Zimbabwe blog: election calls
Updated on 12 November 2008
Zimbabwe blogger Helen retells the conversations heard in 500-strong bank queues.
"We want a new election!"
This is the call that is starting to be heard and talked about in the bank queues and the murmur is getting louder every day.
Life revolves around the bank queues. This is where we meet our friends, make phone calls and send text messages, if we can get through on the very congested and over-subscribed government controlled phone lines.
In the bank queues the discussions are always about the collapse of our country. Pick any topic you can think of and there's always a horror story waiting to be told.
There is no shortage of time for the story telling either as we have to queue at the banks for a good two hours every day in order to withdraw the daily limit which is presently enough to buy just two loaves of bread.
It is the same for government school teachers and other civil servants who take home 90 thousand dollars a month - a single loaf of bread is 200 thousand dollars.
By the end of the week the daily limit will only be enough to buy one loaf of bread because the prices are rising so fast.
Standing in the bank queue, which must have been about a five hundred strong a few days ago, I struck up a conversation with a young woman. She told me she should have been at the University attending lectures because on paper the new semester started over a month ago.
In reality though, nothing at all is happening at the University of Zimbabwe. Lecturers are apparently not allowed to say they are on strike, so they simple say they aren't working.
This is because their salaries are controlled by government regulations which leave University lecturers earning amounts that make even basic survival completely impossible.
The internationally recognized 'dollar a day' is a joke as University of Zimbabwe lecturers are being paid less than fifty US cents a month. It is the same for government school teachers and other civil servants who take home 90 thousand dollars a month - a single loaf of bread is 200 thousand dollars.
The woman I was talking to kept using the word 'pathetic' to describe conditions at the country's highest centre of education. She said that there is no water on the University campus.
Taps, pipes, geysers and cisterns are dry and in the residence hostels the toilets have been locked and sealed off for more than six months. Everyone has to go off campus and collect their own water and to use the toilet.
Power sharing is dead in the water - only there is no water - and a fresh election run by the international community seems the only way to move forward.
"It's no wonder there's cholera everywhere," she said, and there are reports of the disease breaking out in many places in Harare and in smaller centres too.
Our conversation was cut off as a bunch of Green Bombers (Youth Militia) tried to push in to the queue somewhere and all hell broke loose. A fairly orderly queue suddenly became a wild, angry mess as people surged forward and tempers rose.
When things settled down again, the faces had changed and the conversation had gone to politics and the talk was of calling for new elections.
No one believes that anything positive is going to come out of the power sharing deal that was forced on the winner of the March elections and no one thinks that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai should back down.
Power sharing is dead in the water - only there is no water - and a fresh election run by the international community seems the only way to move forward.
