Black Communists living like Kings: What’s hiding behind the mist of coronavirus lockdown in Zim?
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Video & Audio: Gods of War: Confederates: Mind Games when White men are outnumbered
Today we look at deception and mind games in war. Our topic is the American Civil War, especially the Confederates who were outnumbered and outgunned. Unlike the Union, the Confederates lacked many things. But despite these serious disadvantages, the Confederates were amazingly creative, daring and brave.
On these cold winter mornings when the temperatures are down into single digits and thick white mist conceals dips and valleys, Zimbabweans aren’t snuggled up warm in their beds – they are out looking for water.
Boreholes with hand pumps, wells with ropes or murky shallow pools in what’s left of our urban wetlands have become the new gathering places on these early mornings. Buckets, cans, 20-litre containers, wheelbarrows and trolleys are the tools of the dawn brigade and these days whole families are involved, including countless school children who aren’t at school and don’t have any books or guidelines from government, schools or teachers on what they should be doing 74 days into Covid-19 lockdown.
The online learning revolution is just a strange term to hundreds of thousands of kids without computers or internet access here, while they struggle home with buckets of water and [the load getting heavier] with every step.
Once the water is secured, it’s food that everyone’s looking for. In the last fortnight a box of 100 tea bags has gone from Z$59 to Z$159 and a loaf of bread from Z$40 to Z$69, while supplies of sugar and maize meal have disappeared altogether. A litre of fuel has increased from Z$21 to Z$29 and the queues stretch for kilometres as yet again the supply chain has been choked.
As I write, the official exchange rate is 25 Zimbabwe dollars to one US dollar, but on the black market it’s 81 to one.
And so, while our days are filled with grinding struggle just to survive, most people can’t pay attention to what’s really going on in Zimbabwe behind the thick mist of our ‘indefinite’ Covid-19 lockdown.
Some of the latest obscenities
The three Movement for Democratic Change women who were abducted from a police station, tortured, sexually abused and dumped on the roadside after they protested about the degree of hunger in the country, have been arrested, accused of lying about being tortured by police.
This week nine UN special rapporteurs called for Zimbabwe to drop the earlier charges against the women (holding a protest during Covid-19 lockdown) and stop the pattern of disappearances and torture in the country, saying there were 49 cases of abduction and torture in Zimbabwe last year. Meanwhile Zimbabwe’s home affairs minister said the “fake abductions” were being coordinated with some foreign embassies and that authorities would tackle those spreading a “medley of falsehoods”.
Read:
Zim’s lack of Covid-19 assistance laid bare
5 slices of bread and willing participants in their own torture
Last week’s Independent newspaper revealed that lieutenant-colonels, colonels and brigadier-generals are among officers who benefitted from the recent acquisition of ‘top of the range’ vehicles worth millions of US dollars. One military source told the newspaper: “What is worth noting is that brigadier-generals received Toyota Land Cruisers and those who are retiring at the age of 60 were given the option to buy their old vehicles at a token price.” The Independent wrote that the last time this happened, a year ago, ‘old’ vehicles were valued at Z$500, the equivalent of less than US$10.
That new luxury vehicles are again being purchased at a time when the government is begging for US$200 million from the World Bank and IMF to mitigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is just beyond words.
Last week the Zanu-PF MP for Murehwa West pleaded in parliament that legislators be allowed to get medical treatment outside Zimbabwe: “On a point of privilege, Madam Speaker, we have noted that MPs are not feeling well and some of them are not even coming to work because their medical aid is no longer functional,” the MP said, asking: “Is it not possible to work out something so that they can go outside the country to get treated as MPs?”
That an MP would plead to be allowed to go out of the country for treatment when his own constituents, the very people who voted him into office, can’t even afford their blood pressure pills, insulin or heart pills, is obscene. Perhaps the MP doesn’t know that one single injection for prostate cancer, widespread in Zimbabwe, is today priced at Z$30 400 (R6 483).
There are many other things going on behind the mist of lockdown in Zimbabwe, including frightening reports about conditions in Covid-19 quarantine centres: one meal a day, people beaten if they complain, inadequate facilities, bribes to get test results and worrying rates of infection in the centres.
Then came a surprising press conference by the minister of home affairs, denying that a coup was about to happen in the country. And then, perhaps the biggest shadow in the mist, is the unfolding scandal of what people are calling Covid-Gate, relating to the procurement of Covid-19 rapid test kits with links to “dubious foreign-registered companies”; hugely inflated prices of Covid-19 medicinal and surgical supplies, and links to ‘political elites’. Transparency International (Zimbabwe) says that “prices of these goods are highly inflated, indicating a risk of corrupt practices that have been observed during the pandemic.”
In Zimbabwe, corruption, privilege and an expectation of entitlement by people in positions of leadership know no bounds, and tragically the coronavirus pandemic has provided yet another convenient misty smokescreen for their activities.
S.Africa: Animal sex: Black man arrested, goat dies
The Goats were screaming! Villagers at Ga-Ratisi in the Northern Province holding an all-night vigil arrested a naked man early on Sunday morning, who is believed to have committed bestiality with a goat which later died.
