Posted on 06/16/2002 4:29:27 AM PDT by Clive
Goose Liver Pate
Saturday 15th June 2002 (6.15pm Sorry it's late - Webmaster)
Dear Family and Friends,
The past week has been filled with so much contrast and irony that it feels a bit like living in cloud cuckoo land.
Throughout the week the news has been of death and funerals. First a bus crash tragically claimed the lives of 37 student teachers and then a minibus accident took another 11 lives, this time of cross border traders returning from South Africa.
As if this was not enough misery for the country, the police then shot and killed a taxi driver in the heavily congested industrial area of Harare.
A police spokesman appeared on ZBC television and said Lloyd Midzi had been shot for not stopping at a road block but did not explain why the taxi's tyres hadn't been shot out, why spikes had not been put on the road or why a chase had not been effected. He simply said that four shots had been fired, the driver had been killed but the passengers had escaped unhurt.
I cannot describe my feeling of utter horror when thinking of our police shooting at a taxi carrying passengers and worse, that it was in a congested area. Thank God no one else was killed.
So 49 Zimbabweans died this week, 48 in tragic accidents and the 49th at the hands of our police who have mounted road blocks all over the country saying they are determined to stop any mass action in the country before it happens.
I am not surprised our police force are getting nervous because things seem to be rapidly approaching crisis point in a fed up and hungry Zimbabwe.
A couple of months before the Presidential elections the government introduced a daily commuter train service which runs from the high density suburbs into the capital city every morning. The government named this "The Freedom Train" and crowed for weeks about how delighted they were to be helping commuters.
The Independent newspaper has revealed that the railways are losing half a million dollars a day by running The Freedom Train and that they are funding it by using the workers' pension contributions.
A Railways spokesman told the Independent that they now owe the pension fund more than a billion dollars in unpaid contributions and have not remitted any money to the scheme for over a year.
Meanwhile the Railways have had to borrow wagons and locomotives from Botswana and Zambia to try and cope with the massive burden of carrying food into the country. The Railways report that many of our own wagons continue to lie in idle heaps as there is no foreign currency to bring in spare parts for their repair.
There are growing fears that even with the extra wagons and locomotives the food just cannot get to us fast enough anymore.
Maize meal continues to be non existent in our Marondera shops, as does sugar and cooking oil and other basics shoot up in price every week as inflation is now at a shocking 122%.
Both of our weekly papers report that bread shortages are imminent and millers have confirmed that wheat deliveries are now being rationed from the Grain Marketing Board.
Our wheat stocks have dwindled to record lows and are expected to run out completely before the end of July. For millions of people who have been substituting bread for maize, this situation will be dire.
Every day now the talk is about what to eat and if there were any tourists in Zimbabwe I am sure they would wonder what sort of strange disease most grocery shoppers in our country have.
We walk around our supermakets with empty baskets and trolleys; pick things up, look at the prices, turn them over and then put them back on the shelves.
We spend entire mornings standing shivering in lines waiting patiently for our turn to buy 1 small bag of sugar and then when we have the little plastic packet in our hands we glow with delight and scurry home to show our families how lucky we've been.
And while we do this President Mugabe and his entourage have been staying in a luxury hotel in Italy where one room costs the equivalent of Z$480,000 per night - or 8,000 loaves of bread.
Attending the UN Summit on reducing world hunger, journalists report that lunch on one day was goose liver pate, followed by lobster, Italian ices for desert and all washed down with the finest Italian wines.
The gaps between our leaders habits and those of her people have become too great.
Until next week, with love, cathy.
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