Diary

R.W. Johnson

Harare is morose under the rains, more drenching this year even than last year, and longer than most can remember; five or seven centimetres, day after day. It’s made the water table too high and water lies permanently on the surface, sewage floating in it, for the city’s long-neglected sewage system is on the point of collapse. This wouldn’t be easy for anyone to bear, but it’s particularly hard for the residents of Harare, who point to the colossal mansion which the mayor, Solomon Tawengwa, is building for himself and the Mercedes cars which he and his municipal colleagues have awarded themselves. Most angry of all are the council workers whose pay cheques bounced. They went on strike despite a ban on strikes decreed last year by President Mugabe, in the wake of a second round of urban riots caused first by food and then by fuel price hikes, themselves the result of a 60 per cent devaluation of the Zim dollar (which, having started life at two to the US dollar, is now 67 to the US dollar). Mugabe wasn’t bothered by the council workers’ strike any more than he has been by the recent teachers’, doctors’ and telephone-workers’ strikes. It is ZCTU, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, that he fears.