A FAMOUS GROUSE
It’s probably the country’s biggest infrastructural project since independence, delighted Zimbabweans tell me.
From the buzz it’s caused around town, it’s clearly the most unexpected. A populace, long inured to its authoritarian government’s apathy towards providing the basic requirements of a modern state, has watched goggle-eyed as construction crews have worked 24/7 to transform Harare.
In a country where there has been preciously little arterial road development since independence 44 years ago, the National Road Administration has suddenly come to life and sprung to work. In the course of an impressively short period of a few months, it has slapped down in excess of 30 kilometres of double-lane tarmac, heading north through Harare.
Starting at the airport, which has undergone a similarly unanticipated transformation, the new highway stands in marked contrast to the shambles of the grubby national capital. Against a backdrop of urban food plots and roadside entrepreneurs trying to eke a living, it is determinedly, incongruously, First World.
The road comes complete with neatly painted black-and-white curbing at each intersection and is lined with towering lamp standards bristling with flagstaffs flying an array of crisply new foreign flags. At every traffic circle there is an impressive garden display, dotted with monumental sculptures and with horticultural pride of place going to that most quintessentially colonial of emblems, hundreds of English roses coaxed into full bloom in the dusty, drought-stricken African highveld.
Unfortunately, none of this busy-ness is because the corrupt governing elite has suddenly resolved to provide the infrastructural basics. Rather it has to do with appearances — it’s the Zimbabwean equivalent of Russia’s Potemkin villages. The highway, which has freshly tarred branch links to key city venues, has been constructed to impress delegates to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit, which is being held in Harare from 8-18 August.
Taxi drivers have been ordered, on pain of hefty fines or jail, not to deviate from the designated, tarted-up routes when carrying visitors to the summit. Similarly, the national power utility, which currently delivers only four hours of electricity a day, has been instructed to ensure uninterrupted supply to the buildings hosting the SADC Council of Ministers, the Organ Troika Ministerial Committee, the summit sessions, as well as fringe activities like the SADC Industrialisation Week and an investment forum.
Initially, the highway was apparently intended to join Harare International Airport to the new Zimbabwean Parliament but after the door-to-door connection was made last week, this past weekend the road unexpectedly shot further north with reckless enthusiasm. Rural locals, after years of coping with execrable roads and bumper-to-bumper traffic negotiating potholes, are giddily speculating where it might all end: Mazoe? Chinhoyi? Kariba? Cairo? When you’re dealing with an erratic, totalitarian government, anything might happen.
In addition to the road, the ZANU-PF government is also building 30 extravagantly appointed villas for SADCC dignitaries. Still missing their roofs, there is no chance of them being completed in time.
The villas are being built not by the skilled but under-employed Zimbabwean workforce, but by low-cost Indian and Pakistani labour carted en masse from Dubai and housed on-site in a dusty tent city. It’s not quite indentured labour but it’s a spirited approximation.
Scuttlebutt has it that the contractors dragooned at short notice into doing the work, have as yet not received a cent of its estimated US$200 million cost. Downing tools until payments are made is not an option.
The summit is a rare chance for President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his thugs to try to claw back some political redemption. After some lean years of being ignored by the wider world — five blatantly rigged general elections in a row will do that, at least for a while — the ZANU-PF regime is putting its best Gucci-shod foot forward.
And against the backdrop of an increasingly inward-looking international order that is beset with more pressing issues than autocracy in Zimbabwe, the signs are that it is succeeding. Zimbabwe is in the happy position of being between a Western world that no longer even pretends to be concerned about this country’s future and a Sino-Russian power bloc that grows stronger by embracing the moral outcasts of the world.
But, of course, it is in Africa where forgiveness comes most easily. The continent is always volatile and unforeseen events — popular uprisings, palace coups and the occasional civilian massacre — occur often enough for very few African leaders to be confident enough that tomorrow it is not they who may be facing the world’s pointing fingers. It’s not politically wise to be overly critical of a neighbour for too long.
Last year, the very same SADC’s Electoral Observation Mission, comprising monitors from Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, ruled that the August election had been marked by state intimidation of opposition voters and hence was not “free and fair”. Again.
In response, the Zimbabweans launched a torrent of what SADC called “crude, scurrilous and misleading” attacks on SADC and its leaders. Again.
Now, by holding the summit in Harare, SADC has shown that all is forgiven. Again.
SADC is signalling its tolerance of despotism, not only honouring Zimbabwe with the diplomatic recognition that the prestigious hosting implies but also with a tacit personal endorsement. Mnangagwa, who delights in his sinister nickname of The Crocodile — although the two-tooth “passion gap” in his own dentition somewhat detracts from the scariness and makes him careful not to beam too broadly when the press cameras are about — will become chairman of SADC at the summit.
That does not entirely let Mnangagwa off the hook. At the very least, he needs to maintain public order during the summit. He does not want the embarrassment of rowdy demonstrations by opposition and pro-democracy activists in full view of limousine loads of SADC delegates.
Most of all, Mnangagwa does not want in Harare a disastrous replay of the protests that rocked and continue to roil Kenya.
The Kenyan troubles started mid-June, with initial calls for legislators to vote against a controversial finance Bill. On June 25, protesters stormed Parliament after legislators ignored their concerns and the police opened fire, shooting dead at least five and wounding 31.
President William Ruto has since tried to pacify the protesters by refusing to sign the Bill, but the demonstrators have been emboldened and have broadened their demands, calling on Ruto to resign over bad governance, corruption, incompetence in his Cabinet, and lack of accountability. More than 50 people have died in clashes with the police, according to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.
To forestall a similar scenario playing out in front of SADC, ZANU-PF pre-emptively clamped down on the opposition, with 79 members of the Citizens Coalition for Change, including interim party leader Jameson Timba, arrested and held without bail. ZANU-PF has warned that the party and the government were prepared to “decisively” deal with any dissent during the summit.
During the past week, another four people have been dragged off planes at Harare International, apparently on suspicion of planning protests, to be badly beaten and tortured. At least 14 others were detained elsewhere in the country.
Among those arrested were two foreign tourists, a Czech and a Ugandan, who have gone on a hunger strike to protest being held incommunicado. The charge is “publishing false statements with the intent to incite the public”.
It transpires that while travelling in Masvingo, 300km from the capital, the pair recorded some WhatsApp footage for the folks back home in which the Czech commented scathingly on Zimbabwe’s parlous economic state, including bad roads and long power cuts.
Silly buggers. If only they’d stayed in Harare, they could have been happily waltzing up and down an immaculate new highway and enjoying 24-hour electricity. Well, at least until 18 August, when a grimmer Zimbabwean reality reasserts itself.
Follow WSM on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye
