Out of Pod Experience

I don't have a web link for this, it might not exist because many there can't afford a domain, they often rely on home servers and e-mail newsletters.

I was born in South Africa but I spent formative years in Zimbabwe, I left in 2005 and will never be able to return (UK ancestry prevents me going back)
When I hear Americans talking about the middle east, toppling the dictators and spreading democracy, I immediately point to Africa and how it does not have oil. There is an e-mail article I received:
(You will note that they send the letter to themselves, this is to BCC: all others and try protect them from police brutality).

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----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Justice for Agriculture
To: Justice for Agriculture
Sent: Thursday, 19 February 2015, 20:30
Subject: OPEN LETTER dated 19 FEBRUARY 2015

============================
1. Cathy Buckle – Fat Cats or Double “D’s”

Dear Jag

Walking out in the neighbourhood early in the morning it's a strange sight we see in small town Zimbabwe . 90% of people are unemployed, money flow is exceedingly tight and everywhere people are readying for another day of making a living on the roadside.

For some it's a few rocks, lumps of concrete, or chunks of rubble that support planks, boxes or pieces of tin on which they display their goods for sale.

Others have got umbrellas, poles, plastic roofs and fold up tables for their goods. These are Zimbabwe 's `tuck shops' and they are on almost every road in residential neighbourhoods and peri-urban areas.

Before the sun comes over the horizon a delivery truck from the local bakery stops on a dusty, potholed road. People emerge from all over and line up to buy a few dozen loaves of bread at wholesale prices which they will then sell at their `tuck shops,' making a few cents on each loaf.

Also in their `tuck shops' you can be sure to find eggs, biscuits, fruit and veg, sweets, cigarettes, bottled drinks, basic groceries, telephone air time and more, depending on the size of their display tables and the dollars in their pockets.

Every morning from just after sunrise Zimbabwe 's tuck shop operators load their tables and sit out in the elements waiting for customers.

When it's sunny they get hot; when it rains they get wet and when a car roars past they get covered in dust while their toddlers play in the dirt nearby. If you go past at eight, nine, even ten at night, many of them are still there, their shacks illuminated by solar lamps as they wait for the last customer to go past.

As your morning walk continues the contrasts between the grit, determination and endlessly hard work of ordinary people and the neglect, deterioration and decay of the state's urban and residential infrastructure is dramatic. Local council employees whose wages and salaries are paid by our rates are invisible around here.

Roads are a maze of deep potholes; grass as high as a man lines uncut verges; dumped litter gathers under trees. Garbage is uncollected for weeks at a time in low density areas and months at a time in high density areas. Street lights haven't worked for over a decade and the town's only fire engine regularly roars past carrying firewood on its roof.

Further on in your early morning walk the contrast is different again. A hammerkop stands in a mud filled pothole waiting for the frog that must be under there somewhere while all around houses are rising from the foundations. Fat cats on government fiddles or Double D's (Diaspora Dollars) you wonder?

If it's the fat cats the houses go up in quick time but if it's Diaspora Dollars the constructions take months and even years as the money is slowly sent back home. The majority of Zimbabweans have survived for fifteen years on the millions of Diaspora Dollars being sent home by more than a quarter of our population who've been forced to go to work outside our borders.

Our Central Bank Governor said this week that Zimbabwe received US$840 million in remittances from the Diaspora in 2014. That represents a staggering 2.3 million US dollars being sent home every single day from the Diaspora , an increase of fifty million dollars from the previous year. In 2013 US$790 million in Diaspora remittances was recorded, a clear indication that the situation is not improving in Zimbabwe .

Aside from this vast fortune being sent home by individuals every day, there are also the legions of people known as cross border traders.

Men and women who go shopping to South Africa and other neighbouring countries and bring goods back to resell in Zimbabwe . "When the history of Zimbabwe is written, these guys will be remembered for keeping the country afloat" one man wrote beneath a Facebook picture I shared of a hugely overloaded vehicle bringing goods back to Zimbabwe .

The Diaspora dollars, roadside tuck shops and cross border traders have kept almost all ordinary families alive through Zimbabwe's 15 year collapse and deserve recognition for their years of toil and hard work to make sure we've all been able to keep going.
Until next time, thanks for reading, love

Cathy.

Yeah, that's kind of problems on problems on a different scale. The tough thing is, not many opportunities or ways to fix the problem, for an intelligent young person. You are just 1 of many. And there just isn't that much economic energy flowing around. No matter what your ideas are... they're going nowhere.

But.. Lived in Liberia, West Africa from 11-15, and damn, as poor everybody was, they knew how to have fun! All the community drama, gossiping, soap operas, bullshit humor commentaries in the regular gathering hubs. (Called palaver huts in Liberia.)

Happy time of my life, and now Liberians are on FB, and still happy, after state failure, warlords, child soldiers in wigs, and diaspora. Lot of things might economically suck in the local situation-- but daily life is so much more interesting! Is it any worse? Hell no, I'd say it's way better! I don't have five cent extra, but I have family and friends, every day, day after day.

Article by Boris Johnson (London mayor)
I can’t imagine that anyone in his right mind would actually want to go to the 91st birthday party of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, which takes place this Saturday.
It promises to be an event of truly spectacular moral ugliness. While his people are starving, the ancient despot will convoke 20,000 cronies at a kind of golf club-***-safari lodge near the Victoria Falls. In scenes reminiscent of the more disgusting and luxurious behaviour of the emperor Commodus, he will cause various exotic beasts to be slaughtered for the feast.
Five impalas will be roasted, two sables, two buffaloes – and then, to the ululations of his drunken Zanu-PF supporters, there will be a series of culinary climaxes, each more revolting than the last. A local farmer has procured two elephants, and after these rare and majestic creatures have been butchered for the delectation of the semi-deified Mugabe, there will be one more type of meat to come – an animal that you might think was semi-sacred, whose killing should be taboo, a creature that people would never normally dream of eating. Yes, a lion, the king of the animal kingdom, will lay down its life before the meat-maddened mob and have the honour of surrendering its mortal flesh to the palsied gullet of the man who still calls himself the “Hit ler of Africa”.
And then, at last, the cake will appear, predicted to weigh 200lb, and in the most depraved and demoralising vignette of all, this crowd of brainwashed Zimbabweans will sweetly sing Happy Birthday to the man who has impoverished their country. This birthday party is predicted to cost $1 million at a time when Zimbabweans are living on 35 cents a day. Teachers across the country have been forced to contribute $10 each to put on the show.
The whole exercise is utterly nauseating – and my only question, as I say, is who on earth would want to be there?
Who is going to be toasting Mugabe in champagne and Tusker lager? Who is going to feature in the photo spread in the Zimbabwean equivalent of Hello! or OK!? I doubt that Britain will be represented at all – but by rights there is one man who damn well should be there, one man who should be down on the dance floor with Mugabe’s buxom assistants, and flashing his familiar glistering smile at the gathering.
If there were any justice in the world, that man would break off from giving advice to sundry other dubious regimes and help old Bob with the job of blowing out his candles. And that man, naturally, is Tony Blair.
Zimbabwe is now the second poorest nation on earth – beaten only by Congo for overall grimness. The people are so badly malnourished that one in three children is physically stunted, according to the UN. If you go there you see the ravages of HIV, the emaciated figures standing listlessly on street corners. Companies are constantly going to the wall.
But it is vital to recognise that Zimbabwe was not always like this, and did not have to be like this. This Mugabe tyranny is no accident – and Britain played a shameful part in the disaster. Readers will remember the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, by which Margaret Thatcher granted independence to Rhodesia. At that time the country was a breadbasket, a flourishing agricultural producer, with about 6,000 commercial farmers. The only trouble with those farmers was that the most successful of them were white – and Mugabe’s long reign has been characterised by one overwhelming objective: to exterminate the last vestiges of white power, whether political or economic.
As he has said: “The white man is here as a second citizen. The only man you can trust is a dead white man.” So it was crucial that the Lancaster House Agreement protected the interests of these white farmers. They could, of course, be bought out, but their land could not be simply seized. There had to be a “willing buyer, willing seller”. The British government agreed to fund the arrangement, compensating the former colonial farmers for land that they gave up. Under that arrangement the white farmers were able to survive – more or less; Zimbabwe remained economically viable – more or less.
And then in 1997, along came Tony Blair and New Labour, and in a fit of avowed anti-colonialist fervour they unilaterally scrapped the arrangement. The overseas development minister, Clare Short, made it clear that neither she nor Blair gave a stuff about the former colonial farmers. As she put it at the time: “I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new government from diverse backgrounds, without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and, as you know, we were colonised not colonisers.”
May 1982: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband Denis say goodbye to Robert Mugabe at Downing Street
It was that betrayal of Lancaster House that gave Mugabe his pretext to launch his pogroms against the whites.