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Chofamba

November 28, 2007

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Ian Smith denied our African humanity

BORN at the height of the national liberation struggle in the late 1970s, I grew up in post-independence Zimbabwe. Save for hazy memories, I cannot claim to possess a concrete self-consciousness of life under Ian Douglas Smith’s white supremacist Rhodesian Front government. However, having been born to young and unemployed school-leavers of peasant background, my life as a toddler was to be circumscribed in a brutally physical way by the paranoid security policies of Smith’s government.

I spent my early childhood in one of Smith’s concentration camps in a small village called Chibuwe in Chipinge district, on the country’s eastern border with Mozambique. This was a major operational zone for the nationalist guerillas fighting for black self-determination. In order to cut off the guerillas from accessing logistical and political support from the masses, Smith’s government herded African villagers living within such areas into concentration camps, which they euphemistically called ‘protec…

Is big money distorting American democracy?

Tsvangirai’s Prime Ministerial baby mamas

There's something incongruous about how Zimbabwean independent media journalists at home and in the Diaspora are reporting the debacle surrounding Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's marriage-that-allegedly-never-was. Whilst the state-controlled Herald has, predictably, gleefully reported on the 'union' and its attendant soap operatic saga, the independent press has bizarrely preoccupied itself with efforts to ‘uncover’ the ‘truth’ about the origins of claims that Tsvangirai had married his lover, Locadia Tembo, a wealthy businesswoman hailing from a traditionally ZANU PF family and whose sister is an MP in President Mugabe’s party.
Newzimbabwe.com published a story entitled The curious case of Tsvangirai’s marriage on Thursday which sought to reconcile the gaps between the Tembo family’s claims of a marriage between their daughter and the Prime Minister on the one hand, and denials of such a union by Tsvangirai’s spokesman Luke Tamborinyoka on the other. The story qu…

Zimbabwe's indigenisation policy confounds investors

Zimbabwe’s economic indigenisation programme has rendered the country a very uncertain place to do business for white nationals and foreign investors. Harangued by bellicose threats of closure one minute, and mollified with promises of investment protection the next by a government apparently playing good cop-bad cop with foreign-owned banks and mining conglomerates, it is no wonder that they should feel thoroughly confounded.
The controversial black economic empowerment legislation was passed by a majority Zanu PF parliament in 2007, placing statutory requirements on targeted businesses to cede at least 51 per cent of their equity to black Zimbabweans. The deadline for mines to comply with these regulations expired on 24 September, and the fledgling economy has not seen more unpredictable times.
Driven by President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF party, the indigenisation programme has faced its most trenchant opposition from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who formed a coalition gov…

No improvement in state of rule of law in Zimbabwe – experts

The state of the rule of law in Zimbabwe has not improved and the culture of impunity on the part of the police and the state security forces remains unchanged since the signing of the Global Political Agreement in 2008, according to a report by international legal experts.

Masterminds of violence: Zimbabwe's notorious security chiefs
The report, "A Place in the Sun", follows an investigative mission to Zimbabwe late last year by the Commonwealth Lawyers' Association, the Bar Council, the Bar Human Rights Committee, and Avocats Sans Frontières. The mission was told by interviewees that the state of the rule of law had actually grown worse.
Incidents of extra-judicial killings, kidnapping, torture and other serious human rights abuses have been pervasive in Zimbabwe for years but assumed epidemic proportions during the Presidential run-off elections of June 2008. Such human rights abuses continue to occur and they also remain un-investigated by the authorities.
The repor…

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