Zimbabwe’s main labour union begins on Friday a two-day meeting to decide whether to go ahead with planned mass strikes to protest against galloping inflation and grinding poverty. Zimbabweans are battling to make ends meet as the country goes through its seventh consecutive year of economic recession and astronomical inflation, which hit an all-time world record rate of 1 042,9% last week.
Police have found the decomposing bodies of 13 people who drowned in the Limpopo River while apparently trying to cross from Zimbabwe into neighbouring South Africa earlier this year, state media reported on Tuesday. It was not clear if those found were part of a larger group who were reported to have drowned in the flood waters of the Limpopo in January.
Zimbabwe’s agriculture minister has predicted that the country will harvest its total annual requirement of 1,8-million tonnes of maize, contradicting aid agencies who believe that well below that amount will be reaped, reports said on Tuesday. Joseph Made told a Parliamentary portfolio committee that this year’s harvest would ”significantly improve” .
Police in the Zimbabwean capital Harare have rounded up more than 10Â 000 squatters and street children and plan to send them to rural areas, reports said on Monday. Under a fresh clean-up operation codenamed Round-Up, the police netted 10Â 224 people, many of them vagrants, touts and what the authorities call ”disorderly elements”.
Winnie Gondo has to crouch to get in and out of her ”house”, a dome-like structure the height of an average primary school boy, as she and thousands of Zimbabweans still reel in the aftermath of the country’s infamous clean-up operation, one year on. The 43-year-old widow’s home was destroyed during Zimbabwe’s blitz in May 2005.
Twenty-one people appeared in court in southern Zimbabwe after the discovery of a flourishing marijuana plantation, reports said on Thursday. The 21 are part of a group of 29 arrested and charged under Zimbabwe’s Dangerous Drugs Act, said the state-controlled Herald newspaper.
As Zimbabwe’s public health services crumble, the only two state-owned radiotherapy machines are out of action and await repairs, leaving cancer patients without vital treatment, state media reported on Thursday. Impoverished patients were unable to afford alternative treatment or travel to neighbouring countries, said The Herald newspaper.
Zimbabwe civic society will next week commemorate Operation Murambatsvina, the government’s controversial urban-renewal exercise last year under which armed police and soldiers demolished townships and city backyard cottages, leaving close to a million people homeless.
A white Zimbabwean security expert who has been in custody for two months on conspiracy charges has finally had a trial date set for the end of June, reports said on Wednesday. President Robert Mugabe’s government maintains that Michael Hitschmann was at the heart of a terrorist plot that could have seen the Zimbabwean leader assassinated.
The controversial United States ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell, has again defied Harare by publicly accusing the government of ”burgeoning corruption”. Last November, Zimbabwe threatened to invoke an unspecified clause in the Vienna Convention on diplomatic guidelines to expel Dell for ”meddling” in Zimbabwe’s internal affairs.
The authorities in Zimbabwe, who are battling to restore lost production on farms, are scheduled this week to visit new black farmers in the west of the country to see if they qualify for 99-year land leases, local reports said on Monday. Members of the National Land Board are to visit farmers in Matabeland North and South, Lands Minister Didymus Mutasa told the state-controlled The Herald newspaper.
About 100 women who had protested massive increases in school fees were being held by police on Friday, police and organisers of the protest said. The protesters were arrested in the second city of Bulawayo where they marched eight blocks to government education offices on Thursday to demand the lowering of school fees.
A Cabinet minister in Zimbabwe has categorically denied the government is inviting white farmers dispossessed during the controversial land reform campaign back to their farms, it was reported here on Friday. ”No white farmer is being invited back,” State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa told the privately-owned Zimbabwe Independent newspaper.
Zimbabwe players and officials are demanding that the chief executive of the International Cricket Council resigns because he failed to address the sporting crisis in the country. The chairperson of all seven provinces, players’ representatives and former Zimbabwe Cricket directors accuse Malcolm Speed of failing in his duty by refusing to intervene.
Desperately needed anti-retroviral drugs for HIV/Aids patients are running out in Zimbabwe, reports said on Wednesday. Zimbabwe has been hard-hit by the HIV/Aids pandemic and at least one in five members of the country’s 11,6-million people is believed to be HIV-positive.
Zimbabwean union and civic leaders vowed on Monday to take to the streets to protest worsening hardship under President Robert Mugabe’s rule, and asked police to refrain from beating them. Plans for the protest strikes and dates will be discussed at the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions’ congress later this month.
Zimbabwe’s central bank has stopped compelling exporters to sell 30% of their foreign currency earnings at an outdated official rate, the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported on Monday. The central bank said the move is a bid to ”consolidate and support growth” in the export sector.
Zimbabwe is ready to allow the return of white farmers who were driven off their farms under President Robert Mugabe’s land reform programme, the agriculture minister told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday. But minister Joseph Made denied that the new openness toward white farmers marked an about-face in land-reform policies that have been widely criticised as a failure.
Roy Bennett, a former opposition member of Zimbabwe’s Parliament, is seeking political asylum in South Africa because he fears for his life. Bennett, a senior member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, was released from prison in June last year after serving eight months for shoving the justice minister during a heated debate in Parliament.
Teachers at a school in rural Zimbabwe have been convicted of assault after a brutal caning spree during which they beat around 300 children with broomsticks for being late for lessons, breaking one girl’s arm, it was reported on Monday. The incident happened before Easter at Rambanepasi High School in the eastern Hwedza district, said the state-controlled The Herald newspaper.
About 200 white commercial farmers have asked Zimbabwean authorities to restore their seized land, a senior member of a farmers’ union said on Friday. ”I submitted close to 200 applications. Some farmers submitted their applications individually,” said Roy Gifford, vice-president of the white-dominated Commercial Farmers’ Union.
A 35-year-old British pilot was arrested and fined in Zimbabwe this week for attempting to take 45 rounds of ammunition onto a London-bound flight, the state-controlled The Herald reported on Friday. Brett Jason Hamilton, who the paper said is a pilot for British Airways, was arrested on Tuesday after the X-ray machine at Harare International airport detected the ammunition in his luggage.
Rodrigo Rato, the head of the International Monetary Fund, said on Thursday that President Robert Mugabe’s government needed to change its economic course and the way it is governing the Southern African nation. Rato, who was addressing journalists in Washington, said the multilateral lender was still concerned over Zimbabwe’s future.
President Robert Mugabe has threatened to bring down ”the full wrath of the law” against anyone who disturbs Zimbabwean peace and stability. The threat, made in a speech on Tuesday, came after calls by the country’s main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, for street protests to topple Mugabe’s 26-year rule.
President Robert Mugabe used Zimbabwe’s 26th independence celebrations to warn the opposition he will ruthlessly crush street protests against his government and to remind foreign-owned mining firms he was still contemplating seizing shareholding in their businesses. Mugabe warned opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party leader Morgan Tsvangirai he was ”playing with fire”.
Zimbabweans mark 26 years of independence on Tuesday with little to celebrate amid deepening economic hardships, personal tragedies and a rapidly widening gap between the rich elite and the poor majority. President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party on Monday said it was ”disturbed” that young Zimbabweans, in particular, showed no pride in their nation’s independence from colonial-era white rule.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) is embarking on an ambitious programme to improve the health, education and nutrition of vulnerable children in Zimbabwe, where one child dies of HIV/Aids and another is orphaned every 20 minutes. Unicef said it had received a British donation of £22-million (,4-million) to help children facing some of the worst hardships anywhere in the world.
Zimbabwe celebrates 26 years of independence from Britain on Tuesday with a shadow of seven years’ economic woes hanging over its freedom day. Zimbabwe gained independence from colonial master Britain on April 18 1980 after a protracted liberation war against white Rhodesian settlers, with President Robert Mugabe then winning plaudids for his conciliatory attitude to minority whites.
Several members of a faction of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have broken ranks to rejoin Morgan Tsvangirai’s side, reports said on Thursday. Blessing Chebundo, the MP for the mining town of Kwekwe left the MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara earlier this week.
Zimbabwe’s government has said aid agencies do not have permission to compile food production forecasts after some organisations projected the country faced a huge grain deficit, local reports said on Wednesday. Agriculture Minister Joseph Made complained that aid organisations were conducting ”backdoor assessment exercises”.
The possibility of mass strikes loom on the horizon for Zimbabwe’s embattled economy as workers demand higher wages to cushion them against soaring living costs because of hyper-inflation and shortages of foreign currencies. Wage talks opened two weeks ago and were expected to continue until the end of the month in Zimbabwe, where large-scale labour action could become a reality for the first time in eight years, according to unionists.
The loss-making state airline Air Zimbabwe carried just 230Â 000 passengers last year, compared with more than a million in 1999, the official media reported on Friday. Acting chief executive Captatin Oscar Madombwe blamed the decline on negative publicity on political and economic turmoil in the country and a perception of safety concerns among both local and foreign travellers.