ZIMBABWE - LETTER FROM THE DIASPORA !

10th October 2008.

Dear Friends,

I have been writing this Letter from the Diaspora for one whole year now. This is Letter No 52. I have no idea who reads the letter or whether it makes any difference but for the first time in 52 weeks I have to admit that I am lost for words. There are no words to express my horror and disgust at what is happening in Zimbabwe. Horror at the level of hunger and poverty being experienced by ordinary Zimbabweans and disgust at the politicians who continue to play their childish power games while all around them the country sinks further and further into the abyss.
The World Food Programme yesterday issued an appeal for 140 million dollars to save 5 million Zimbabweans from imminent starvation. With the international economies in such disarray and billions being spent by governments to rescue failing banks it is hard to see this WFP appeal succeeding in raising sufficient funds to rescue Zimbabwe from its self-inflicted wounds. The rainy season is less than a month away in Zimbabwe and there is still no seed and no fertilizer in the bankrupt country for the new agricultural season. The country faces another disastrous crop failure which Robert Mugabe will no doubt once again blame on sanctions and greedy white farmers. In a carefully researched piece in the UK Times this week Jan Raath estimated that less that 400 white farmers of the original 5000 remain on their farms. Since the Agreement was signed on September 15th some 60 farmers have been forced, often at gunpoint to abandon their farms. 'Land grabbers' Jan Raath call them. " Army officers, magistrates, agricultural officials, local government officials are walking into homesteads and settling in, commandeering farmers' vehicles, furniture and the food in their fridges." All this while the people of Zimbabwe die slowly of starvation, of AIDS or water-borne diseases. The forthcoming rainy season can only increase the misery as malaria takes its annual toll and health care system collapses for lack of resources. A whole generation is being wiped out while the land grabbers and fat cats look the other way, blind and deaf to the cries of the suffering masses.

What of the next generation? The pupils at primary schools, the bright young men and women at universities and colleges who will be the future leaders of the country. What hope for them? This week four major institutions of higher learning failed to open their doors for the new semester citing 'budgetary constraints', the collapse of basic infrastructure and the absence of lecturers who, along with secondary and primary school teachers, have fled the country in their thousands. In educational terms, 2008 has been declared a 'non-year'. There will be no Grade Seven exams and possibly no O's or A levels either. Pupils and college students will just have to repeat a year in 2009 they are told. And what guarantee do they have that things will be any different next year? Without a political solution, nothing will change. So while Mugabe and Zanu PF continue to hold on to power there is no end to Zimbabwe's misery in sight. The official inflation rate is an unimaginable 232 million percent, twenty times more than it was a month ago. None of Gideon Gono's attempts to bring down inflation and rescue the economy have succeeded; in fact; they have made things worse. The sight of food outlets laden with goods for sale in foreign currency right next to empty shelves for local currency sales proves the point.

The country is being held to ransom by Robert Mugabe and his gang of thieving supporters who continue to plunder the country's resources while the people die a slow and lingering death. More than anything else, it is the total lack of humanity, the callous indifference to the suffering of the African people by the president and his party that leaves me lost for words. In his determination to cling to power at all costs Robert Mugabe is committing silent genocide while Africa and the rest of world look the other way. There are no words to convey that horror.

Yours in the (continuing) struggle. PH.