Category: zimbabwe

BY HARRIET CHIKANDIWA/TAURAI MANGUDHLA

A NIGHT of long knives beckons for banks after Finance minister Mthuli Ncube accused them of driving the parallel market rate up, causing the sharp tumbling of the local currency.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government recently suspended lending by banks among a number of measures, accusing them of funding illegal foreign currency trading and as a result, weakening the local currency.

The suspension has since been lifted.

Amid the panic among banks, whose primary function and source of income traditionally is lending, sources close to the Presidency say Mnangagwa still has a lot more tricks up his sleeve.

While making a presentation in Parliament last week, Ncube pointed a figure at banks for their alleged role in the chaos engulfing the economy.

“The players in the parallel market are numerous. It is not just the ordinary citizens at the street corners. It is also the corporates. It is also banks. I think we know what money changers do — they change money,” Ncube said.

“So, their business is clear but illegal at the same time. Some of the corporates are going into the banking sector to borrow cheaply because of low-interest rates and use those resources to acquire inventory, to store the inventory or to put it on shelves at the higher exchange rate.

“Everytime they do that, then the whole cycle starts all over again. We have a situation where even corporates were pushing up the parallel rate. This is announced by some faceless people that there is a new parallel rate.”

Ncube said some banks were doing that of their own accord, using their own resources, taking positions in the market, adding that there were numerous players trying to make easy money, which made the exchange rate unstable.

“So, what actions have we taken and continue to take. Let me be clear: we are using both the local currency and the US dollar, it is not one or the other and there is a very good reason why we are doing that.”

Bankers Association of Zimbabwe chief executive, Fanwell Mutogo refuted the allegations, saying banks no longer deal with foreign currency.

“I don’t think banks are involved in that because we no longer deal with foreign currency in terms of the auction and there is no way banks could be involved in foreign currency trading. We only do the official thing and all our business comes through the auction so far, so there is no way we can influence (the exchange rate),” he said.

“There are some businesses which they think were misbehaving, which he may be referring to, but not banks because banks don’t deal with foreign currency besides the business which comes from the auction system.”

Ncube also made a fresh plea to consumers to accept the multicurrency regime.

“I also hear arguments about US dollarisation of Zimbabwe dollarisation, please. I urge the public to desist from that argument. It is not a useful argument because we need both currencies,” Ncube said.

“If you go to the root of Zimbabwean dollars alone, for now, it is too early to do that. It would mean that we will not allow you to hold US dollars like in any other countries, where you cannot use US dollars to shop.

“We will also not allow the banks to keep foreign currency. We cannot let them have one and half billion US dollars in the bank. We cannot allow that because a mono currency regime does not permit that.”

Ncube said companies would have to restate their balance sheets in a manner that happened in 2008/09 which was “very dangerous”.

“It starts with the key fundamentals of a stable currency that we do not want huge budget deficits. In the last four years, we have not been running large budget deficits,” Ncube said.

“We even ran a surplus in 2021. However, we had a small deficit, 1,5% deficit, which is within the 3% target that Sadc has mandated all countries to run their countries properly.”

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Source: Govt mum on Gwayi-Shangani relocations – NewsDay Zimbabwe

BY PRAISEMORE SITHOLE

BINGA villagers in the Lubimbi area have accused government of not clear on their relocation from the Gwayi-Shangani dam catchment.

A total of 2 422 people, whose homes lie in the dam’s catchment area, will be relocated and last year, government officials visited the villagers to evaluate their properties and look for a place to relocate them.

But the villagers said government had been quiet about the issue ever since.

In an interview, dam committee member Tongai Ncube said their relocation was now long overdue.

“We are expecting the government to report back to us. Last year, the government evaluated our property, but it has not yet allocated us land so that we can start to rebuild.

“Ever since last year, no government official has visited the area. We are now under pressure because we hear from the media that the process to finish the dam is being fast-tracked, with the night shift being introduced,” Ncube said.

He said the villagers were mobilising funds to visit Bulawayo government offices and engage the Provincial Affairs minister.

“Government is being evasive and not engaging the community. The evaluation was done, but no feedback. Resettlement discussions were done, but no action. The community wants to scale up the engagement to the national level, ” another villager said.

The villagers have been living a nomadic way of life after they were initially relocated from their land in the Madilo area between the Shangani and Kana rivers in 1945 to create space for a Cold Storage Company project.

The other group, which had been relocated to Sinamatela during the construction of Lake Kariba in the late 1950s, was also relocated to facilitate the establishment of Hwange National Park.

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Source: Unity Accord dead, says ex-chief Ndiweni – NewsDay Zimbabwe

BY SILAS NKALA

DETHRONED Ntabazinduna Chief Nhlanhlayamangwe Ndiweni has said President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s administration effectively dumped the 1987 Unity Accord by not appointing a Zapu side Vice-President.

The Unity Accord was signed between then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe of Zanu PF and Joshua Nkomo of Zapu, who became Mubage’s vice-president afterwards, to end the violence.

Currently, government has one Vice-President after Kembo Mohadi unceremoniously resigned last year, but remained a second Zanu PF party vice-president.

“The Unity Accord was broken by Zanu PF. Zanu PF kept the name Zanu PF and removed Zapu from positions within the government of the day. The current President Mnangagwa has refused to give Zapu the Vice-President position, an act that speaks volumes that, indeed, the Unity Accord is dead,” Ndiweni said.

He also complained that the manner and descriptions given to Gukurahundi by the Zanu PF government since Mugabe’s time show that the perpetrators are belittling the killings.

Between 1983 and 1987, the Zanu PF government unleashed the North Korea-trained Fifth Brigade Regiment in Matabeleland and Midlands to stem what it termed a dissident menace.

Over 20 000 unarmed civilians including men, women, children and unborn children, were killed.

Thousands of women and girls were reportedly raped, thousands more were injured and nearly a million were displaced.

The Unity Accord silenced the guns of genocide in 1987.

Ndiweni said the Zanu PF government sought to destroy evidence by blocking exhumation of victims.

Ndiweni noted that justice was needed to resolve Gukurahundi, adding that the criminals would get away with murder in the absence of a judicial process.

His remarks come at a time when Mnangagwa had tasked chiefs to deal with the emotive issue.

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Source: Interview: Turning nurses into entrepreneurs – NewsDay Zimbabwe

By Mirriam Mangwaya

THE world recently commemorated the International Nurses Day. In Zimbabwe, nurses celebrated their profession under grim conditions of a collapsing health system characterised by a shortage of drugs, inadequate equipment, massive brain drain and poor remuneration.

NewsDay senior reporter Miriam Mangwaya (ND) caught up with Douglas Chikobvu (DC), the co-founder of the Zimbabwe Professional Nurses Union (ZPNU) to discuss the state of affairs in the health sector.

ND: What is the role of the Zimbabwe Professional Nurses Union in the country?

DC: ZPNU is an alternative union birthed due to deep-seated challenges faced by nurses. I co-founded the organisation in 2017 together with author and public speaker Robert Emmanuel Chiduku and Freeborn Dhlakama.

The union received government recognition as a nurses’ union in 2018. ZPNU is a nurse-driven union key in improving the well-being of its membership and that of the community and stakeholders.

The aim of ZPNU is to transform the lives of Zimbabwean nurses who wallow in abject poverty courtesy of government’s failure to pay them a living wage. Therefore, as a nurse’s voice, the union aims to engage the government through all progressive means and ways till nurses get a respectable living wage.

Furthermore, the union is coming up with a lot of projects for nurses so that nurses get extra income. The key focus is to encourage nurse entrepreneurship by helping nurses open their own clinics, maternity homes and many other things thereby complementing government efforts in improving access to healthcare for Zimbabweans.

The union offered bereavement funds and medical funds to its membership country-wide. The major success of ZPNU is its ability to deliver on its mandate.

ND: You said ZPNU is promoting entrepreneurship among the health workers. Will, it not divide the attention of the nurses and distract them from committing to civil service work?

DC: By law, nurses are allowed to run their own clinics. Nothing will divert their commitment, just like other health professionals who are managing both their private institutions and the public institutions. Projects are key in creating extra income for themselves.

We have set aside funds for poultry and rabbit keeping and have also identified possible markets for them. We have seen that entrepreneurial skills have been lacking in our members, thereby leaving them depending on and exposed to government measly wages.

We want our members to enjoy financial stability and also do a private practice like other health practitioners are doing by opening clinics and surgeries. We are working on modalities to open clinics for our members like what our counterparts are doing.

ND: How would you describe the nursing profession in the Zimbabwean context?

DC: The nursing bar is still a top-notch qualification. This has seen our nurses tracked and looked for globally.

Zimbabwe nurses do not struggle to get jobs abroad, resulting in the health system suffering a brain drain, as the government has over the years failed to pay nurses a living wage.

However, when we look at our hospitals, the services in most government hospitals and clinics are pathetic due to a dire lack of basic tools of the trade, measly wages imposed on healthcare workers, rampant corruption, embezzlement of funds and all that have impacted negatively.

The government funding still falls far below the recommended 15% Abuja Declaration agreement on health financing. The government should, therefore, invest more to capacitate, revitalise and revamp our healthcare system.

ND: Countries across the globe celebrated International Nurses Day recently. What were the Zimbabwean nurses celebrating?

DC: The International Nurses Day was commemorated on the 12 of May, the day Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern-day nursing was born. It is a historic and monumental day for nurses globally.

However, Zimbabwean nurses took these commemorations to look back, reflect and moot how best they can rise above adversity, especially in an environment where they don’t have basic tools of the trade and are underpaid.

As ZPNU, the commemoration was held in Matabeleland South, Gwanda under the theme, ‘Nurses turning a crisis into a legacy’. We want our members to defy the odds and continue to do their best despite the hardships they are facing.

They must look for opportunities amid this turbulence and ensure that they remain committed to their work and continue saving lives.

We took this day to remind the government of the need to revive our once glorious healthcare.

ND: Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as frontline workers, nurses are at a greater risk to be affected by the pandemic than ordinary persons. How did the nurses manage to soldier on despite various challenges?

DC: Nursing is a calling. Some scholars define nursing as a profession of profession. Nurses have a calling to save lives and offer all their best for humanity. The pandemic took a toll on most frontliners as they bravely fought to contain it with limited resources at their disposal. Some were at the frontline without personal protective equipment.

Some worked for longer hours when others had gone down after contracting the disease. We managed to contain COVID-19 although we lost our beloved fellow nurses, doctors and other frontliners. May the souls of all frontliners who succumbed to COVID-19 rest in eternal peace. Currently, we have well-wishers who are working with nurse unions in providing counselling sessions to all nurses who lost their beloved nurses and relatives.

Some health practitioners like clinical psychologist Julia Mutambara are offering free counselling sessions to all frontliners who were traumatised by their experiences with the respiratory disease.

ND: Nurses working in rural health institutions have bemoaned marginalisation by the government on the improvement of their working conditions. Is there a difference in working conditions between nurses in rural areas and those in urban areas?

DC: Definitely, working conditions for urbanite nurses and those in rural areas are really different. Most rural health institutions lack clean water, electricity, equipment and other key medical consumables to deliver a quality health service.

Barriers to healthcare in rural areas are real and serious. This has caused high maternal mortality among other challenges. Some clinics are inaccessible due to poor road networks which is also affecting how nurses deliver their duties and also access to health by the locals.

The government should electrify rural clinics, ensure clean safe water supply and timely pay rural allowances to our nurses. Availability of drugs at all health institutions throughout the country should be the government’s number one priority.

ND: There are serious concerns about the deplorable state of the health delivery system on accessibility of drugs, equipment and low staff complement generally. How can that be addressed?

DC: Government commitment is key in solving the broader challenges haunting our public healthcare delivery.

This commitment can then cascade to government partners and the general citizens. Our government should finance our healthcare institutions, provide advanced tools of the trade, buy cancer machines, build more hospitals to improve health access, provide state-of-art emergency services, build and equip maternity theatres and pay frontliners a living wage.

Funds released by Treasury for health services should be used for their sole purposes and it is the duty of the government to guard against any possible abuse of funds. This will help address barriers to healthcare.

The government should come up with a raft of measures, among them giving health personnel non-monetary incentives to motivate them to deliver. This will retain staff and stop the brain drain.

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Source: ‘Rwandan fugitive had valid Congolese passport’ – NewsDay Zimbabwe

BY HARRIET CHIKANDIWA

FOREIGN Affairs deputy minister David Musabayana has claimed that Rwandan genocide fugitive, Protais Mpiranya, entered the country on a Congolese passport and that government did not know his alias.

Mpiranya, who was held responsible for the massacre of thousands of Rwandans in the infamous 1994 genocide that claimed an estimated 800 000 people, was reportedly given protection by Zimbabwean authorities.

Reports suggest the fugitive died in Zimbabwe and was secretly buried in Harare in 2006 under the alias Ndume Sambao.

“The late Mpiranya entered Zimbabwe after having presented a valid (Democratic Republic of Congo) passport and complied with immigration regulations and procedures,” Musabayana said in a ministerial statement in Parliament on how Zimbabwe harboured the world’s most wanted fugitive.

“Zimbabwe had no knowledge that Ndume Sambao was, in fact, Protais Mpiranya and only learnt of the alias that he was using after the International Criminal Tribunal Residual Mechanism requested Zimbabwe to check this name in our record.”

He said suggestions that Zimbabwe harboured a wanted criminal was “a clear distortion of fact”.

“Anybody could have volunteered information on his whereabouts to our law enforcement authorities, which could have resulted in him being apprehended,” he said.

Musabayana said government took “concrete and positive steps” to facilitate the investigations on the whereabouts of Mpiranya.

“So, the best way moving forward is to ensure that as Parliament, we pass budgets that ensure that we are fully capacitated at our borders so that we close in on such leakages, but the world over, it is very difficult to come up with a system that is foolproof,” he said.

“Otherwise it will not be efficient or effective. We aspire that one day, we will get there, but the world over, fugitives are found and they always find their ways.”

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