tree and announce how much I support Chamisa without any fear,” she told IPS.

But even as she backs Chamisa and the opposition CCC, her mistrust for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, which manages polls here, has shrivelled her hope for transparent elections.

“I personally don’t and can’t trust ZEC because Zanu-PF, at every election, sends its thugs to chase Chamisa’s election agents at polling stations in order to stuff ballot boxes with fake votes in favour of the ruling party,” she said.

In a country where political intolerance stands rather on the high side, Hanyani also said: “I don’t like Zanu-PF people”.

“I don’t like people who support Zanu-PF even in my eyes, my mind and my heart. They don’t dare come here because they back our suffering,” said Hanyani.

She said she does not fear being attacked owing to her political affiliation, claiming that “Zanu-PF supporters are afraid of me. They know I speak my mind freely without fear in their face.”

She said Zimbabwe’s First Lady Auxilia Mnangagwa embraced her three years ago when she visited her area.

“Auxilia Mnangagwa in 2019, when she came here leading some clean-up campaign, hugged me before she knew I was in the opposition. When she later knew I was an opposition supporter, she handed me her cap, a white one which I still have kept. I don’t know why she gave it to me. Whether or not that was a way of saying to me come to Zanu-PF, I don’t know,” said Hanyani.

Hanyani claimed that she has many friends who have secretly told her that they back Chamisa behind the scenes because they fear being terrorised by ruling party supporters.

“My friends come secretly telling me that they are with me in supporting Chamisa because they are afraid of violent Zanu-PF supporters. I am a bishop of change here in my area, and everybody here knows me. I know people want change now,” she said.

The aged Hanyani claimed that even some Zanu-PF supporters in her area were confiding in her about their secret support for Chamisa’s opposition CCC.

She said they (Zanu-PF supporters) claimed they only supported their party during the day and switched to the opposition CCC by night, fearing being brutalised.

During Zimbabwe’s Independence Day celebrations this year, Hanyani instead castigated the celebrations.

“I am pained by this year’s independence celebrations because many people, even with this independence, are suffering. I hate Mnangagwa. Mugabe was 100 percent better than him.”

Taking to the popular opposition slogan of the day, Hanyani said, “Mukomana ngaapinde hake” —- loosely translated to mean “let the young man enter”, referring to letting Chamisa take the reins of power.

Ecstatic about the impending Zimbabwe elections next year, Hanyani said: “If ever Chamisa is declared winner in 2023, even the birds of heaven will come down rejoicing, the angels of Jesus Christ.”

“I will be the happiest person alive then. Come elections next year,” she said.

Hanyani, at 85 after the 2018 elections, made news headlines when, with many other opposition activists, she stormed the Constitutional Court to tell President Mnangagwa’s lawyers that she wanted the vote “they had stolen” back.

This happened following the disputed 2018 presidential elections, which Mnangagwa won after a Constitutional Court ruling.

On the day of her IPS interview, Hanyani claimed she had only had tea and plain bread in the morning, claiming she was starving.

Nevertheless, as she parted ways with IPS, she broke into song and dance, praising Chamisa.

“Chamisa, Chamisa, why do you do that? Beware of enemies in the country; Chamisa; Chamisa; your enemies are plentiful in the country; do you see the enemies?” sang the elderly Hanyani.

Ironically, Chamisa has survived a litany of assassination attempts.

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Reki Jimu (51) has lived with HIV for nearly two decades. Here he shows a container of antiretroviral drugs to HIV/AIDS support group members at Chitungwiza government hospital outside Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS.

By Jeffrey Moyo
CHITUNGWIZA, Zimbabwe, Jul 29 2022 (IPS)

In 2001, when Reki Jimu was 30 years old, his wife died aged 27.

The now 51-year-old Jimu said the couple’s two sons died prematurely. Both were underweight and frail, although the couple had been previously blessed with a baby girl, Faith Jimu, who is now a 29-year-old mother of three.

Jimu was born in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland Central Province in Mazowe Citrus Estate, with his rural home located in the province’s Mukumbura area in Chigawo village.

Two years after his wife, Tendai Goba, died following a very long illness, which he said eroded her weight, Jimu was tested for HIV and found to be positive.

“My wife Tendai died in 2001, succumbing to AIDS, although then we had no proof she suffered from it. She had Kaposi’s sarcoma – a cancer associated with AIDS,” Jimu told IPS.

His diagnosis did not dampen his zeal to live – although he encountered a lot of discouragement from relatives, friends, and colleagues.

“When I started losing weight, people said I was being bewitched by my brother whom they claimed had goblins that were sucking out my blood,” Jimu said.

He said the back-biting started when his wife and two sons were still alive.

“Some naysayers were even blunt in their statements during the early days when my wife was sick, at the time our sons were alive. People said my sons were very thin because they had AIDS. We would hear this and never say anything in return. But of course, our sons died prematurely because they were all underweight (but) before we knew they had HIV,” said Jimu.

But thank God, said Jimu, the couple’s daughter, who was born before the couple contracted HIV/AIDS and has lived on without the disease and is now a parent.

Yet Jimu, even as his first wife kicked the bucket, has never given up on life.

Now residing in Chitungwiza, a town 25 kilometres southeast of Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, in 2003, soon after testing positive for HIV, Jimu immediately started taking antiretroviral treatment, and that has kept him going for almost two decades.

In fact, for close to two decades, 51-year-old Jimu has lived with HIV/AIDS, sticking to his antiretroviral treatment without fail.

Thanks to his belief in ARV treatment, now Jimu looks like any other healthy person.

“Look, I’m looking good. Nobody can tell I’m HIV positive. Nobody can even tell I’m taking ARV drugs unless I tell them myself,” bragged Jimu.

He has soldiered on with life despite being HIV positive.

In 2007, Jimu became the founder, leader and pastor of the Christian Fellowship Network Trust, a support group that he said has become pivotal in supporting people living with HIV and AIDS in Chitungwiza.

He has not stopped embracing life, and through the help of HIV/AIDS support groups, Jimu said he married again a year after he had tested positive.

Francisca Thomson, his second wife of the same age as him, is also living with HIV.

“Francisca is my queen, very beautiful girl, I can tell you, and we are so happy together,” boasted Jimu.

Jimu said he, like any other average person, has become a beacon of hope to many living with HIV.

He said he became open about his HVI/AIDS status at a time when the public loathed people like him and when HIV/AIDS stigma was rife.

“I am one of those people who used to appear on national television on an HIV/AIDS advert clip in which I was saying I didn’t cross the red traffic light… I am a pastor…  I am HIV positive, adverts of which were sponsored by Population Services International,” said Jimu

Now a known fighter against HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe, Jimu cannot hold back his gratitude for the Chitungwiza General Hospital here, which he said made him what he is today- an epic HIV/AIDS peer educator.

Zimbabwe has about 1,4 million people living with HIV/AIDS.

Living with HIV has not forced Jimu into a cocoon.

Instead, he said the condition has merely turned him into an ardent defender of many others.

“I’m now very active in offering routine counselling services and spiritual guidance to many who newly test positive for HIV and seeing me with the positive mindset I have. Many are adjusting quickly to their HIV-positive status and moving on with their lives,” said Jimu.

Yet, for Jimu, it has not been easy getting where he is now.

He said over the years, he has come face to face with stigma, saying many people around him were disgusted at merely seeing him sick.

Jimu said landlords quickly evicted him when they heard of his status.

“As a tenant at the many houses I have lived in, I would be quickly given notices to leave because people were afraid to live with me thinking I would just one day wake up dead in their homes or infect them with HIV. I would hear people gossiping about my sickness, some saying I was now a moving skeleton, some urging me to visit prophets for healing, some saying I must go back to the village and die there,” said Jimu.

Over the years, however, things have gotten better, with Jimu saying his relatives have begun to embrace him.

Yet, in the past, he had to contend with all the sneering and discrimination from both kith and kin.

“Being loathed and discriminated against were the things I have encountered in church, work and many other places. At many gatherings we would attend with my late wife, we would be made to take back seats as people were ashamed of having us occupying the front seats, obviously ashamed of how we looked because of the signs of sickness on us,” recalled Jimu.

But that is now a thing of the past.

As more and more people living with HIV are beginning to find it easier to live with the disease, Jimu has a message for them.

“I urge people who are HIV positive to take their medication during prescribed times without defaulting even when they feel they are now healthy and fit,” he said.

And he also carries an almost similar message for those on the brink of marriage.

“I urge couples to get tested for HIV before engaging in sex. If one is found positive, they can be assisted by health experts to live healthy lives without infecting each other with the disease,” said Jimu.

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Workers pictured at a home in Zimbabwe’s Mwenezi rural district, where 44-year-old Davison Chihambakwe, based in neighbouring South Africa, has helped upgrade and modernise some of the houses belonging to his family. He uses the money he sends after fleeing this country’s economic hardships 15 years ago. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
Harare, May 31 2022 (IPS)

Two decades ago, Trynos Mahamba left Zimbabwe for the United Kingdom, but back home, he has changed the lives of his relatives.

Since the day after he left, Mahamba (53) has been sending money home while Zimbabwe’s economy faltered amidst violent land seizures from commercial white farmers during Zimbabwe’s land reform programme.

In neighbouring South Africa, 44-year-old Davison Chihambakwe, who left this country in 2007, claims he has built a giant construction empire, and, with it, he said, has also made a difference back home.

Even in neighbouring Botswana, 39-year-old Langton Mawere, who left Zimbabwe in 2008 at the height of its economic crisis, has ‘made it’ back home. He has set up a property business by sending money for developments managed by others on his behalf.

Speaking from the United Kingdom, Mahamba says he sends money to his aged parents living in the Zimbabwean capital Harare. The money reaches them through WorldRemit – a money transfer company.

“I have made sure that without failure, I send about 2000 Pounds (sterling) to my ailing parents who are now in their eighties because they need monthly medical check-ups and food as well,” Mahamba told IPS.

From South Africa, Chihambakwe says his family also benefits.

“None of my close relatives or family members are suffering back home because I make sure I send them money to meet their daily needs.”

He sends the money through another international money transfer company Western Union, to his relatives like 32-year-old Denis Sundire, based in Harare.

Sundire says that his SA-based cousin has supported him since college.

“Davison (Chihambakwe) supported me since my college days, and even to this day, as I struggle to get a job, he still sends me money for my upkeep. That’s why he is becoming more and more successful. He is so kind,” Sundire told IPS.

Zimbabwe battles 90 percent unemployment, according to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), although the government has downplayed that to 11 percent, claiming people are working in the informal sector.

Mahamba, Chihambakwe and Mawere all said they fled this Southern African country searching for greener pastures as economic hardships visited this country.

As a result, hundreds of Zimbabwean economic migrants who fled this country have over the years become the panacea to the African nation’s worsening financial woes.

Zimbabwe’s economic migrants like Mahamba, Chihambakwe and Mawere are breathing life into the country’s faltering economy through the remittances they send back home.

Chihambakwe boasts of modernising his rural village in Masvingo province in the Mwenezi district. He claimed he has helped some of his poor villagers build modern houses, doing away with the thatched huts.

For many like Chihambakwe, helping his village and loved ones from his South African base has also increased diaspora remittances into Zimbabwe’s economy.

According to the Ministry of Finance, remittances from outside the country were said to have reached US$1,4 billion in 2021, up from US$1 billion a year before.

Yet even as Zimbabwe’s economic migrants in countries like South Africa make strides, they frequently face xenophobic sentiments and, at times, attacks.

Many South Africans heap blame on migrant Zimbabweans for seizing local jobs and rising crime.

In South Africa, the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) results for the fourth quarter of last year showed the official unemployment rate reaching over 35 percent, the highest rate since 2008, when the QLFS began.

Recently, a video of South Africa’s Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi launching a scathing attack on illegal foreign nationals went viral.

He (Motsoaledi) made the remarks on foreign nationals at an ANC regional conference in the Eastern Cape in South Africa.

Referring to migrants that he said have flooded South Africa, Motsoaledi said, “something is going wrong in our continent, and SA is on the receiving end.

“When people do wrong things in their countries, they run here.”

“We are the only country that accepts rascals. Even the UN is angry with us that SA has a tendency, because of something called democracy, to accept all the rascals of the world,” the South African Minister was quoted saying.

As Zimbabwean migrants breathe life into their country’s struggling economy via remittances, with xenophobia climbing to new heights in South Africa, a gardener, 43-year-old Elvis Nyathi from Zimbabwe, was this year stoned by a mob in the neighbouring country before being burnt to death ostensibly for being a foreigner.

Recently writing in the Mail & Guardian, South Africa’s Fredson Guilengue working for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) regional office in Johannesburg, said “the issue of xenophobic attacks against foreign nationals has once again reached disturbing levels in South Africa.

The tensions are also exacerbated by an anti-migrant campaign dubbed Operation Dudula, headed by 36-year-old Nhlanhla ‘Lux’ Dlamini.

Dlamini was arrested and now faces housebreaking, theft, and malicious damage to property charges after Dudula members descended on a suspected “drug house” in Soweto in March.

However, even within the ruling ANC, there have been mixed messages about the operation, with some indicating support, although SA President Cyril Ramaphosa distanced his government from the Dudula machinations.

“The concerns that we have is that we have got a vigilante force-like organisation taking illegal actions against people who they are targeting, and these things often get out of hand, they always mutate into wanton violence against other people”, Ramaphosa said.

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Zimbabweans readily join the COVID-19 vaccine queues, but the rollout hasn’t been smooth. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Zimbabwe , Oct 8 2021 (IPS)

More than a month ago, she lost her parents, brother, and wife, to the coronavirus. Then her fiancé battled COVID-19, but 27-year-old Melinda Gavi said she had not contracted the disease.

Gavi joined crowds scrambling to get vaccinated at Parirenyatwa hospital in the Zimbabwean capital Harare even though she was previously sceptical about getting vaccinated against the dreaded disease.

Her parents, brother, and wife were equally sceptical of the COVID-19 vaccines before they were visited by the disease, which eventually claimed their lives.

In a country of about 15 million people, nearly 5.5 million have had at least had one dose of the vaccine the Reuters COVID-19 tracker, which assuming that each person needs two doses, represents 18.8% of the population.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed in October that Zimbabwe had received 943 200 COVID-19 vaccine doses from the global COVAX Facility in September and October for its ongoing vaccination campaign.

IPS has been following the rollout of the vaccines in various centres over the past few months, recording people’s personal experiences in the queues.

Gavi says it has taken her days to get vaccinated.

“This is my third day coming here at Parirenyatwa to try and get vaccinated,” Gavi told IPS as she stood in a long and meandering queue at Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital.

About 200 people gathered at the back of the hospital, some looking tired as they lingered in the queue. Some sat on the pavements and or flower beds, waiting for their turn to get vaccinated in the slow-moving queue.

“We have limited vaccines, and often on a day we are vaccinating just 80 people and everybody else often just goes back home without getting vaccinated,” a nurse who refused to be named as she was unauthorised to speak to the media, told IPS.

In February this year, Zimbabwe began vaccinating its citizens against coronavirus after receiving a donation of 200 000 doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine.

But when the vaccine first arrived, it was met with growing scepticism from social media platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook, which fuelled the vaccine hesitancy.

This is no longer the case. Now healthcare workers have to battle hordes of people scrambling for the vaccine.

“With time, as more and more people got vaccinated without severe safety fears, the public became more assured, and demand for vaccines gradually started to rise,” said epidemiologist Dr Grant Murewanhema in Harare.

In Bulawayo, on July 8, in the presence of IPS, at the United Bulawayo Hospital, a nurse moved along the queue of people waiting to get vaccinated, counting up to 60 recipients. She told the rest to return the next day.

She told them she only had enough vaccines for 60 people.

At number 60 was 47-year-old Jimmy Dzingai, who said he was a truck driver.

“Oh, better, at least I am going to get vaccinated,” said Dzingai then as he heaved a sigh of relief, folding his hands across his chest.

Meanwhile, as they were told to leave, others did so but grumbled as they filed outside the hospital, some waving their face masks in anger, shouting at hospital authorities for turning them away.

“This is not the first time I am coming here to try and get vaccinated. I have been here four times, and this is my fifth day starting mid-June – only to get excuses,” 54-year-old Limukani Dlela, a man who said he lived in Matsheumhlope, a low-density suburb in Bulawayo, told IPS saying that at times the excuse was that there not enough vaccines available and at other times there were a limited number of vaccines.

Corruption and nepotism have characterised this Southern African country’s bitter war against COVID-19, and many people like Dzingai, the truck driver, have not been spared by the rot.

As Dzingai stood at the end of the queue, four middle-aged women strode past him and all others, going straight to the head of the queue and quickly got vaccinated and left.

According to one of the nurses who manned the queue, “the four were staff members and couldn’t wait in the queue like everybody else.”

The nurse said this even though the four women, after receiving doses, immediately left the premises just like any other ordinary person.

“I was talking to my bosses right now, and my truck has been loaded for me to take the delivery to Zambia. I have told my bosses I was getting my vaccine. Instead, you are telling me I’m not going to be vaccinated. You should get water to inject me and give me the vaccine certificate. I will not leave this place without the vaccine,” swore the truck driver.

But the nurse would have none of it.

“You won’t be vaccinated today. That won’t happen, unfortunately,” she said.

Dzingai vowed to stay put at the hospital until he was vaccinated, but because the four women who jumped the queue and got vaccinated before him, it meant he (Dzingai) and three others who had waited at the end of the queue had to leave without the jab.

With many Zimbabweans like Dzingai now eager to get vaccinated, the government has so far authorised the use of China’s Sinovac and Sinopharm, Russia’s Sputnik V, and India’s Covaxin and the U.S. Johnson and Johnson vaccines.

It has not, however, been easy for people to get the doses. Now bribery has become the order of the day at Zimbabwe’s hospitals like Sally Mugabe Referral hospital in the capital Harare.

Lydia Gono (24), from Southertorn middle-income suburb in Harare, said she had to ‘switch to her purse’, which is local parlance for a bribe, to get quickly vaccinated at Sally Mugabe hospital, the closest medical facility to her home.

“I spent close to a week trying to get vaccinated here without success, but today I just rolled a US 10 dollar note in my hand and shook the hand of a nurse who manned the queue, leaving the note in her hand. I was taken to the front and vaccinated without any delay,” Gono told IPS.

Tired of the corruption and nepotism and the delaying tactics characterising the vaccination process at public healthcare centres, many middle-income earners like 35-year-old Daiton Sununguro have opted for the private medical centres to get their vaccines parting with US 40 dollars for a single dose.

“Paying is better than having to wait for many hours before getting the vaccine at public healthcare facilities. I will still come back and pay the other US 40 dollars for my second dose,” Sununguro told IPS at a posh private medical facility in Harare’s Mount Pleasant low-density suburb.

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Stung by inflation as wages fizzle under the country's skyrocketing inflation, Zimbabwe's civil servants recently staged a strike demanding better wages although police barred the government workers from marching to the country's Minister of Finance’s office to deliver a petition detailing their grievances. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Nov 8 2019 (IPS)

Stung by the country’s spiralling inflation, Zimbabwe’s government workers took to the streets this week for the first ever police-sectioned march demanding improved wages.

They asked the Minister of Finance Mthuli Ncube “to commit to a process of restoring the value of workers’ salaries to the pre-October 2018 status of $475 for the lowest-paid worker”.  Currently some teachers earn about $50 a month.

• In August, consumer rights watchdog Poverty Reduction Forum Trust said the Basket of Needs for an average family of five cost about $187 in August, (according to currency exchange rates) an increase from $154 the month before. 

Amid a heavy police presence, the protestors were barred from marching to Ncube’s offices where they intended to deliver their petition.

Charles Mubwandarikwa, Harare chairperson of the Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe, said “government officials never feel the pain of inflation; we only need better wages to overcome inflation”.

“It is now becoming increasingly difficult to properly price goods,” Denford Mutashu, president of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Retailers, told IPS.

IMF on Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation

• The southern Africa nation’s annual inflation rate is the second-highest in the world, after Venezuela, at 300 percent according to the International Monetary Fund. 
• Though two months ago Ncube ordered the Zimbabwe Statistics Agency to stop publicising the country’s annual inflation figures.
• An IMF mission to the country in September, led by Gene Leon, conducted a review and progress with Leon stating, “Policy actions are urgently needed to tackle the root causes of economic instability and enable private-sector led growth”.
• He listed the ability to contain fiscal spending as a key challenge, adding tightened monetary policy was needed to stabilise the exchange rate.
• “Risks to budget execution are high as demands for further public sector wage increases, quasi-fiscal activities of the [Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe] RBZ that will need to be absorbed by the central government, and pressure to finance agriculture could push the deficit back into an unsustainable stance,” Leon said in a statement.

Hyperinflation harms everyone

The recommendations by the IMF would make it difficult for government to accede to the wage increase demands.

But trade unionists like Zivaishe Zhou, who is the National Coordinator of the Zimbabwe Agricultural Professionals and Technical Association, said that inflation was impacting citizens and said that corruption was responsible for the country’s economic demise.

“In Zimbabwe, surely nothing has been damaged by the sanctions, which are aimed at few companies and individuals; we have a corrupt government that is not accountable to anyone,” Zhou told IPS.

Dewa Mavhinga, the Southern Africa Director with Human Rights Watch, agreed.

“Zimbabwe authorities misinform the public that targeted sanctions are responsible for collapsing the country’s economy which is untrue. Rampant corruption and bad governance are the root causes of the country’s economic crisis,” Mavhinga told IPS.

• The European Union (EU) and United States (U.S.) slapped Zimbabwe with financial and travel bans that targeted top governing Zimbabwe Africa Union Patriotic Front officials (Zanu-PF) for purported human rights violations and electoral fraud in 2001.
• The BBC reports that financial and travel sanctions by the U.S. target 56 companies and 85 individuals, including President Emmerson Mnangagwa. 

The call to lift sanctions

Last month, government supporters held an anti-sanctions march, just as the U.S. included Zimbabwe’s Minister of State Security Owen Ncube on its list of restricted persons. 

Zimbabwe responded by threatening the U.S. ambassador in the country with unspecified action, with Foreign Affairs Minister Sibusiso Moyo saying “we have the means to bring all this to an end, should we deem it necessary or should we be pushed too far”.

• U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe Brian Nichols had stated in an interview on Trevor Ncube’s Heart & Soul television channel that corruption rather than sanctions had done more harm to Zimbabwe’s economy.

Mnangagwa’s government has pinned the blame on the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA), passed in 2001 by the U.S. Senate, prohibiting Zimbabwean entities from doing business with the first world nation.

“ZIDERA has blocked Zimbabwe’s access to international credit markets, leading to the drying up of traditional sources of external finance,” Mnangagwa told a gathering of anti-sanction marchers last month.

But are sanctions to blame for Zimbabwe’s economy?

For Owen Dhliwayo, a Zimbabwean civil society activist here, “corruption in the Zanu-PF government has been prevalent even before the enactment of ZIDERA”.

Experts like Mlondolozi Ndlovhu, who holds a Master’s Degree in Society and Media Studies from the country’s Midlands State University, agree.

“The amounts that have been reported to have been stolen by government officials here even as reported by State media, shows that even with sanctions upon it for as long as there won’t be corruption, Zimbabwe can still manage to do very well in terms of its economy,” Ndlovhu told IPS.

• In July, Zimbabwe’s former Environment, Tourism, and Hospitality Industry Minister Prisca Mupfumira was arrested the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission  (ZACC) over an alleged $95 million corruption scandal emanating from a National Social Security Authority (NSSA) forensic audit report detailing a litany of corrupt activities at the $1 billion state pension entity.
• Mupfumira is currently out on a bail of 5000 Zimbabwean dollars.
• This month, Joramu Gumbo, Minister of State for Presidential Affairs in Mnangagwa’s Office, was arrested for prejudicing the government of $1 million during his time as transport minister when he reportedly influenced Zimbabwe Airways, a government airline, to enter into property deals with his sister.

Reacting to the clear diplomatic standoff between the U.S. and Zimbabwe, Ndlovhu also said “a small country like Zimbabwe threatening a country like the U.S., which has the potential to bring investment into the country, only shows that the Zimbabwean government has failed to reform itself”.

But ardent Zanu-PF backers like Tafadzwa Mugwadi, see things differently.

“If sanctions are ineffective to the extent that the U.S. ambassador believes so, why has America kept them for nearly two decades now?” Mugwadi told IPS.

Taurai Kandishaya, National Coordinator of the Zimbabwe Citizens Forum, a civil society organisation with links to the ruling Zanu-PF party, agreed.

“The reason why westerners imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe was to cripple our economy,” Kandishaya told IPS.

Human rights situation worsens

Since Mnangagwa came to power, Zimbabwe’s human rights situation has worsened.

• In August 2018, Mnangagwa unleashed the military on protesters who questioned the delayed release of the presidential election results. Six people were shot and killed as a result.
• In January, 17 more people were shot and killed by members of the military after protests erupted following the hiking of fuel prices.
• On Nov.6, although government had given a nod to the civil servants strike to go forward, heavily armed police blocked the protesters from marching to the Ministry of Finance. where they intended to deliver their petition detailing their grievances.

Civil society activists like Catherine Mkwapati, director of the Youth Dialogue Action Network, a democracy lobby group in Zimbabwe, believe these rights abuses are not resultant of sanctions.

“Zimbabwe doesn’t need sanctions [lifted] in order to have a professional judiciary system; it doesn’t need sanctions to go in order for us to respect human rights.”

Earlier this year, the Zimbabwean government announced that it would take over all under-utilised land and redistribute it to deserving farmers, irrespective of their race and colour. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
MARONDERA, Zimbabwe, May 28 2019 (IPS)

For subsistence farmer Rogers Hove—who proudly brandishes a worn out letter for his five hectare piece of land he obtained from government following the chaotic land seizures from white commercial farmers over two decades ago—what matters most to him, “is to see my piece of land in my possession”.

At the age of 78, Hove has little else to show for the land he owns.

Hove has not made much money from it. Other than three thatched huts built from plain home-made brick, there is not much else on the land, let alone cattle—the ownership of which is regarded as a symbol of wealth.

“One day things will be alright and I may be able to farm productively the same way white farmers used to do here before we stepped in to take over our land,” Hove tells IPS.

But 20 years ago, Hove was 58 when former President Robert Mugabe’s government embarked upon a violent land reform programme that saw many black Zimbabweans taking ownership of huge swathes of land once occupied by white farmers—who were loathed by the now 95-year-old former Zimbabwean president.

Despite boasting of owning one of the most fertile pieces of land in Mashonaland East Province, Hove admits that many resettled farmers like himself have fallen on hard times.

“Yes, I have this land, but since I took over, I have not produced much because I have no means to do my farming properly. Other farmers who have the means often have to assist me, but that has not changed anything either,” Hove says.

Instead of tending to the farm, Hove’s wife, Agness, 70, is busy by the roadside selling trinkets and cigarettes to passersby.

“Maybe we will have food if I do this. We have nothing from our farm. Well-wishers give us handouts,” Agness tells IPS.

All their seven children have their own families living far from their aged parents, who have fixed their hope on the piece of land they invaded during the country’s chaotic land reform programme.

In Zimbabwe, it never rains, but pours for underperforming farmers like Rogers and Agness. Under President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government, many of these farmers risk losing their land.

Earlier this year, the Zimbabwean government announced that it would take over all under-utilised land and redistribute it to deserving farmers irrespective of their race and colour. 

Briefing parliament at the time, Douglas Karoro, Zimbabwe’s deputy Minister of Lands, Agriculture, Water, Culture and Rural Development, said “in the event that the government decides to distribute the land to people, it’s our policy to make sure that the distribution exercise is done fairly.”

“’The redistribution is not going to look at the colour of the farmer, the political inclination of the farmer, or the religious affiliation of the farmer,” Karoro told Parliament earlier this year.

But before struggling resettled farmers like Rogers face the boot from their land, for now the Zimbabwean government awaits completion of a land audit in order to implement the new policy.

Dispossessing resettled farmers here is not a new phenomenon. Under Mugabe’s government, unproductive resettled farmers were threatened with eviction.

At the time the then agriculture minister Douglas Mombeshora was quoted as saying, “what we are doing now is identifying farms and plots where land is not being utilised at all or not being used to its potential with a view to distributing it to others.”

Farmers like Hove pin the blame on government for their failures to successful farm the land seized from white commercial farmers.

“Government has always promised to help us with inputs to improve our farming, but only those that support the ruling Zanu-PF party benefit from the inputs while the majority like us suffer on the land we say we now own,” says Hove.

As such, the 71,000 families who resettled on farms once owned by white commercial farmers face an uncertain future.

Consequently, hunger has not spared them either as they have become victims of the country’s incessant droughts despite owning swathes of rich agricultural land.

“I have each year depended on food from donor organisations as my land hardly gives me adequate food since I settled here in 2001,” Menford Mutimbe, a 71-year old resettled subsistence farmer from Marondera, with eight children and two wives, tells IPS.

However, Zimbabwe’s resettled farmers have no guarantee of ownership to the pieces of land they repossessed from white farmers.

So for them, according to other farmers like Mutimbe, “getting capital from banks to sustain our farming activities is hard.”

“What we have are mere offer letters which banks have not taken in as collateral although government has made efforts to have our 99 year leases used as collateral to help us get loans,” Mutimbe said.

Last year, Zimbabwe’s central bank agreed to accept 99-year leases from resettled farmers as collateral after government changed the law to allow the 99-year leases to be transferable and bankable.

Despite the move, suffering continues for struggling farmers like Hove who says “banks are rejecting my lease for no clear reasons.”

Independent economists like John Robertson know the reason for this.

Soon after the government declared the state to be the owner of all land in the country, even the 99-year leases cannot be trusted.

“Government resented the influence of commercial farmers and decided that the best way to dis-empower them was to take away their property rights. They portrayed the move as a means to redress racial imbalances that were imposed by colonisation, but government also cancelled the ownership rights of black farmers,” Robertson tells IPS.

Ben Gilpin, director of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), says the situation for resettled farmers is different as “former commercial farmers had property rights that enabled them to finance short-, medium- and long-term capital requirements.”

“Once these were undermined, the financial sector fled. Former farmers were responsible for the risk involved…if they failed, the lenders would have recourse,” Gilpin tells IPS.

Yet as resettled farmers like Hove cling to the hope of using their leases as collateral to get bank loans, Robertson has nevertheless painted a grim picture about this optimism.

“The collateral value of the land was cut to zero when the government declared all agricultural land in the country to be the property of the State. This meant that the farmers could not offer title deeds to the banks as security for loans; so ever since Land Reform, the farmers had no access to bank finance,” says Robertson.

Land experts like Professor Mandivamba Rukuni, a development analyst and strategist in the areas of agriculture, community development, business, finance, government, and education, blame Zimbabwe’s failing economy for the resettled farmers’ mounting woes.

“My main analysis is that Zimbabwe’s economy is in bad shape; it affects agriculture. It’s ridiculous to expect agriculture to do well when the country’s economy is choked. Financial markets are not doing well. Where can government get money to support them (resettled farmers)?” Rukuni tells IPS.

Members of Zimbabwe’s Khoisan tribe perform a traditional dance during an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign conducted by Tsoro-O-Tso San, a development trust that aids the tribe. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
TSHOLOTSHO, Zimbabwe, Aug 31 2017 (IPS)

Sixty-seven-year-old Hloniphani Sidingo gives a broad smile while popping out through the gate of a clinic in her village, as she heads home clutching containers of anti-retroviral pills.

The first Bantu people to dwell in present-day Zimbabwe, the Khoisan, also known as the Bushmen or Basagwa, populate remote areas of southern Africa, particularly Angola, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Here, the Khoisan community is found in Matabeleland North’s Tsholotsho district, where many like Sidingo are domiciled. Other Khoisans live in Plumtree in this country’s Matabeleland South province.

Now, with the word spreading far and wide about AIDS awareness, many Khoisans like Sidingo have joined the fight against the disease. And thanks to the Zimbabwean government’s anti-retroviral initiative, she is still alive more than 16 years after she tested positive for HIV.

“I’m so happy. I’m happy I continue to receive my share of treatment pills from government and this keeps me going,” Sidingo told IPS.

“AIDS killed my husband and my children – five of them,” she said. “I’m not taking chances because I want to survive. My husband back in the days didn’t trust community health workers when they approached us urging us to embrace HIV/AIDS tests and get treatment if we have the disease. Ntungwa, my husband, actually thought health workers were up to no good and avoided them, resulting even in our children, who also later died of AIDS, doing like their father,” added Sidingo.

Meanwhile, organisations catering for the welfare of the Khoisan here say the dread and shame surrounding HIV/AIDS is fading among members of the tribe.

“The Khoisan now understand the existence of the (AIDS) virus and almost all who are infected are on ARVs,” Davy Ndlovu, Programmes Manager for Tsoro-O-Tso San, a development trust that aids Khoisan people in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

But while success stories are there to be told about the ancient tribe’s strides in combatting HIV/AIDS, a combination of poverty and ignorance has sometimes disrupted ARV treatment.

“As you might be aware, the San are a poor people and when the nursing staff here once told them not to take the medication on an empty stomach, this was interpreted in that when one had no food for that day, one would not take his or her medication. Due to this ignorance, a number of Khoisan people living with AIDS have lost their lives,” Ndlovu said.

While the tribe now embraces ARV medication, they still face the burden of having to walk long distances to access treatment, according to Tsoro-O-Tso San.

“The other issue has to do with reviews where people are expected to travel to the nearest hospital, which is about 15 to 20 kilometres away. When they fail to raise transport money, they just stay and miss the review,” said Ndlovu.

Despite such hurdles, for Khoisans living with HIV like Sidingo, fighting the disease has become top priority.

“I have learnt to adhere to taking my medication consistently. Many people in my community now understand the importance of getting tested for HIV,” Sidingo told IPS.

Ndlovu said like Sidingo, many Khoisans now live with HIV and are trying to cope with the virus like everybody else, in  a country where 1.2 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, according to UNAIDS.

To Ndlovu, “They (the Khoisan) are no longer discriminated against in the AIDS battle.”

Of the 2,500 Khoisan people domiciled in Zimbabwe, approximately 800 of them now live with HIV/AIDS, about a third of the population, according to Tsoro-O-Tso San.

Meanwhile, the rush to get tested for HIV/AIDS amongst Zimbabwe’s Khoisan tribe comes at a time the tribe stands accused of engaging in careless sex habits, exposing the tribe to the ravages of AIDS.

“The biggest threat is that the San still practice casual sex with no protection at all. Sex among the San is a pastime to be enjoyed and you still find people sharing girlfriends – young and old do this,” Ndlovu of the Tsoro-O-Tso San told IPS.

“Organisations like Medicine Sen Frontiers (MSF) have worked with the Khoisan tribe on issues related to HIV/AIDS. A number of the Khoisans, both male and female, the youths in particular, have been trained as peer HIV/AIDS educators with the intention to teach people issues related to HIV/AIDS prevention, safe sex, and treatment,” said Ndlovu.

The Zimbabwean government’s National Aids Council fosters also HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns amongst the country’s ancient tribe, according to Tsoro-O-Tso San.

To do this, NAC works in conjunction with the country’s Ministry of Health to provide anti-retroviral drugs to the minority tribe, a gesture that has put smiles on many HIV-positive Khoisans like Sidingo.

“Back in the years, as the Khoisan we thought our people were being bewitched as we saw them succumbing to AIDS, but thanks to the treatment, we have started to live on even with the virus,” Sidingo told IPS.

Even luxury homes in the Zimbabwean capital Harare were not spared by the raging floods of early 2017, perpetuating hunger in the Southern African nation after El Nino ravaged crops nationwide. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Mar 3 2017 (IPS)

Dairai Churu, 53, sits with his chin cupped in his palms next to mounds of rubble from his destroyed makeshift home in the Caledonia informal settlement approximately 30 kilometers east of Harare, thanks to the floods that have inundated Zimbabwe since the end of last year.

Churu’s tragedy seems unending. From 2015 to mid-2016, the El Nino-induced drought also hit him hard, rendering his entire family hungry.“We are homeless, we are hungry. I don’t know what else to say.” -- farmer Dairai Churu

“I farm here. I have always planted maize here. All my crops in 2015 were wiped out by the El Nino heat and this year came the floods, which also suffocated all my maize and it means another drought for me and my family,” Churu told IPS.

Churu, his wife and four children now share a plastic tent which they erected after their makeshift three-room home was destroyed by the floods in February this year.

“We are homeless, we are hungry. I don’t know what else to say,” Churu said.

Zimbabwe has not been spared the severe droughts and floods triggered by one of the strongest El Niño weather events ever recorded in the country’s history, which have left nearly 100 million people in Southern Africa, Asia and Latin America facing food and water shortages and vulnerable to diseases, including the Zika virus, according to UN bodies and international aid agencies.

With drought amidst the floods across many parts of this Southern African nation, the Poverty Reduction Forum Trust (PRFT) has been on record in the media here saying most Zimbabwean urban residents are relying on urban agriculture for sustenance owing to poverty.

PRFT is a civil society organisation that brings together non-governmental organisations, government, the private sector and academics here in Zimbabwe to discuss poverty issues and advocate for pro-poor policies.

Even government has been jittery as floods rocked the entire nation.

“Not all people are going to harvest enough this year. The floods have come with their own effects, drowning crops that many had planted and anticipated bumper harvests. Some greater part of the population here will certainly need food aid as they already face hunger,” a senior government official in Zimbabwe’s Agriculture Ministry told IPS on condition of anonymity for professional reasons.

For the mounting floods here, experts have also piled the blame on the after-effects of the El Nino weather phenomenon.

“El Niño conditions, which are a result of a natural warming of Pacific Ocean waters, lead to droughts, floods and more frequent cyclones across the world every few years. This year’s floods, which are a direct effect of the El Nino weather, are the worst in 35 years and are now even worsening and bearing impacts on farming, health and livelihoods in developing countries like Zimbabwe,” Eldred Nhemachema, a meteorological expert based in the Zimbabwean capital Harare, told IPS.

Consequently, this Southern African nation this year declared a national emergency, as harvests here face devastation from the floods resulting in soaring food prices countrywide, according to the UN World Food Programme.

The UN-WFP has also been on record reporting that Zimbabwe’s staple maize crop of 742,000 tonnes is down 53 percent from 2014-15, according to data from the Southern African Development Community.

The floods have prompted Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Climate to recommend that a state of disaster be declared in the country’s southern provinces, where one person was killed by the floods while hundreds were marooned by raging rivers that swept away homes and animals.

For instance, this year’s floods in Zimbabwe’s Masvingo Province left 300 pupils marooned at Lundi High School, leaving mostly girls stranded after the Runde River burst its banks and flooded dormitories. About 100 homesteads were also hit by the floods in the country’s Chivi, Bulilima and Mberengwa districts, according to the country’s Civil Protection Unit.

Based on this year’s February update from the country’s Department of Civil Protection, at least 117 people died since the beginning of the rainy season in October last year.

And for many Zimbabweans like Churu, who were earlier hit by the El Nino-induced drought, it is now double trouble.

“We already have no crops surviving thanks to the floods, yet we have had our crops destroyed by El Nino the previous year, and so suffering continues for us, with drought in the midst of floods. It hurts,” Churu said.

Excerpt:

High HIV rates among teens call for interventions on a war-footing. Credit: Miriam Gathigah and Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah and Jeffrey Moyo
NAIROBI, Kenya / HARARE, Zimbabwe, Feb 1 2016 (IPS)

Keziah Juma is coming to terms with her shattered life at the shanty she shares with her family in Kenya’s sprawling Kibera slum where friends and relatives are gathered for her son’s funeral arrangements. While attending an antenatal clinic, Juma who is only 16 years discovered that she had been infected with HIV. “I went into shock and stopped going to the clinic, that is why they could not save my baby and I have been bed-ridden since giving birth two months ago,” she told IPS.

Juma’s struggle to come to terms with her HIV status and to remain healthy mirrors that of many teens in this East African nation. Kenya is one of the six countries accounting for nearly half of the world’s young people aged 15 to 19 years living with HIV. Other than India, the rest are in Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria and Mozambique, according to a 2015 UNICEF report Statistical Update on Children, Adolescents and AIDS.

Yet in the face of this glaring epidemic, Africa’s response has been discouraging with statistics leaving no doubt that the continent is losing the fight against HIV among its teens. Julius Mwangi, an HIV/AIDS activist in Nairobi told IPS that some countries such as Kenya seem to have chosen “to bury their heads in the sand in hopes that the problem will go away.”Despite government statistics indicating that the average age for the first sexual experience has increased from 14 to 16 years among Kenyan teens, this has done little for the country’s fight to combat HIV among its young people.

The Ministry of Health’s fast track plan to end HIV and AIDS shows that only an estimated 24 per cent of teens aged 15 to 19 years know their HIV status. Still in this age group, only about half have ever tested for HIV. Mwangi attributes the country’s high HIV rates among its teens to lack of practical interventions to address the scourge. He referred to the controversy over the Reproductive Health Bill 2014 which provided a significant loophole for young people less than 18 years to access condoms and other family planning services, but was rejected.

Judith Sijeny, a nominated Member of the Senate who sponsored the Bill, says that the proposed piece of legislation was rejected in its original form on grounds that it was encouraging sexual immorality among young people. Sijeny said in addition to providing information on HIV prevention and treatment including advocating for sexual abstinence, the Bill was also “providing a solution by encouraging safe sex.” “Statistics are providing a very clear picture that teenagers, including those living with HIV, are engaging in sexual activities,” she said.

Government statistics show that one in every five youths aged 15 to 24 had sex before the age of 16 years. A revised version of the Bill, which will constitute Kenya’s primary health law for now, states clearly that condoms and family planning pills are not to be given to those under 18 years of age.

While other African nations like Kenya have chosen to be in denial, leaving their young populations vulnerable to early deaths due to HIV, others such as Zimbabwe have vowed to take the bull by its horns. Last year, the Zimbabwean government in conjunction with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) launched the Condomise Campaign where they distributed small-sized condoms to fit 15-year olds in a bid to prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. This is despite this country’s age of consent to sex pegged at the age of 16!

The Condomise Campaign may, however, have come too late for several Zimbabwean teenagers like 16-year old Yeukai Mhofu who is already living with HIV after she was raped by her late stepfather. Regrettably, Mhofu said she may already have infected her boyfriend.“I had unprotected sex with my boyfriend at school and I am afraid I might have infected him. Although I was aware of my HIV status after my rape ordeal by my late stepfather, I succumbed to pressure from my school lover after he kept pestering me for sex and I feared to disclose my status to him because I thought he would hate me,” Mhofu told IPS.

For many Zimbabwean teenagers like 15-year old Loveness Chiroto still in school, the government move to launch condoms for teenagers has left her relieved at the fresh prospect of young people like her to survive the AIDS storm. “Now with government and UNFPA taking a position that we should use condoms, I’m personally happy that as young people we have been given the alternative on how to soldier on amidst the HIV/AIDS scourge,” Chiroto told IPS.

But irked by the Condomise initiative gathering momentum, many adults have vehemently castigated the idea. “Our children need strict grooming in which they are strongly taught the hazards of engaging in premature sexual intercourse; condoms won’t help our young people because even grown-up people are contracting HIV with condoms in their pockets,” Mavis Mbiza, a Zimbabwean mother of two teenage girls
in High school, told IPS.

Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T) legislator and parliamentary portfolio committee on health chairperson, Ruth Labode, is however at variance with many parents like Mbiza. “Is there a difference when an adult is having sex and when a teenager is having sex? If teens are sexually active, condom use for them may be a necessity, I agree because there is also need for such young persons to be protected from STIs as well,” Labode said.

The UNFPA senior technical advisor, Bidia Deperthes went on record saying this Southern African nation’s teenagers from 15 years of age needed to be catered for in the condom distribution as some of them had become sexually active.

Statistics show that 24.5 per cent of Zimbabwean women between the ages 15 to 19 are married and is proof of teenagers being sexually active, which justifies the distribution of condoms to Zimbabwe’s teenagers according to UNFPA. An official from Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health and Child Care speaking on condition of anonymity for professional reasons, agreed with UNFPA. “We are highly burdened with HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) even amongst teens, so condoms are very important in reducing new infections of HIV and STIs,” the health official told IPS. In 2007, South Africa’s new Children’s Act came into effect, expanding the scope of several existing children’s rights and explicitly granting new ones.

The Act gave to children 12 years and older a host of rights relating to reproductive health, including access to condoms, this at a time SA’s persons aged 15–24 account for 34 per cent of all new HIV infections. In 2014, at Botswana’s Condomise Campaign launch in conjunction with UNFPA, the organisation’s representative there, Aisha Camara-Drammeh emphasised that condoms were equally crucial for the African nation’s teenagers. “This is an exciting and yet a very crucial moment for us as UNFPA and our stakeholders – including the Ministry of Health, UNAIDS and indeed the young people themselves – to be witnessing the inauguration of this campaign in Botswana. Ensuring access to condoms is a prerequisite for the Sexual and Reproductive Health of young persons,” Drammeh had said then.

According to the UNFPA then, Botswana’s young people were faced with numerous challenges which included high-risk sexual behaviour leading to high teenage unwanted pregnancies, high incidences of HIV infections, low comprehensive knowledge on SRH and HIV and limited access to SRH services and commodities. With condoms use rife amongst Botswana’s young people, the country is witnessing declines on new HIV infections, with the 15–24 year olds’ HIV incidence declining by 25 per cent, according to UNFPA. Even further up in Malawi, in 2013, government there moved in to launch the first-ever national HIV/AIDS prevention drive through a Condomise Campaign seeking to promote and increase condom use among teenagers there.

(End)

Wheelchair-bound, her body now skeletal from full blown AIDS, disabled 38-year-old Melisa Chigumba attempts to wave away a swarm of flies hovering around her face as she sits outside her home in Chachacha, a remote area in Shurugwi, 278 kilometers south of the capital, Harare.

Shown in the photo donning a red dress, is Zipha Moyo, a disabled HIV/AIDS activist recently making a presentation Harare, the Zimbabwean capital on the exclusion of People with Disabilities in HIV and AIDS programs. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

The couple’s three children, who were born infected with HIV, died in their infancy.

Melisa is a prime example of the millions of people here living with disabilities bearing the brunt of HIV/AIDS.

Her sister-in-law Meagan, according to the Zimbabwean culture is her aunt, now looks after her at their remote home, the only inheritance left for her by her husband.

According to the National Association of Societies for the Care of the Handicapped (NASCOH), Zimbabwe has a population of almost 1.8 million people living with disabilities.

Amongst this population, are the deaf and mute who have not been spared by HIV/AIDS.

This is despite Zimbabwe making huge strides in reducing HIV/AIDS prevalence from 29 per cent in 1997 to approximately 13. 7 per cent now.

Many battling physical disabilities like Melisa here say they have apparently been left out in combating the disease in their circles.

“I have not heard of any efforts being made to help disabled HIV-positive persons like myself. There are no special government programs for us, and just like all able-bodied persons, we also queue for treatment drugs at clinics,” Melisa told IPS.

The HIV/AIDS plight affecting people living with disabilities in this southern African nation worsens at a time the rest of the world commemorated the International Day of Disabled Persons earlier this month.

The global day for the disabled was proclaimed in 1992 by the United Nations and aims to promote an understanding of disability issues and mobilize support for the dignity, rights and well-being of persons with disabilities.
But Zimbabwe’s disabled HIV/AIDS activists claimed there was no assistance in combating the virus.

“Although we are sexually active as well as vulnerable to rape and other forms of sexual abuse, as disabled people we are overlooked in national HIV prevention strategies because policymakers do not regard us as sexually active,” Agness Mapuranga, a Shurugwi-based disabled HIV/AIDS activist living with the virus, told IPS.

“We are the country’s least covered and engaged population by HIV/AIDS service organisations despite the fact that many of us also battle with the virus,” added Mapuranga.

To make matters worse, there are no recorded statistics from the country’s Ministry of Health and Child Care on how many people with disabilities are accessing HIV treatment drugs.

A top government official from the Ministry of Health and Child Care confessed the government’s shortcomings in fighting AIDS amongst people with disabilities.

“Government’s health delivery system lacks policies or programmes to equip HIV/AIDS caregivers with the skills and knowledge needed to effectively assist disabled people in HIV prevention,” the government official, told IPS on condition of anonymity for professional reasons.

Meanwhile, it is Zimbabwe’s hearing and visually impaired population that face the greatest HIV/AIDS threat, according to lobby groups here.

“A glaring example of the worst HIV/AIDS sufferers here are the hearing impaired and the visually impaired, where information is not available in formats accessible to them; that is in sign language and braille. No one can stand up and produce or show a comprehensive program on prevention, treatment and care for these two disability categories,” Farai Mukuta, Advocacy and Knowledge Management Advisor for the Disability, HIV and AIDS Trust (DHAT) and the Deaf Zimbabwe Trust (DZT), told IPS.

DHAT is a non-profit regional organization which was registered in Zimbabwe as a Trust in 2007 with the aim of promoting the rights and capacity building of Persons with Disabilities having cervical cancer, tuberculosis, infected and affected by HIV and AIDS.

Mukuta’s remarks resonate with other pro-disabled lead activists.

“Deaf people are faced with challenges regarding access to information. Sign language is the medium of communication for deaf and hard-of- hearing people and they need information in formats they understand,” Barbra Nyangairi, the DZT Executive Director, told IPS.

Nyangairi’s remarks are true for HIV positive Liberty Hungwe, who is deaf living in Shurugwi’s Tongogara area.

“For me, testing for HIV has been a challenge because service providers do not have sign language, and owing to that, when we went for testing, people like myself were just tested and there was no counselling either post or pre-test counselling, which are barriers for us in accessing HIV/AIDS services,” Hungwe told IPS through the aid of a sign language interpreter.

Based on findings by DHAT, HIV/AIDS challenges affecting people with disabilities stem from commonly held notions among health personnel that handicapped persons are not sexually active.

In a baseline study in 2012, the United Nations noted that Zimbabwe’s people with disabilities often lack confidentiality at HIV/AIDS voluntary counselling and testing centres due to the presence of interpreters.

A 2012 study by the UN said HIV/AIDS and disability was an “emerging issue” and “cause for concern” as people living with disabilities were at greater risk of exposure to HIV infection due to social exclusion and rejection.

“People living with disabilities are at great risk of acquiring HIV, while empirical evidence has also demonstrated that people with sensory impairments – the deaf and the blind – are more vulnerable than others, due to their special communication needs,” the UN report said then.

The UN report also noted the general absence of literature and media images that “incorporate the HIV and AIDS information needs of people with disabilities, especially the deaf and blind.”

Even leading activists for people living with disabilities here agree with the UN.

“The prevailing view in society is that PWDs are not sexually active and do not warrant inclusion in HIV and AIDS interventions. Consequently, there have been no deliberate efforts to address the issue of AIDS among people with disabilities and to incorporate them within the rubric of the national response,” Mukuta, told IPS.

“The reality is that disabled people are just as sexually active as the rest of the society and are even more at risk of infection because of the obvious barriers that they encounter in accessing vital information on HIV/AIDS,” added Mukuta.

Mukuta said Zimbabwe’s success story in combating HIV/AIDS excludes HIV positive people with disabilities (PWDs).

“Our country boasts of the fast falling rates of HIV infections, but in all this, people with disabilities have been systematically sidelined from all HIV and AIDS intervention programmes in the country, on the erroneous assumption that they are not sexually active,” Mukuta told IPS.

Despite the hurdles faced by many disabled HIV positive people like Shurugwi’s speech-impaired Hungwe, other lobby groups here brag they have played their part in combating HIV/AIDS spread among such minority groups.

“As Deaf Zimbabwe Trust, we have trained 20 deaf people as peer educators in order to provide accurate information to the deaf community and we intend to train more peer educators who are deaf so that they can cascade information while we are in the process of creating a support group for people who are deaf and living with AIDS,” Nyangairi told IPS.

But now hit with full blown AIDS, disabled and wheelchair-bound Chigumba is pessimistic.

“I just wait for my time to die and evade this pain,” Chigumba told IPS as she winced with pain.

Writer can be contacted at moyojeffrey@gmail.com

Credit: Construction Review Online

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Zimbabwe, Nov 13 2015 (IPS)

The upcoming week for the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), which runs from November 13-17 in Abidjan, the capital city of Ivory Coast, is set to throw this continent into the full gear of infrastructural boom, development experts here say.

“If PIDA and what it all entails may be strictly followed by Africa and its leaders, yes, truly the underdeveloped continent may see itself emerging from the era of infrastructural underdevelopment and help the continent attract much needed foreign investors,” Zimbabwean independent economist, Kingston Nyakurukwa, told IPS.

For African nations, from the outset PIDA was meant to promote socio-economic development and poverty reduction through improved access to integrated regional and continental infrastructure networks and services.

Owing to the infrastructure deficit facing Africa, in July 2010, African leaders launched PIDA under the leadership of the African Union, New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Development Bank (AfDB).

At its launch, PIDA’s presidency was initially assumed by South African President Jacob Zuma, thanks to his country’s successful organization of the World Cup in 2010, which inspired the entire continent.

Then Zuma said: “Africa’s time has come and without infrastructure, our dreams will never be realized. We cannot trade on the continent because of the lack of communication. The infrastructure that we want to create will provide new opportunities for our continent.”

With the African Development Bank Group being the executing agency, PIDA was designed as successor to the NEPAD Medium to Long Term Strategic Framework (MLTSF), which was meant to develop a vision and strategic framework for the development of regional and continental infrastructure.

For many development experts here, like Henry Kakonye, Africa has however lacked development in infrastructure over the years, impacting negatively on the continent’s economic growth.

“Lack of infrastructure development in Africa over the years has gradually affected productivity and resulted in rising production and transaction costs, subsequently derailing growth through slowing competitiveness of businesses and the ability of governments to chase economic and social development policies,” Kakonye told IPS.

According to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), PIDA will also help the objectives for Sustainable Energy in Africa in line with the UN’s sustainable development goal to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

But in developing Africa’s infrastructure, NEPAD has also been on record saying the private sector cannot be left out.

“With support from the private sector, PIDA is expected to play a critical role in addressing the continent’s infrastructure problems,” said Adama Deen, head of Infrastructure Programmes and Projects at the NEAPAD Agency while speaking at a recent NEPAD forum in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“Infrastructure is essential for integrating regions, realising socio-economic potential and fast-tracking development in Africa,” Deen had added.

And based on NEPAD Division at the African Development Bank, the continent would require investment of about 360 billion dollars in infrastructure in order to be well connected to the rest of the world by 2040.

To this, PIDA, a joint initiative by the African Union, NEPAD and the AfDB, aims to develop a web of 37,200 km of highways, 30,200 km of railways and 16,500 km of interconnected power lines by 2040 while at the same time it plans to add 54,150 megawatts of hydroelectric power generation capacity and an extra 1.3-billion tons capacity at Africa’s ports, according to AfDB’s Ralph Olaye.

The South African Energy Ministry has also been on record saying no infrastructure programme could be successful if it is not linked to continental development objectives.

As such, according to the SA government, PIDA remains key to the Southern African region and the entire Africa to promote socio-economic development.

Chief Executive Officer of the NEPAD Agency, Dr Ibrahim Mayaki, during this year’s commemorations of the Africa Day agreed with the SA government.

“Bridging the gap in infrastructure is thus vital for economic advancement and sustainable development. However, this can only be achieved through regional and continental cooperation and solution finding,” Mayaki said then.

“In fact, now more than ever is the time for us all to live up to the courage of our convictions for an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens – as is espoused by NEPAD. Leadership is no longer a top down issue,” Mayaki had added.

(End)

Urban farming is mushrooming in Africa as starvation hits even town and city dwellers. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Sep 2 2015 (IPS)

There is a scramble for unoccupied land in Africa, but this time it is not British, Portuguese, French or other colonialists racing to occupy the continent’s vacant land – it is the continent’s urban dwellers fast turning to urban farming amid the rampant food shortages that have not spared them.

Inadequate wages have aggravated the situation of many, like Agness Samwenje who lives in Harare’s high density Mufakose suburb, and they have found that turning to urban farming is one way of supplementing their supply of food.

Samwenje, a pre-school teacher who took over an open piece of land to cultivate in vicinity to a farm, told IPS that “this mini-farming here is a back-up means to feed my family because the 200 dollars I earn monthly is not enough to support my family after becoming the breadwinner following the death of my husband four years ago, leaving me to care for our three school-going children.”“There is increased rural-to-urban migration in Africa as people seek better employment opportunities which, however, they rarely find and subsequently turn to farming on open pieces of land in towns in order for them to survive because they have no money to buy foodstuffs” –Zambian development expert Mulubwa Nakalonga

“I now spend very little money buying food because crops from my small field here in the city supplement my food,” she added.

For others, like jobless 34-year-old Silveira Sinorita from Mozambique who now lives in the Zimbabwean town of Mutare, urban farming has become their job as they battle to feed their families.

“Without employment, I have found that farming here in town is an answer to my food woes at home because I grow my own potatoes, beans, vegetables and fresh maize cobs, whose surplus I then sell,” Sinorita told IPS.

Pushed to the edge by mounting food deficits, urban farmers in other African countries have even gone beyond mere crop farming. In cities such as Kampala in Uganda and Yaoundé in Cameroon, many urban households are raising livestock, including poultry, dairy cattle and pigs.

Urban farming is mushrooming in Africa’s towns and cities at a time the United Nations is urging nations the world over to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger in line with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), more than 800 million people around the world practise urban agriculture and it has helped cushion them against rising food costs and insecurity, although the U.N. agency also warns that the number of hungry people has risen to over one billion globally, with the “urban poor being particularly vulnerable.”

However, urban farming in Africa is often met with opposition from the authorities where land is owned by local municipalities and agricultural experts say that opposing it makes no sense in the face of growing food insecurity.

“Poverty is not sparing even people living in the cities because jobs are getting scarce on the continent and as a result, farming in cities is fast becoming a common trend as people battle to supplement their foods, this despite urban farming being prohibited in towns and cities here,” government agricultural officer Norman Hwengwere told IPS. Zimbabwe’s local authority by-laws prohibit farming on vacant municipal land.

FAO has also reported that Africa’s market gardens are the most threatened by the continent’s growth spurt because they are typically not regulated or supported by governments, and a recent study has called for governments to become more involved.

In a 2011 research study titled ‘Growing Potential: Africa’s Urban Farmers’, Anna Plyushteva, a PhD student at University College London, argues that greater government involvement is needed for urban agriculture to emerge out of marginality and illegality and deliver greater environmental and social benefits.

“Without official regulation, urban farming can create some serious problems. At present, informal farmers and their produce are exposed to contamination with organic and non-organic pollutants, which is a serious threat to public health,” said Plyushteva.

For independent Zambian development expert Mulubwa Nakalonga, the more people flock to cities, the more pressure they add to the limited resources there.

“There is increased rural-to-urban migration in Africa as people seek better employment opportunities which, however, they rarely find and subsequently turn to farming on open pieces of land in towns in order for them to survive because they have no money to buy foodstuffs,” Nakalonga told IPS.

“Often when people migrate from rural areas anywhere here in Africa, they cling to their agricultural heritage of practices through urban agriculture which you see many practising in towns today to evade hunger,” Nakalonga added.

In the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, for example, urban gardens in some communities resemble those found in the country’s rural areas from which people migrated.

Despite the opposition elsewhere, some African cities are nevertheless supporting the urban farming trend. The Cape Town local authority in South Africa, for example, introduced its first urban agriculture policy document in 2007, focusing on the importance of urban agriculture for poverty alleviation and job creation.

As FAO projects that there will be 35 million urban farmers in Africa by 2020, it is supporting programmes in some countries to capitalise on the benefits. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, FAO’s Urban Horticulture Programme is building on the skills of rural farmers who have come to the cities.

The FAO programme in DRC started in response to the country’s massive rural-to-urban exodus following a five-year conflict and now helps local urban farmers to produce 330,000 tons of vegetables each year, while providing employment and income for 16,000 small-scale market gardeners in the country’s towns and cities.

The country’s urban farmers sell 90 percent of what they produce in urban markets and supermarkets, according to FAO, helping to feed a swelling urban population as Congolese flee the countryside in search of security.

Meanwhile, in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, various groups and agencies have helped popularise the “vertical farm in a bag” concept in which city dwellers create their own gardens using tall sacks filled with soil from which plant life grows.

With hunger hitting both rural and urban African dwellers hard, an increasing number of them believe that urban farming is the way to go.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Africa's children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

“Poverty has become part of me,” says 13-year-old Aminata Kabangele from the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me.”

Aminata, who fled her war-torn country after the rest of her family was killed by armed rebels and now lives as a as a refugee in Zimbabwe’s Tongogara refugee camp in Chipinge on the country’s eastern border, told IPS that she has had no option but to resign her fate to poverty.

Despite the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, African children still stand as the number one victims of suffering and destitution across the continent.“Poverty has become part of me. I have learned to live with the reality that nobody cares for me” – Aminata Kabangele, a 13-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo

“In every country you may turn to here in Africa, children are at the receiving end of poverty, with high numbers of them becoming orphans,” Melody Nhemachena, an independent social worker in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Based on a 2013 UNICEF report, the World Bank has estimated that up to 400 million children under the age of 17 worldwide live in extreme poverty, the majority of them in Africa and Asia.

According to human rights activists, the growing poverty facing many African families is also directly responsible for the fate of 200,000 African children that the United Nations estimates are sold into slavery every year.

“Many families in Africa are living in abject poverty, forcing them to trade their children for a meal to persons purporting to employ or take care of them (the children), but it is often not the case as the children end up in forced labour, earning almost nothing at the end of the day,” Amukusana Kalenga, a child rights activist based in Zambia, told IPS.

West Africa is one of the continent’s regions where modern-day slavery has not spared children.

According to Mike Sheil, who was sent by British charity and lobby group Anti-Slavery International to West Africa to photograph the lives of children trafficked as slaves and forced into marriage, for many families in Benin – one of the world’s poorest countries – “if someone offers to take their child away … it is almost a relief.”

Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide network of trade unions, teachers’ and civil society organisations working to eliminate and prevent all forms of child labour, has reported that a 2010 study showed that “a staggering 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years worked in cocoa farms of Ivory Coast and Ghana at the cost of their physical, emotional, cognitive and moral well-being.”

“Trafficking in children is real. Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children,” Gabon’s Social Affairs Director-General Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga told a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire in 2012.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2011 human trafficking report.

In Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, a study of child poverty showed that over 70 percent of children are not registered at birth while more than 30 percent experience severe educational deprivation. According to UNICEF Nigeria, about 4.7 million children of primary school age are still not in school.

“These boys and girls, some as young as 13-years-old, serve in the ranks of terror groups like Boko Haram, often participating  in suicide operations, and act as spies,” Hillary Akingbade, a Nigerian independent conflict management expert, told IPS.

“Girls here are often forced into sexual slavery while many other African children are abducted or recruited by force, with others joining out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival,” she added.

Akingbade’s remarks echo the reality of poverty which also faces children in the Central African Republic, where an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 boys and girls became members of armed groups following an outbreak of a bloody civil war in the central African nation in December 2012, according to Save the Children.

Violence plagued the Central African Republic when the country’s Muslim Seleka rebels seized control of the country’s capital Bangui in March 2013, prompting a backlash by the largely Christian militia.

A 2013 report by Save the Children stated that in the Central African Republic, children as young as eight were being recruited by the country’s warring parties, with some of the children forcibly conscripted while others were impelled by poverty.

Last year, the United Nations reported that the recruitment of children in South Sudan’s on-going civil war was “rampant”, estimating that there were 11,000 children serving in both rebel and government armies, some of who had volunteered but others forced by their parents to join armed groups with the hopes of changing their economic fortunes for the better.

Meanwhile, back in the Tongogara refugee camp, Aminata has resigned herself. “I have descended into worse poverty since I came here in the company of other fleeing Congolese and, for many children like me here at the camp, poverty remains the order of the day.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

Fish farming has fast turned into a way for many Africans to beat poverty and hunger. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 5 2015 (IPS)

Hillary Thompson, aged 62, throws some grains of left-over rice from his last meal, mixed with some beer dregs from his sorghum brew, into a swimming pool that he has converted into a fish pond.

“For over a decade, fish farming has become a hobby that has earned me a fortune,” Thompson, who lives in Milton Park, a low density area in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, told IPS. In fact, he has been able to acquire a number of properties which he now rents out.

Thompson is just one of many here who have struck gold through fish farming.

African strides in fish farming are gaining momentum at a time the United Nations is urging nations the world over to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns as part of its proposed new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when they expire this year.In many African towns and cities, thriving fish farmers have converted their swimming pools and backyards into small-scale fish farming ponds, triggering their proverbial rise from rags to riches

The SDGs are a universal set of 17 goals, targets and indicators that U.N. member states are expected to use as development benchmarks in framing their agendas and political policies over the next 15 years.

Faced with nutritional deficits, a number of Africans have turned to fish farming even in towns and cities to complement their diets.

In Zimbabwe, an estimated 22,000 people are involved in fish farming, according to statistics from the country’s Ministry of Agriculture.

Behind the success of many of these fish farmers stands the Aquaculture Zimbabwe Trust, which was established in 2008 to mobilise resources for the sustainable development of environmentally-friendly fisheries in Zimbabwe as a strategy to counter chronic poverty and improve people’s livelihoods.

Over the years, it has been on the ground offering training aimed at building capacity to support the development of fish farming.

The figure for fish farmers is even higher in Malawi, where some 30,000 people are active in fish farming-related activities, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Fisheries are reported to contribute about 70 percent to the protein intake of the developing country’s estimated 14 million people, most of whom are too poor to afford meat.

For many Malawians like Lewis Banda from Blantyre, the country’s second largest city, fish farming has become the way to go. “Fish breeding is a less demanding economic venture, which anyone willing can undertake to do, and fish sell faster because they are cheaper,” he told IPS.

In many African towns and cities, thriving fish farmers have converted their swimming pools and backyards into small-scale fish farming ponds, and many like Banda have seen fish farming trigger their proverbial rise from rags to riches.

“I was destitute when I came to Blantyre eight years ago, but now thanks to fish farming, I have become a proud owner of home rights in the city,” Banda said.

Globally, FAO estimates the value of fish trade to be 51 billion dollars per annum, with over 36 million people employed directly through fishing and aquaculture, while as many as 200 million people derive direct and indirect income from fish.

FAO also reports that, across Africa, fishing provides direct incomes for about 10 million people – half of whom are women – and contributes to the food supply of 200 million more people.

In Uganda, for example, lake fishing yield catches are worth more than 200 million dollars a year, contributing 2.2 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), while fish farming employs approximately 135,000 fishers and 700,000 more in fish processing and trading.

The rising fish farming trend comes at a time when the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) has been on record as calling for initiatives such as fish farming to be replicated in order for Africa to harness the full potential of its fisheries in order to strengthen national economies, combat poverty and improve people’s food security and nutrition.

Last year in South Africa, Alan Fleming, the director of The Business Place, an entrepreneur development and assistance organisation based in Cape Town, came up with the idea of using shipping containers as fish ponds, an idea that was well received by the country’s poor communities.

“My children are now all in school thanks to the noble idea hatched by Fleming of having a fish farm designed within the confines of a shipping container, which is indeed an affordable idea for many low-income earners like me,” Mpho Ntabiseni from Philippi, a low-income township in Cape Town, told IPS.

Citing a growing shortage of traditionally harvested fish, the South African government invested 100 million rands (7.8 million dollars) last year in aquaculture projects in all four of the country’s coastal provinces.

In 2014, some 71,000 South Africans were involved in fish farming, according to figures from South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs.

Nutrition experts say that fish farming has added nutritional value to many poor people’s diets. “Fish farming helps poor African communities to add high-value protein to their diet since Africa often suffer challenges of malnutrition,” Agness Mwansa, an independent nutritionist based in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, told IPS.

Adding an environmental concern to the benefits of fish farming, Julius Sadi of the Aquaculture Zimbabwe Trust, told IPS that “fish from aquaculture ponds are preferred by consumers because they are bred in water that is exposed to very little or no pollution, which means that there is high demand and therefore high income for fish farmers.”

As a result, donor agencies such as the U.K. Department for International Development (DfID) have helped to give Africa’s aquaculture industry a kick-start over the last decade.

According to FAO studies, about 9.2 million square kilometres (31 percent of the land area) of sub-Saharan Africa is suitable for smallholder fish farming, while 24 countries in the region are battling with food crises, twice as many as in 1990.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015 report released jointly by FAO and the World Food Programme (WFP) says that the East and Central Africa regions are most affected, with more than 30 percent of the people in the two regions classified as undernourished.

With fish farming gaining popularity, it could be the only means for many African to beat poverty and hunger. “Fish breeding has emancipated many of us from poverty,” said Banda.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Many Zimbabweans are turning to raising small livestock like goats which survive dry conditions to avert climate change impacts that have claimed their cattle over the years. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Jul 22 2015 (IPS)

With unusually hot and dry weather beating down on this Southern African nation, climate change and the accompanying drought have cost farmers much of their cattle herds. In response, many ranchers are turning to goats to preserve their livestock assets.

Climate change experts agree that breeding drought-tolerant animals like goats, which survive on shrubs and need less manpower to tend, is a better choice than high-maintenance cattle.

This is happening at a time the United Nations is urging nations the world over to take urgent action to combat climate change and manage its impact as part of the United Nations’ new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs are a universal set of 17 goals, targets and indicators that U.N. member states are expected to use as development benchmarks in framing their agendas and political policies over the next 15 years.“With rainfall patterns fluctuating in Zimbabwe, rearing cattle is becoming unsustainable. But breeding goats, which are drought-tolerant, can be much more rewarding” – Happison Chikova, an independent Zimbabwean environment and climate change expert

“With rainfall patterns fluctuating in Zimbabwe, rearing cattle is becoming unsustainable.  But breeding goats, which are drought-tolerant, can be much more rewarding,” Happison Chikova, an independent environment and climate change expert, who holds a degree in geography and environmental studies from Zimbabwe’s Midlands State University, told IPS.

“Plans are imminent to boost production of goats in Zimbabwe’s dry regions where small livestock like goats thrive and we have identified meat export markets in countries like South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria and the Middle East, where goat meat is a delicacy,” Chrispen Kadiramwando,  president of the Goat Breeders Association of Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Official statistics from the country’s Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises and Cooperative Development show that there are approximately 136,000 goat breeders countrywide, ranging from ordinary communal goat breeders to peri-urban goat breeders.

Livias Ncube, from the country’s Region 5, the hottest part of the country in Mwenezi district, is one of the Zimbabweans who have shifted to goat-breeding, raising and selling.

“There are hardly adequate rains in this part of the country, which is the driest area here in Zimbabwe, but I don’t use any stock feeds to nourish my goats as they adapt to the conditions, and they are even fatter,” Ncube told IPS.

Besides selling the goats locally, Ncube told IPS that he has now become an exporter of goat meat to neighbouring countries like South Africa and Mozambique.

“Although I maintain a sizeable herd of cattle after a series of droughts here which killed many cows, I now have a flock of 130 goats and I’m also earning money through selling these goats,” Ncube told IPS.

Ncube said he earns an estimated 1600 dollars each month through goat selling, with each goat trading at around 70 dollars.  His goats multiply at a faster pace than cows in spite of the dry conditions in this region.

Through the Zimbabwe Livestock for Accelerated Recovery and Improved Resiliency (ZRR) programme, supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Ncube learned how to manage and market his goats to improve their livelihoods.

ZRR is a programme that provides farmers with training in goat husbandry and health management, and trains community livestock workers on preventative and curative animal health techniques.

According to a research paper by the Matobo Research station on goat breeding and development activities in Zimbabwe, there are already more than two million goats in Zimbabwe, with nearly all goats (about 98 percent) reared in communal areas.

However, agricultural experts fear that indigenous goat breeders are not realising the monetary value vested in their small livestock.

“Thousands of farmers are into goat breeding here, but few have been able to ascertain the value in their animals due to lack of adequate information flow between the goat producers and the market, resulting in rural farmers ending up engaging in barter trade thereby stifling the commercialisation of goats,” Leonard Vazungu, a government agricultural extension officer, told IPS.

At the beginning of this year, the Zimbabwean government distributed 10,000 goats for breeding stock and aims to increase the number to 44 million by 2018.

This comes at a time when this Southern African nation’s cattle population has declined from 6.8 million in 2000 to the current 5.2 million.

“Investing in small livestock like goats, which have higher chances of survival in drought-prone areas, cautions the country against livestock loss,” Barnabas Mawire, country director for Environment Africa, told journalists a climate change workshop held this month in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare.

But this may not be easy without a national climate change policy.

Earlier this year, citing Zimbabwe’s growing climate change effects, non-constituency parliamentarian Annastancia Ndlovu pushed a motion for the formulation of a national climate change policy in the National Assembly.

Ndlovu is chairperson of Zimbabwe’s Environment, Water, Tourism and Hospitality Industry Parliamentary Portfolio Committee.

For Zimbabwe, financial shortfalls have not made the war against climate change any easier.

“The drop in government funding for climate change means we must work with other partners to move the climate change agenda forward and we are currently developing the national climate policy – the country’s first for which we need as many resources as we can get,” Veronica Gundu, principal environment officer for Zimbabwe’s Environment, Water and Climate ministry, told IPS.

However, with or without the national climate change policy, many Zimbabwean goat breeders like Ncube say they have moved single-handedly to address climate change impacts.

“We have moved on with our lives in the face of deepening climate change impacts and through goat breeding.  For us life goes on although climate change effects have claimed most of our cattle,” said Ncube.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Slums in a Kenyan shanty town. Africa has more than 570 million slum-dwellers, according to UN-Habitat, with over half of the urban population (61.7 percent) living in slums. Photo credit: Colin Crowley/CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, May 22 2015 (IPS)

Nompumelelo Tshabalala, 41, emerges from her dwarf ‘shack’ made up of rusty metal sheets and falls short of bumping into this reporter as she bends down to avoid knocking her head against the top part of her makeshift door frame.

“This has been my home for the past 16 years and I have lived here with my husband until his death in 2008 and now with my four children still in this two-roomed shack,” she told IPS.

Tshabalala lives in Diepkloof township in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a densely populated informal settlement – a euphemism for slums, where an estimated 15 million of the country’s approximately 52 million people live, according to UN-Habitat, the U.N. agency for human settlements.

Neighbouring Zimbabwe has an estimated 835,000 people living in informal settlements, according to Homeless International, a British non-governmental organisation focusing on urban poverty issues. “Local authorities in African countries should strike a balance in developing both rural and urban areas, creating employment so that people stop flocking to cities in huge numbers in search of jobs” – Precious Shumba, Harare Residents Trust

“Slum-dwelling here in Africa has become normal, a trend to live with, which is difficult to combat owing to numerous factors ranging from political corruption to economic inequalities necessitated by the growing gap between the rich and the poor,” Gilbert Nyaningwe, an independent development expert from Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Overall, out of an estimated population of 1.1 billion people, Africa has more than 570 million slum-dwellers, reports UN-Habitat, with over half of the urban population (61.7 percent) living in slums. Worldwide, notes the U.N. agency, the number of slum-dwellers now stands at 863 million and is set to shoot up to 889 million by 2020.

Development agencies in Africa say slum-dwelling remains a continental trend despite the U.N. Millennium Development Goals targets compelling all countries globally to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

According to the United Nations, that 100 million target “was met well in advance of the 2020 deadline”, and in African countries such as Egypt, Libya and Morocco the total number of urban slum dwellers has almost been halved, Tunisia has eradicated them completely, and Ghana, Senegal and Uganda have made steady progress, reducing their slum populations by up to 20 percent.

However, sub-Saharan Africa continues to have the highest rate of “slum incidence” of any major world region, with millions of people living in settlements characterised by some combination of overcrowding, tenuous dwelling structures, and poor or no access to adequate water and sanitation facilities.

Hector Mutharika, a retired economist in late Malawian President Kamuzu Banda’s government, blamed poor service delivery for the increase in slums in Africa.

“The increasing numbers of slum dwellers in Africa is due to poor service delivery here by local authorities which more often than not worry most about filling their pockets from local authorities’ coffers instead of channelling proper housing facilities to poor people, which then pushes homeless individuals into building slum settlements anywhere,” Mutharika told IPS.

For Rwandan civil society activist Otapiya Gundurama, the roots of the problem go far back in time. “Shanty homes in Africa are a result of the continent’s urban infrastructure set up during colonial rule at which time housing and economic diversification were limited, with everything related to urban governance centralised, while towns and cities were established to enhance the lifestyles and interests of a minority,” Gundurama told IPS.

Some opposition politicians in Africa, like Gilbert Dzikiti, president of Zimbabwe’s opposition Democratic Assembly for Restoration and Empowerment (DARE), see the trend of growing slums here as a result of government failure. “The perpetual rise of slum settlements in Africa testifies to persistent failure by governments here to invest in both rural and urban development,” Dzikiti told IPS.

African civil society leaders blame rising unemployment on the continent for the continuing rise in the number of slums. “Be it in cities or remote areas, slums in Africa are a result of huge numbers of jobless people who hardly have the means to upgrade their own dwellings,” Precious Shumba, director of the Harare Residents Trust in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

In order to reverse the trend of growing slums across the continent, Shumba said, “local authorities in African countries should strike a balance in developing both rural and urban areas, creating employment so that people stop flocking to cities in huge numbers in search of jobs.”

African slum-dwellers like South Africa’s Tshabalala accuse city authorities of ignoring the mushrooming of informal settlements for selfish reasons.

“Slums here are sources of cheap labour that keeps the wheels of industry turning, which is why local authorities are not concerned about our living standards because they [local authorities] are getting more and more revenue from firms thriving on our sweat,” Tshabalala told IPS.

Meanwhile, rising slum settlements in Africa are also having a knock-on effect for other development goals in the education and health sectors for example.

“The United Nations Millennium Development Goal of universal attainment of primary education for all by the end of this year is certainly set to be missed by a number of countries here in Africa, especially as many of these sprouting slum settlements have no schools to help the children growing in the communities get any education,” a senior official in Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education told IPS on the condition of anonymity for professional reasons.

At the same time, “there are often no toilets, no water and no clinics in most slum-dwelling areas here, exposing people to diseases, consequently derailing the MDG of halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases in informal settlements,” Owen Dliwayo of the Youth Dialogue Action Network, a lobby group in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Whether they like it or not, many Africans faced with the possibility of having to access water through prepaid meters have resorted to unprotected and often unclean sources of water because they cannot afford to pay. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, May 8 2015 (IPS)

While many countries appear to have met the U.N. Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, rights activists say that African countries which have taken to installing prepaid water meters have rendered a blow to many poor people, making it hard for them to access water.

“The goal to ensure that everyone has access to clean water here in Africa faces a drawback as a number of African countries have resorted to using prepaid water meters, which certainly bar the poor from accessing the precious liquid,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development, a Zimbabwean democracy lobby group, told IPS.

Prepaid water meters work in such a way that if a person cannot pay in advance, he or she will be unable to access water.Despite U.N. recognition that water is a human right, international financial institutions such as the World Bank argue that water should be allocated through market mechanisms to allow for full cost recovery from users

As a result, African rights activists like award-winning Terry Mutsvanga from Zimbabwe and other civil society organisations are against the idea of prepaid water meters.

“If one has to pay upfront before accessing water, then it would mean those in most need would be denied access,” Mutsvanga told IPS, adding that water is a global human right.

Mutsvanga was echoing the United Nations General Assembly which, in July 2010, emerged with a binding resolution on the human right to water and sanitation – but for Africa, the human right to water may be far from reality.

Laden with a population of approximately 1.1 billion, Africa’s 300 million people have no access to safe drinking water, according to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Many rights activists on the continent attribute Africa’s mounting water challenges partly to the advent of prepaid water meters.

“We already have hundreds of millions of people without access to clean water, and imagine the severity of the water challenge if water prepaid meters would reach everyone on the continent,” Mutsvanga said.

Over the years, prepaid water meters have been widely used in African countries like Namibia, Nigeria, Swaziland and Tanzania, as well as South Africa, where the meters which were rolled out in 1999 are currently in low-income areas.

Zimbabwe is currently conducting a pilot project aimed at installing the prepaid water meters, in towns and cities to begin with. And the country’s impoverished urban dwellers like 51-year old Tinago Chikasha are in panic mode, fearing the worst may be coming their way.

“Local authorities are pressing ahead with the idea of prepaid water meters, but jobless people like me have no money to make prepayments for water while we already have unpaid water bills running into thousands of dollars, which local authorities say they will deduct through all future water prepayments, meaning we run into the danger of having dry water taps for as long as we owe local authorities,” Chikasha told IPS.

In non-African countries like the United Kingdom, prepaid water meters are no longer being used after they were declared illegal in 1998 for public health reasons.

They were also abandoned in South Africa at one stage following a massive cholera outbreak, but were reintroduced and have replaced previously free communal standpipes in rural townships.

Despite U.N. recognition that water is a human right, international financial institutions such as the World Bank argue that water should be allocated through market mechanisms to allow for full cost recovery from users, and civil society activists like Melusi Khumalo in South Africa blame capitalist tendencies for necessitating the advent of prepaid water meters.

“Prepaid water meters are a result of such negative policies by institutions like the World Bank and they [prepaid water meters] deny water access to those in most need,” Khumalo, who is affiliated to Parktown North Residents’ Association in Johannesburg, told IPS.

In Zimbabwe, Mfundo Mlilo, chief executive officer of Combined Harare Residents’ Association (CHRA), told IPS: “We are vehemently against the prepaid meter project because it will not solve the problems of water delivery, and these prepaid water meters will not lead to residents receiving adequate safe and clean water, while the same prepaid water meters will also not lead to increase in revenue flows as the City [of Harare] claims.”

Last month, Harare’s Town Clerk Tendai Mahachi was reported by Zimbabwe’s Weekend Post as saying: “With these meters we expect roughly to save about 20-30 percent of the current costs we are incurring.”

According to Mahachi, at least 300 000 households in the Zimbabwean capital are scheduled to have prepaid water meters installed, while all new housing projects will be obliged to install meters.

Meanwhile, with prepaid water meters set to rake in big money for some of Africa’s local authorities, there are those like Nathan Jamela, an urban dweller in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, who fear the health consequences.

“We experienced the worst cholera outbreak in 2008, and we fear that if prepaid water meters are installed in every household here we will slide back to the crisis, with many people unable to afford to pay for water,” Jamela told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

An unidentified woman from Zimbabwe's Mashonaland Central Province at Manzou Farm packs her tobacco with the help of her children as they prepare to leave following an eviction order. “Land grabs in Africa have helped to perpetuate economic inequalities similar to the colonial era economic imbalances” – Terry Mutsvanga, Zimbabwean rights activist. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Apr 8 2015 (IPS)

There is a new scramble for Africa, with ordinary people facing displacement by the affluent and the powerful as huge tracts of land on the continent are grabbed by a minority, rights activists here say.

“Our forefathers cried foul during colonialism when their land was grabbed by colonialists more than a century ago, but today history repeats itself, with our own political leaders and wealthy countrymen looting land,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development (PYD), a democracy lobby group in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Civil society activist Owen Dliwayo, who is programme officer for the Youth Dialogue Action Network, another lobby group here, said multinational companies were to blame in most African countries for land seizures.“Our forefathers cried foul during colonialism when their land was grabbed by colonialists more than a century ago, but today history repeats itself, with our own political leaders and wealthy countrymen looting land” - Claris Madhuku, Zimbabwe’s Platform for Youth Development (PYD)

“I can give you an example of the Chisumbanje ethanol fuel project here in Chipinge. The project resulted in thousands of villagers being displaced to pave way for a sugar plantation so that thousands of hectares of land space could be created for the ethanol-producing project, consequently displacing poor villagers,” Dliwayo told IPS.

The 40,000 hectare sugar cane plantation which started in 2008 left more than 1,754 households displaced, according to PYD.

Fifteen years ago, Zimbabwe embarked on a controversial land reform programme to address colonial land-ownership imbalances, but activists have dismissed the move as disastrous for this Southern African nation.

“To say African nations like Zimbabwe addressed the land problem is untrue because land which African governments like Zimbabwe grabbed from white farmers was parcelled out to political elites at the expense of hordes of peasants here,” Terry Mutsvanga, an award-winning Zimbabwean rights activist, told IPS.

“Land grabs in Africa have helped to perpetuate economic inequalities similar to the colonial era economic imbalances,” he added.

In 2010, ZimOnline, a Zimbabwean news service, reported that about 2,200 well-connected black Zimbabwean elites controlled nearly 40 percent of the 14 million hectares of land seized from white farmers, with each farm ranging in size from 250 to 4,000 hectares, with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his family said to own 14 farms spanning at least 16,000 hectares.

Further up in East Africa, according to a 2011 presentation by Uganda’s Joshua Zake titled ‘Land Grabbing; silent pain for smallholder farmers in Uganda’, key characters of land grabbing in that country are also a few wealthy or powerful individuals against many vulnerable individuals or communities.

Zake is Senior Programme Officer Environment and Natural Resources and Coordinator of the Uganda Forestry Working Group at Environmental Alert.

According to Zake, land grabbing in Africa, particularly in Uganda, is promoted by the suspected presence of oil and other mineral resources beneath the land, such as in Uganda’s Amuru and Bulisa districts.

Zake’s remarks fit well with Zimbabwe’s situation, where more than 800 families were displaced by government from Chiadzwa in Manicaland Province after the discovery of diamonds there in 2005.

But land grabs in Africa may also be rampant in towns and cities, according to private land developers here.

“There is high demand of land for the construction of homes in towns and cities across Africa owing to the sharp rural-to-urban migration,” Etuna Nujoma, a private land developer based in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, told IPS.

“The wealthy and the powerful as well as the corrupt politicians are taking advantage of the land demand and therefore often parcelling out urban land amongst themselves for resale at exorbitant prices at the expense of the poor.”

Last year, irked by corrupt local authorities appearing to be dishing out land among themselves for resale, a group of informal settlement dwellers outside Namibia’s coastal holiday town of Swakopmund occupied municipal land with the intention of settling there.

With land grabs at their peak in Zimbabwe, members of the ruling Zanu-PF party are measuring out land pieces which they then give to people who pay in the range of 10 to 20 dollars for 30 to 50 square metres, depending on the areas in which they want to obtain housing stands, according to Andrew Nyanyadzi of Zanu-PF.

“We don’t need permission from local authorities for us to have access to the land which our liberation war leaders fought for. It’s our land and we are therefore selling at affordable prices to ruling party loyalists,” Nyanyadzi told IPS.

Houses that once sheltered farmworkers stand empty as lands are reallocated for commercial farming and other profit-making purposes in Africa. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

Consequently, lobby groups in Zimbabwe say havoc rules supreme in the country’s towns and cities.

“In Harare, land belonging to the city has been taken over by known militant groups of people with links to Zanu-PF, whom police here are even afraid to apprehend,” Precious Shumba, the director of Harare Residents Trust, told IPS.

“This is exactly what happened to Harare’s urban land in Hatcliff high density area, where housing cooperatives belonging to the ruling Zanu-PF leaders have grabbed council land using their political power,” Shumba said.

However, like other countries across Africa, Zimbabwe’s local authority by-laws prohibit individuals or organisations from selling land that does not legally belong to them.

Meanwhile, in Mozambique, the poor are losing out to foreign investors on land rights there despite the state being the sole owner of land.

Under the country’s constitution, there is no private land ownership – land and its associated resources are the property of the state – although the country’s Land Law grants private persons the right to use and benefit from the land whether or not they have a formal title. However, loopholes have emerged in the law.

A survey last year by Mozambique’s National Farmers’ Union showed that there was a colonial-era style land grab there, with politically-connected companies in the former Portuguese colony seizing hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland from peasants.

According to GRAIN, a non-profit organisation supporting small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, peasants in northern Mozambique have difficulties keeping their lands as foreign companies set up large-scale agribusinesses there.

The NGO says Mozambicans are being told that these projects will bring them benefits, but this is not how Caesar Guebuza and other Mozambican peasants see it.

“Agricultural investments by foreign companies have not benefitted us, but rather we have lost land to these companies investing here and we are being treated as aliens in our own land,” Guebuza told IPS.

Economists blame the Mozambican government for favouring foreign investors, who now possess large swathes of state land.

“The Mozambican government is known for siding with foreign investors who now occupy huge tracts of land for their own use as local peasants lose out on land, which is their birth right,” Kingston Nyakurukwa, a Zimbabwean independent economist, told IPS.

With foreign investors acquiring huge tracts of land ahead of locals in Africa, ActionAid Tanzania earlier this year said that through the European Union, United States and several European countries, the European Union’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition plans to invest 7.57 billion euros in agricultural development and food security across Africa.

However, said Nyakurukwa, these will be business ventures that will strip Africans of their hard-earned money as they buy agricultural produce.

Similarly, in Nigeria, Mozambique and Tanzania, smallholder farmers are being moved off their land, paving the way for sugarcane, rice and other export crop-growing projects backed by New Alliance money, according to ActionAid Tanzania’s findings.

For Africans in Tanzania, big money might be gradually rendering them landless.

“Money from investors seem to be elbowing us out of our native lands here in Tanzania as no one has been offered the choice of whether to be resettled or not as we are being forcibly offered money or land for resettlement,” Moses Malunguja, a disgruntled peasant from Tanzania, told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Distributing condoms in prisons and schools has set off a heated debate, rendering the fight against HIV/AIDS a challenge ahead of this year's U.N. deadline for nations to halt its spread. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/ IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Mar 28 2015 (IPS)

Tatenda Chivata, a 16-year old from Zimbabwe’s Mutoko rural district, was suspended from school for an entire three-month academic term after he was found with a used condom stashed in his schoolbag.

Regerai Chigodora, a 34-year-old prisoner at a jail in Harare, had his 36-year sentence stretched to 45 years after he was caught with used condoms in prison early this year.

With restrictions blocking the distribution of condoms in schools and prisons in Africa, health experts say the continent’s opportunity to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in line with the U.N. Millennium Development Goals may be squandered,

“It will be hard for Africa to win the war against HIV/AIDS if certain groups of people like students and prisoners are being skipped from preventive measures,” Tamasha Nyerere, an independent HIV/AIDS counsellor based in Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital, told IPS.

Human rights activists in Zimbabwe say more cases of youths like Chivata and prisoners like Chigodora may be going unreported in countries where condom use in jails and schools is anathema.With restrictions blocking the distribution of condoms in schools and prisons in Africa, health experts say the continent’s opportunity to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in line with the U.N. Millennium Development Goals may be squandered.

“It’s indeed disturbing how hard we have worked as Africa to fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS yet we have not been so pragmatic in our bid to institute preventive measures in schools and jails, where most of our African governments have vehemently refused to allow condoms to be distributed with the common excuse that they promote homosexuality in jails and sexual immorality in schools,” Elvis Chuma, a gay activist in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, told IPS.

Zimbabwean prisoner Chigodora agreed, telling IPS that “whether or not authorities here like it, homosexuality is rife in jails and even if we may smuggle in condoms to use secretly, if you get caught like in my case, you will be in for serious trouble.”

Schoolchildren in Africa like Zimbabwe’s Chivata have to contend with secret use of condoms in school. Their only crime is that they are underage, said Chivata.

“I’m serving a suspension from school because I was caught with a condom I used during sex with my girlfriend, but the same teachers teach us about use of protection if we get tempted to engage in sex. Now I’m wondering if I was wrong using a condom. Perhaps I could have gone undetected if I had opted to have unprotected sex,” he told IPS.

Under Zimbabwe’s Legal Age of Majority Act, any Zimbabwean under the age of 18 years is a minor, while a person between the age of 16 years and 18 years is defined as a young person under the Children’s Protection and Adoption Act.

Sodomy is also a punishable offence in Zimbabwe, which rights activists say, makes it difficult for this Southern African nation and other African nations to distribute condoms in prisons.

“African countries like Zimbabwe are being cornered by their own laws which bar them from dishing out condoms to prisoners and school children,” Tonderai Zivhu, chairperson of the Open Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS, a lobby group in Masvingo, Zimbabwe’s oldest town, told IPS.

South Africa and Namibia may be the only two out of Africa’s 54 countries that have adopted HIV/AIDS preventive measures in schools and jails.

In 2007, South Africa’s new Children’s Act came into effect, giving children 12 years and older the right to obtain contraceptives. The country’s Department of Correctional Services also provides condoms to inmates.

In Namibia, the country’s policy on HIV/AIDS states that all convicted prisoners awaiting trial and inmates are entitled to have access to the same HIV-related prevention information, education, voluntary counselling and testing, means of prevention, treatment, care and support as is available to the general population.

Other African countries, however, seem unclear about their position on condoms use in jails and schools.

Last year, the government of Rwanda confirmed the prevalence of homosexuality in prisons, but was non-committal on whether or not it would start distributing condoms in its correctional facilities.

This year, Zimbabwe’s Primary and Secondary Education Minister Lazarus Dokora told parliament that parents were free to pack condoms for their children in their schoolbags, but that the government would not allow them to be openly distributed at schools.

“We must say children are in school to learn and be initiated for certain life skills, and when it comes to condoms, you are the guardian of your child and you must have an intimate connection with your child so that when you pack their school luggage and prepare their books you can also pack condoms,” Dokora had said.

This laissez-faire approach has incensed certain African indigenous pro-culture activists who have been vocal in their calls against condom distribution in prisons and schools.

“Distributing condoms in prisons and in schools will render African governments accomplices to the commission of the crime of sodomy and sexual immorality among school-going children, which is against our cultural values and norms as Africans,” Bupe Mwansa, head of the Culture and Traditions Conservation Association in Zambia, an indigenous pro-culture lobby group, told IPS.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), an estimated 3.2 million children lived with HIV at the end of 2013, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, with approximately 145,000 HIV-positive children from Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat) states that Zimbabwe has a total of 18,000 prisoners, with 28 percent of these living with HIV and AIDS.

In South Africa, an estimated 41.4 percent of that country’s 166,267 prisoners are also living with HIV/AIDS, based on statistics from the Ministry of Health there, despite the country being the only African nation that does not outlaw homosexuality.

Although other African governments admit there are sexual activities going on in schools and prisons, they remain hesitant to allow condom distribution in them.

“School children engage in premarital and often unprotected sex, yes we know, and prisoners also have unprotected anal sex, but presently there is nothing we can do as government to address these challenges because our laws do not allow underage children to engage in sex while homosexual, now rife in our jails, is also unlawful,” a top Zimbabwean government official speaking on the condition of anonymity told PS.

But for human rights doctors like Nomalanga Zwane in Johannesburg, fighting HIV/AIDS in schools and jails requires drastic measures.

“If school kids are left on their own with the belief that they are not engaging in sex because they are barred by being underage, we are fighting a losing battle against HIV/AIDS because the same school pupils will spread the disease even outside school while prison inmates with no access to condoms will also one day come out of jail and further spread the disease,” Zwane told IPS.

Zimbabwe’s ex-convicts like 37-year-old Jimson Gwatidzo, now an ardent campaigner for the distribution of condoms in jails after he contracted HIV in jail, sees no credible reason why some African governments forbid condoms in prisons “in the face of rampant rape-induced HIV/AIDS infections behind prison walls.”

“It is time for governments across Africa to scrap anti-sodomy laws to allow for the distribution of condoms in prisons and be able to fight HIV/AIDS spread in jails without legal barriers,” Gwatidzo told IPS.

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris    

Bamboo nursery in Africa. There is debate over whether commercially-grown bamboo could help reverse the effects of deforestation and land degradation that has spread harm across the African continent. Credit: EcoPlanet Bamboo

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Feb 28 2015 (IPS)

Deforestation is haunting the African continent as industrial growth paves over public commons and puts more hectares into private hands.

According to the Environmental News Network, a web-based resource, Africa loses forest cover equal to the size of Switzerland every year, or approximately 41 000 square kilometres.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is also on record as saying the African continent loses over four million hectares (9.9 million acres) of natural forest annually, which is twice the world’s average deforestation rate. And deforestation, according to UNEP, accounts for at least one-fifth of all carbon emissions globally.

The dangerous pace of deforestation has triggered a market-based solution using bamboo, a fast-growing woody grass that grows chiefly in the tropics.“If grown in the right way, and under the right sustainable management system, in certain areas, bamboo can play a role in reversing ecosystem degradation” – Troy Wiseman, CEO of EcoPlanet Bamboo

“The idea of bamboo plantations is a good one, but it triggers fear of widespread starvation as poor Africans may be lured into this venture for money and start ditching food crops” – Terry Mutsvanga, Zimbabwean human rights activist

EcoPlanet Bamboo, a multinational company, has been expanding its operations in Africa while it promotes the industrialisation of bamboo as an environmentally attractive alternative fibre for timber manufacturing industries that currently rely on the harvesting of natural forests for their raw resource. The company’s operations extend to South Africa, Ghana and Nicaragua.

For EcoPlanet and some African environmentalists, commercially-grown bamboo could help reverse the effects of deforestation and land degradation that has spread harm across the African continent.

“If grown in the right way on land that has little value for other uses, and if managed under the right sustainable management system, bamboo can play a role in restoring highly degraded ecosystems and connecting remnant forest patches, while reducing pressure on remaining natural forests,” Troy Wiseman, CEO of EcoPlanet Bamboo, told IPS.

Happison Chikova, a Zimbabwean independent environmentalist who holds a Bachelor of Science Honours Degree in Geography and Environmental Studies from the Midlands State University here, agreed.

“Bamboo plants help fight climate change because of their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide and act as carbon sinks while the plants can also be used as a source for wood energy, thereby reducing the cutting down of indigenous trees, and also the fact that bamboo can be used to build shelter, reduces deforestation in the communal areas where there is high demand of indigenous trees for building purposes,” Chikova told IPS.

But land rights activists are sceptical about their claims.

“The idea of bamboo plantations is a good one, but it triggers fear of widespread starvation as poor Africans may be lured into this venture for money and start ditching food crops,” Terry Mutsvanga, an award-winning Zimbabwean human rights activist, told IPS.

Mutsvanga’s fears of small sustainable farms losing out to foreign-owned export-driven plantations were echoed by Nnimmo Bassey, a renowned African environmentalist and head of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, an ecological think-tank and advocacy organisation.

“No one can seriously present a bamboo plantation as a cure for deforestation,” Bassey, who is based in Nigeria, told IPS, “and unfortunately the United Nations system sees plantations as forests and this fundamentally faulty premise gives plantation owners the latitude to see their forest-gobbling actions as something positive.”

“If we agree that forests are places with rich biodiversity, it is clear that a plantation cannot be the same as a forest,” added Bassey.

Currently, bamboo is widely grown in Africa by small farmers for multiple uses. The Mount Selinda Women’s Bamboo Association, an environmental lobby group in Chipinge, Zimbabwe’s eastern border town, for example, received funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) through the Livelihood and Economic Development Programme in order to create sustainable rural livelihoods and enterprises by using bamboo resources.

Citing its many benefits, IFAD calls bamboo the “poor man’s timber.”

Further, notes IFAD, bamboo contributes to rural poverty reduction, empowers women and can be processed into boats, kitchen utensils, incense sticks, charcoal and footwear. It also provides food and nutrition security as food and animal feed.

Currently, EcoPlanet Bamboo’s footprint in Africa includes 5,000 acres in Ghana in a public-private partnership to develop commercial bamboo plantations. In South Africa’s Eastern Cape, certification is under way to convert out of production pineapple plantations to bamboo plantations for the production of activated carbon and bio-charcoal to be sold to local and export markets.

Environmentalist Bassey worries whether all these acres were unutilised, as the company claims. “Commercial bamboo, which will replace natural wood forests and may require hundreds of hectares of land space, may not be so good for peasant farmers in Africa,” Bassey said.

EcoPlanet Bamboo, however, insists it does not convert or plant on any land that could compete with food security.

“(We) convert degraded land into certified bamboo plantations into diverse, thriving ecosystems, that can provide fibre on an annual basis, and yet maintain their ecological integrity,” said Wiseman.

Wiseman’s claim, however, did not move long-time activist Bassey and one-time winner of the Right Livelihood Prize, an alternative to the Nobel Peace Prize, who questioned foreign ownership of Africa’s resources as not always to Africa’s benefit.

“Plantations are not owned by the weak in society,” said Bassey. “They are owned by corporations or rich individuals with strong economic and sometimes political connections. This could mean displacement of vulnerable farmers, loss of territories and means of livelihoods.”

Edited by Lisa Vives/ Phil Harris   

Street vendors in Africa reflect the income inequality that pervades the continent, much of it due to corruption. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Feb 21 2015 (IPS)

Reports this year of illicit moneys from African countries stashed in a Swiss bank – indicating that corruption lies behind much of the income inequality that affects the continent – have grabbed international news headlines.

Secret bank accounts in the HSBC’s Swiss private banking arm unearthed this year by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) were said to hold over 100 billion dollars, some of which came from Africa, including some of the poorest nations on the continent.

When these funds leave the region, they deny the very nations that need them most.

For example, at least 57 clients of the Swiss HSBC bank associated with Uganda were reported to be worth at least 159 million dollars. The World Bank has estimated that Uganda loses more than 174.5 million dollars in corruption annually.“Income inequality begins with our political leaders and corrupt wealthy business people who, more often than not, illicitly own the resources of the [African] continent” – Claris Madhuku, Platform for Youth Development, Zimbabwe

It is not a crime for Africans to have a Swiss bank account. But questions are now being raised by local tax offices as to whether the proper taxes were paid on the stashed amounts.

In South Africa, the head of the Revenue Service, Vlok Symington, said his office was analysing the information. “Early indications are that some of these account holders may have utilised their HSBC accounts to evade local and/or international tax obligations,” Symington was reported as saying by the South Africa Sunday Times.

“Income inequality begins with our political leaders and corrupt wealthy business people who, more often than not, illicitly own the resources of the continent,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development, a democracy lobby group in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Diamonds, for example, which have made many traders wealthy, are often mined by the poorest of the poor, treated almost as slaves in war-torn African countries, despite the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, which was established in 2003 to prevent the flow of these diamonds.

“It’s a case of greed and corruption,” thundered Zimbabwean independent political analyst, Ernst Mudzengi. “Africa has parasitic politicians who are primarily concerned with self-centred political power and economic gain as ordinary Africans remain at the periphery in poverty,” Mudzengi told IPS.

Development experts here attribute income inequalities to the continent’s lax anti-corruptions laws.

“African countries do not have sound anti-corruption laws and politicians and the rich amass too much power exceeding even the powers of the police here, leaving them with the liberty to accumulate wealth overnight by whatever means without being questioned,” Nadege Kabuga, an independent development expert in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, told IPS

“It’s shocking how huge banks such as HSBC have created a system for enormously profiteering at the expense of impoverished ordinary people, worse by assisting numerous millionaires from Africa in particular to evade tax payment, disadvantaging the already poor,” Zenzele Manzini, an independent economist based in Mbabane, the capital of Swaziland, told IPS .

“Very often, government directors, ministers and their secretaries are the ones globetrotting on government businesses, awarding themselves huge allowances and the lower government workers remain stuck at the periphery with no extra benefits besides the meagre salaries they get monthly,” a top Zimbabwean government official in the Ministry of Labour, told IPS on the condition of anonymity, afraid of victimisation.

Writing for Financial Transparency Coalition, a global alliance of civil society organisations and governments working to address inequalities in the financial system, Koen Roovers, the coalition’s European Union (EU) Lead Advocate, asked the deeper question: “How do we prevent this in the first place?”

To catch fraud sooner rather than later, capacity in developing countries must be increased, Roovers said. “The scale of the challenge is significant: the UK-based charity Christian Aid has estimated that sub-Saharan Africa would need around 650,000 more tax officials to reach the world average.”

Rich states have promised help to poor countries to build the capacity they need, but these commitments have yet to be honoured.

Researchers at the U.S.-based Global Financial Integrity, a non-profit organisation working to curtail illicit financial flows, said developing nations have lost almost one trillion dollars through illicit channels.

Without clearly defined measures to curb income inequalities, economists say the African continent may be headed for the worst levels of poverty set to hit even harder at the already poor.

“Africa may keep facing perpetual poverty amid rising income inequalities because governments here have no institutions and expertise to identify and halt money laundering by corrupt wealthy individuals and politicians evading tax,” Zimbabwean independent economist, Kingston Nyakurukwa, told IPS.

According to Roovers, “criminals and their enablers are creative, so the only way to prevent future scandals is to shed light on what criminals and tax dodgers are trying to hide. This is why online registers of assets for all legal persons and arrangements are necessary and should be publicly available.

“If we turn a blind eye to these loopholes,” he added, “economic development for all will continue to be undermined by illicit actors looking to exploit them.”

Edited by Lisa Vives/Phil Harris