Cathy Buckle's Weekly Letter From Zimbabwe !

Visible Echo
Saturday 14th July 2007

Dear Family and Friends,

Shoe polish, dishwashing liquid and light bulbs were the three most plentiful products in a major supermarket in my home town by this weekend. This isn't a little family shop on the corner, its a branch of a national supermarket chain with outlets in most towns and cities around the country. Almost none of the basics of daily life are available a fortnight after enforced price cuts. Imagine trying to run a home, school or institution with no rice, flour, maize meal, margarine, meat, milk or eggs. No salt, sugar, biscuits, porridge, dried fish, dried beans or powdered milk. No soap, candles or matches - and this at a time when electricity cuts are occurring daily and last for 15 hours at a time.

Behind the great mountains of shoe polish there are other products too but mostly not items in regular use and even their stocks are dwindling fast. These goods stand in long and plaintive lines, side by side along the front of the shelf, remove one and you can see the back wall - a visible echo shouts at you!

Mid week it was announced that the licences of all private abattoirs had been cancelled and that all slaughtering and meat supplies had been taken over by the virtually defunct government owned Cold Storage Commission. In Marondera the CSC has been completely closed for at least the last five years but on Thursday hundreds of people jostled outside their premises. It was mayhem: the first meat in the town for a fortnight. No one questioned what conditions were like inside the buildings which have stood deserted all these years. No one asked if fixtures and fittings had been replaced, if the buildings had been fumigated, if corroded pipes had been changed. No one even asked to see the paperwork proving that the premises had been checked by Health Inspectors or if the buildings had been declared hygienic and fit to handle meat for human consumption. It was utter chaos and the local department of Health said nothing and did nothing.

Towards the end of the week almost 2000 businessmen around the country had been arrested for not cutting their prices. Most buses and public transport vehicles had stopped operating as fuel supplies ran out and transporters were ordered to charge prices way below their costs. The government price cutting task force have now announced that medicines are next in line to have prices cut and a cold panic is spreading amongst people on life preserving medicines - as supplies of drugs run down and are not replaced, how will they survive?

Zimbabwe is on a knife edge and everywhere you look there is a potential crisis unfolding. Queues containing many hundreds of people form rapidly as a rumour circulates. Perhaps there is sugar, salt or flour and suddenly people are running to line up at the back of supermarkets, outside locked butchery doors, in alleyways, along pavements. The lines this week have contained more people than most of us have ever seen before. Four people standing abreast and then four behind them and so on and the mass goes around the corner, around the block and back on itself again. This is what 80% unemployment looks like, and also the face of the collapse of a country which just seven years ago was a major regional food exporter.

Until next week, thanks for reading,
love cathy