Monday, July 16, 2007

 

Things still falling apart in Zimbabwe


We might not think about Zimbabwe every day. But life is crazy for the ordinary man in the street. Recently Mad Bob Mugabe decided the only way to curb inflation would be to force shops to sell things more cheaply. Of course the shops buckled as they could not buy their goods more cheaply.


Dear Family and Friends,

Shoe polish, dishwashing liquid and light bulbs were the three most plentifulproducts 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 atime 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 CSChas 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
Copyright cathy buckle 14th July 2007.www.cathybuckle.comMy books: "African Tears" and "Beyond Tears" are available from:orders@africabookcentre.comTo subscribe/unsubscribe to this newsletter, please write to: cbuckle@mango.zw

Comments:
This country has been on a "knife edge" for years now. It has been about to "implode" for so long we have become bored waiting for it. No one is going to do anything.
 
This is like watching an animal suffer with a long disease. How long can the suffering continue before these people understand there will be no rescue.
 
Cathy Buckle is just another version of you Klonki-- too stupid to recognise that a monkey in silk is a monkey no less..
 
And oh great anon one... what would you do with all the monkeys in silk?
Let's see if the Chinese can tame them where your white asses failed.
Did you perhaps think that maybe she has nowhere else to go?
 
Yeah anon and dogs in silk are still smelly dogs. Aren't you embarassed that your white race has only managed to crawl out of the mud in the last 1000 years and looks about ready to crawl straight back into the mud? You think you're something special? You're not. Your "civilisation" was just a blip on the radar of the rest of the world, risen and fallen in the blink of an eye. You whites have the work ethic of retarded water buffalo, you think you deserve to be treated like royalty just because of your white skins. Truth is most of you would not be successful without special treatment.
 
foo(l) man too...

jelaousy makes you nasty... and ugly..

Sayonara
 
fuck off foo man--go invent some gunpowder and give yourself a blowjob. Western civilization dragged you arseholes out of your rikshaws and strawhuts and put a man on the moon.
Now piss off back to your rice paddy like the good little koolie you are.--.get on your little 2 stroke motorcycle, fueled by gasoline and piss off to your little job in front of the computer, checking the wristwatch speaking on the cellphone using the microwave jerk off to the porn on your HDTV-----ALL INVENTED BY SOME WHITE MAN WITH AMBITION AND A BRAIN.---we crawled out of the mud to get the fuck away from the MUD people, but like friggin cockroaches there is just no escape from the infestation.

I think its time to rebuild those gaschambers, fire up the ovens --and roast us some wogs again.
 
You sad little fuckers. You'd better learn to speaky Putonghua so you can earn some money for your fat white bitches.
 
justanotherpissedoffwhiteboy

Your "civilisation" did jack shit for us man. We were already civilised while you people were still running around in furs beating each other over the head with clubs. Careful not to let your knuckles drag on the floor too much.
 
justanotherpissedoffwhiteboy

Tell us all, who was the most influential man over the last 1,000 years? A white maggot? No. An Asian. So eat that.
 
And just how far do you think you neanderthals would have got if you hadn't had paper or ink, or if you hadn't had the compass, or a mathematical value for zero? You backward bastards couldn't find your own dicks in the dark without a clue. And look at you now.
 
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