Dear libtards, aren’t you attracted by Zimbabwe?

Dear libtards,

Every other week, someone of your persuasion, either a feminist or antiracist or a professor of whiteness studies or cultural Marxist writes an open letter starting with “Dear white people”, containing a blast of inanities.

This seems to be some kind of fashion or trend, probably copied from someone in the USA or Great Britain. It is not that you have any appreciation for the open letter or all those European philosophical treatises (or novels even) utilising the epistolary form. After all, libtardism starts where Westernism of Europeanism leaves off. As Jakes Gerwel, after whom a boulevard has just been renamed in Cape Town by the DA in all its politically correct fervour, once said: “We need an African renaissance. The only outcome of the European one was apartheid.”

roodt_fbfotoDante, Michelangelo, German Idealism, the French philosophes, Baroque art, Beethoven and Mozart, all of that stuff is quite worthless to you as you are dedicated precisely to putting an end not only to all white culture but to the white race itself. Reading the nonsensical obituaries to André Brink, or André P. Brink as he is known in Afrikaans, these last few days, I am struck by the fact that no-one had enquired why he had had, not only countless mistresses and six wives, but six white wives. Does that not, by definition — and from the libtard perspective — make him a racist? After all, there are tens of millions of women of colour in this country, of various sizes and shapes, not to mention nationalities. Surely, if he had been a sincere libtard himself, as he so often professed to be, he would have found at least one of them who struck his fancy? Instead, he stuck to his own race, the much-maligned white race, and committed marriage no less than six times with a woman that the American system labels “Caucasian”. Not Asian, Caucasian. And with a person of the opposite sex, whereas he might very well have married someone of his own sex, desire being polymorphously perverse as Freud and many of his more hip followers have stated so often.

That leads me to my first gripe with you libtards who insist on polluting the airwaves and the newspaper columns – you seem to have a complete monopoly on what is known as the MSM or “mainstream media” – with your righteous appeals for more affirmative action, more “transformation”, more equality, more censorship of dissident opinions, more punishment for the racists and the politically incorrect, and more lenient treatment of the criminals who terrorise us here in South Africa: why do you not practise what you preach? Why do all you libtards live in majority-white or middle-class areas with private security guards, armed response and all the unnecessary and “paranoid” accoutrements of “privatised apartheid” as many of you have called it? Why do you not live in all those interesting, colourful – not to forget “vibrant” – communities whose virtues you extol in all of your litanies against racism, sexism, patriarchy and whiteness? Places that go by the names of Soweto, Alexandra, Diepsloot, the same Diepsloot about which the “doyen of South African journalism, professor Anton Harber” wrote an eponymous eulogy in book form?

Or is hypocrisy, like “non-racialism”, “non-sexism”, “non-genderism” and all the other non-creeds you cite ad nauseam, a basic tenet of libtardism? For example, some American study found that 96% of liberal journalists lived in majority-white areas. I still remember that Mad Max du Preez, the renegade Afrikaner and fanatical libtard, exhorted all whites to go and live in the black townships about fifteen years ago in the Rapport. Alas, Max himself never set the example. So what is this, are all libtards… God forbid, racist? But don’t sell your house in Parkhurst or your equally cosy little flat in Sea Point yet, I have a much better idea which should become clearer in a moment.

Let’s admit it: South Africa is a divided country and getting more divided by the day. Compounding the already strong ethnic and linguistic divisions in South Africa, is the ideological division. It used to be Left-Right, but nowadays I would call it Libtard-Normal. I know, I know, I have read Michel Foucault, in French to boot, and a few of his American disciples, so I know that normality or being normalised is a very bad thing. Being a scizophrenic or a car hijacker is so much better than being an accountant with a nine-to-five job and firmly heterosexual tendencies. As some author said not so long ago on television in Paris: “I’m white, heterosexual and Catholic. How horrible!” Normality, middle-class values, conservatism, the nuclear family, of all that stuff, it’s nothing less than a disease. And the cure is libtardism or amoral fundamentalism, the constant din of proselytising near-hysteria screamed at us every day. Racist! Sexist! Apartheid nostalgist! And all the other epithets and insults you constantly hurl at us.

This is purely an aside and please do not take it seriously. (On the other hand, I know that you never take seriously anything said by anyone other than a fellow convert, someone of the faith, a coreligionist in libtardism.) But most religions, at least until now, have tried to get converts by being nice to people, giving them a free meal or helping the poor. In our crumbling state hospitals there are Muslim women wearing head scarves and handing out sandwiches to everyone as a sign of their faith and their values, for example. However, libtardism is the only creed I know of where its adherents try to win the heathen masses over by making them feel bad about themselves, by insulting them, slandering them, calling them stupid oafs, fascists, racists, and so on. So even if you are by some miracle making converts, you are making at least as many enemies and I can assure you that most of us normal people are starting to get really irritated with you. If only we were so cruel, reactionary and dangerous as you make us out to be, we would long ago have posted a few snipers outside the offices of your newspapers or hidden in the trees on your sidewalk and at least silenced some of the most strident and hysterical warmongers among you.

But we are tolerant, unlike you. Which is why South Africa is in the mess it is in. Because for too long the libtard in his position of power in the media or the academy or in the more ideological departments of Big Business, has been getting away with murder, sometimes literally. The libtard or the Marxist view of South African history with its simplistic notions of “stolen land”, “white evil” and the “apartheid holocaust” in itself leads to revenge and violence.

While most conservatives have to work for a living, you libtards spend your days in cafés or in luxury hotels where you may be seen typing away on your brand-new Apple Powerbook i7’s obligingly provided by some educational institution or NGO. That is another amazing characteristic of libtards: while they profess an abhorrence of capitalism, they are slaves to brands and look down upon us non-Apple-owning plebs who vulgarly buy PC components, including second-hand ones, to build our own no-name-brand machines, powered by open-source software that require right-wing skills such as a basic knowledge of Unix commands to operate. Libtards know something about the differentiations between Hegelian and structural Marxism, but have no notion whether their motherboards have Intel 1150 or 1155 sockets. Apart from PC slogans which you learn off by heart, ignorance is bliss in your libtard world.

Probably most people in this country would just like to get on with their lives, have a job, raise children, watch or play a bit of sport without racial quotas. But thanks to your zeal and fanaticism, no normal society in South Africa is possible anymore. Like in the former Soviet Union, Mao’s China or Castro’s Cuba, everything is now subject to social engineering, bureaucratic oversight, political correctness and control. The tragicomic demise of Zelda La Grange who had tried for years to speak and act like a libtard, carrying her white guilt on her sleeve, is a case in point. The soupçon of being politically incorrect in a Tweet sealed her fate and led to an outburst of libtard rage, exemplified by the usual shrieks of “racism”, “whiteness” and the two or three other concepts that libtardism deems to be sinful and evil. Sniffing out the impure ones is of course part of every revolution and in South Africa the process is getting more and more intense.

That is why South Africa is bound to end up on the scrapheap as just another African basket case, a Mozambique after Samora Machel’s Marxist-Leninist revolution or the post-Mobutu DRC. As I tweeted the other day to Helen Zille who has herself become a freedom fighter of libtardism, shooting her paint gun with the word “racist” appearing all around her as in some cartoon world, South African now runs on ideology. No matter what happens to Eskom, to the economy, to law and order, the price of food and energy, everything pales into insignificance next to the exigencies of revolution, transformation and egalitarianism.

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I am less worried by an imminent ethnic conflict than by violence breaking out between libtards and normal people. The intolerance of you libtards toward dissent is stoking real tension. This is especially the case among Afrikaners. The last time there was a minor Boer civil war was in 1860 when forty people died in a shoot-out on the outskirts of Potchefstroom. The incident was to haunt Paul Kruger for years as he had to to give the order to return fire after the first shots were fired by the rebels. Afrikaans libtards are even worse than the anglophone variety: people like Adriaan Basson, Max du Preez and Piet Croucamp harbour such an intense hatred towards the conservative majority of Afrikaners that they are intent upon destroying the few remaining Afrikaans institutions, including schools and universities, that still enable Afrikaners to survive in a hostile, charged environment. Being the most dominated ethnic group in South Africa, the libtard-normal division there is at its most intense, exemplified by banning our most popular singer, Steve Hofmeyr, from arts festivals and the general imposition of censorship on dissidents, the suppression of their books and articles, attacks (including cyberattacks) on their websites, witchhunts at work, etc. So the prospect of an identity war among Afrikaners is not as far-fetched as it may sound, which might ultimately drag the rest of South Africa down with it.

At a certain level, you libtards hate South Africa. You have always hated our country and were happiest when you could call for boycotts against us and could plant car bombs in our streets or shrapnel bombs in our restaurants. So this kind of uneasy peace does not sit well with you. Little by little, you are realising that the country will never change, that people are set in their habits and cling to their traditions like you cling to your vacuous belief system.

Your ideal for South Africa is a kind of New York on the Vaal where everybody is a gay or transgender communist living off Scandinavian aid or World Bank loans and most of the economic activity consists of diversity workshops for which you libtards will claim fees big enough to drive Range Rover Sports. In this libtard utopia Marx and Engels will meet Goldman Sachs and everybody will live off zero-interest perpetual bonds and members of the nomenklatura will lord it over the equalised, non-racial, non-sexist masses who will be largely illiterate and believe everything you say.

It must be clear to you that this utopia is never going to happen. Public debts, like the body count due to the breakdown of law and order, are mounting. The middle class that you wanted to destroy is resisting by inventing their own virtual society on social media and the internet. Dare I remind you that large numbers of people are talking back to you, the sacerdotal class of the revolution, our lords whose wisdom we are not supposed to question?

A divided house cannot stand, as they say. If South Africa is to escape the current quagmire, something needs to happen. Either you should go the tried and trusted route of the left-wing revolutionary and commit genocide against us by rounding us all up, working us to death in gulags or simply shooting everyone suspected of questioning your precepts, or you should give up on the idea of “transforming” South Africa altogether. Given your libtard capacity for organisation and the current state of your military, if I were you, I would not opt for civil war against the millions of remaining conservatives, Afrikaners, traditional Africans and others who are still ideologically very impure, to the point of being racists, sexists or at least irredeemably politically incorrect.

However, a solution is at hand, I believe. There is one country in Southern Africa where the struggle for equality, non-racialism and non-sexism has been largely achieved: Zimbabwe. Comrade Robert Mugabe has indeed eradicated whiteness in most of its forms, literally by removing all white farmers and imposing a strict “indigenisation” policy. On the debit side, Zimbabwe is not exactly a model of enlightenment when it comes to “gender” and I doubt whether American-style “queer theory” is yet a compulsory subject at the University of Harare. But no society is perfect. The challenge for you libtards is to “move” the Zimbabwean transformation project “forward”, as you are wont to put it and “challenge the last vestiges of patriarchy” which may or may not remain in that otherwise “progressive” country.

“Thy hinterland lies there” as the inscription reads on the Rhodes statue in Rondebosch, next to the University of Cape Town where large numbers of fanatical libtards labour in the politically correct monasteries for a better world without race, sex or social hierarchy.

Soon Mr. Mugabe may pass the baton to his wife, Grace, which will in itself cheer the feminists of the world, including the South African ones who would be delighted to go and serve a female president. Why commit to an unlikely quest for utopia in the land of apartheid, gated communities, rugby, koeksisters, boerewors and Die Stem when you could experience the instant bliss of liberation in an already “postcolonial” society?

Ja, man, you must have noticed that one. As Saul Bellow says somewhere in his novel Herzog, “the word sensibility later made it big”. That was in the USA. Among South African libtards, “postcolonial” has made it big. I would say it is even compulsory to use it all the time, just like you have to be quick on the draw in crushing any dissent out there by shouting “racist” with a megaphone or preferably on the eight o’clock TV news.

Just imagine. If Bob had to go and meet his maker at last and Grace had to succumb to the charms of her own sex and perhaps become Zimbabwe’s first openly gay president, it could be libtard heaven. Sexism, racism and whiteness would all have been vanquished and the entire Zimbabwean economy could consist of transgender or postcolonial advocacy groups spreading the good news on a planetary scale. Sweden and Norway would provide most of the state budget and Oxfam would dish out free food, paid for by private British and other donors. Not to forget the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Everyone would drive around in black Range Rovers running on a Chinese energy subsidy as Harare would now be the intellectual capital of Africa, nay the world, with so many self-proclaimed libtard genii assembled in one city. In fact, many foreign governments would compete to donate money to Zimbabwe which would consist of one gigantic network of ultraliberal and Marxist NGOs, media and universities where all departments except Whiteness, Gender and Postcolonialism would be abolished.

No self-respecting libtard would want to share a country with Steve Hofmeyr anyway. This place is only worth boycotting or fleeing from, blighted as it is by 360 years of apartheid and colonialism. As Allister Sparks put it, he is “ashamed of his nationality”. Aren’t you?

Not only shall we at last enjoy some kind of social peace and no-one on crack cocaine would hoot at you in the morning traffic screaming “you racist, sexist bastard” anymore, but north of the Limpopo a truly new, exciting society will be flourishing. The UN will consecrate Harare as the permanent home of the World Conference Against Racism that last took place – ironically – in Durban, a city divided along race and class lines. Property prices will go through the roof as libtards from South Africa and all over the world will scramble to stake a claim in Harare like the hippies once descended on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.

South Africa would avoid the fate of Syria with a potential libtard-normal civil war breaking out and Zimbabwe would gain thousands of postcolonial, postracial, postgender, post-anything people with high self-esteem and global media connections.

Sounds like a win-win situation to me, don’t you think?


The master of Zim’s destiny makes his reappearance

Scene from the film 'The Ambassador'
Scene from the film ‘The Ambassador’

Africa’s oldest leader, president Robert Mugabe from Zimbabwe, appeared in public again after he had not been seen for weeks

Mugabe, who turns 90 on February 21, spoke at the burial of his younger sister Bridget.

Belying recent rumours of ill health and even death, he spoke for an hour at a graveside in Zvimba, some 100km west of the capital Harare.

The old ruler who wiped out his political oppostion in a genocide in the 1980’s, is now the only survivor among six siblings. Bridget died in hospital on Saturday, aged 78.

“Zimbabwe’s land, its natural resources, belong to the people of Zimbabwe,” Mugabe eulogized.

“It is a relationship which is natural, God-given and which makes you owners of your wealth and therefore masters of your destiny,” he said.

The poverty-stricken people of the former Rhodesia is being ransacked by criminal mobs, aided by Mugabe, in the Marenge diamond fields, a scenario often seen in Africa and portrayed in the film The Ambassador (2011).

In the film, a Danish journalist uncovers chilling corruption linked to diplomatic title brokerage and blood diamonds in the CAR. Observers say it is similar to what is happening in Zimbabwe.

“Sure, we will need partners, but we need partners who do not become our masters,” Mugabe said at the funeral.

Mugabe’s health has been the subject of speculation in recent years, with some media suggesting he sought medical treatment in countries including Malaysia and Singapore.

Beware of Juju!

Vince Musewe
Vince Musewe

The rag tag unemployed youth that were ululating and dancing on ZANU(PF)’s election “victory” are nowhere to be seen. Now all you see are young girls fetching water in the early mornings in urban Harare some wearing yellow ZANU(PF) t-shirts that say “indigenise, empower, employ develop”. What a joke!

Around 10 in the morning, you can see the same youths playing pool or gambling to while away time. Some recently died from drinking “Zed” a lethal cane spirit imported from Mozambique that costs only a dollar. There is erratic power so bathing is not a priority for them. All this, as Mugabe flew to New York with a plane load of 80 cohorts not only to shop, but to insult the Americans and the British. The new ministers will no doubt be getting their flashy Mercs soon to maneuver in Harare’s potholed roads.

The masses are a truly sorry lot!

Listening to Julius Malema campaign sent some chills down my spine and I sincerely hope that I am not alone. The habit of creating exaggerated anticipations amongst the poor masses during electioneering continues to work. Here in Zimbabwe those rural folk who were allocated peri-urban land before the elections are now being evicted. They have delivered the vote.

Progressive black South Africans must be very worried. The masses are ignorant and have no inkling of what it takes to run a successful economy. All they want is better salaries, better houses, social grants and jobs today but these come through intelligent economic management and not through the outright repossession of land and companies by politicians and their cronies.

Ownership alone has been overplayed here in Zimbabwe. Some of our chefs and their cronies own multiple farms and yet we can’t feed ourselves. An estimated 2 million people face starvation in Zimbabwe this year. Most state enterprises are sitting idle or are being run to the ground as those politically appointed to run them earn obscene salaries and perks.

As Malema demands economic freedom through repossession of assets, South Africans who want a future must fight this buffoonery with all they have. The fight is not on twitter or facebook but must be on the ground in the townships and rural areas. The poor masses will sell themselves short as they always do, so they must be educated and informed of what Malema falsely is promising them. Here in Zimbabwe, air time vouchers goats and exaggerated promises of jobs and indigenization at political rallies are nowhere to be seen and the masses have returned to their poverty.

The black middle class poses a serious danger through their lack of participation in politics. Most just wait for voting day and yet, if Africa is to develop we must all be activists everyday. We must educate the short sighted poor masses of how year after year they deliver their vote to political parties who cannot deliver to them.

Malema will not deliver economic freedom through his rantings at rallies simply because he seeks to use the same methods that decimated our economy here in Zimbabwe. There is no depth in what he is promising and I question his appreciation of economics.

Politicians in Africa have failed to deliver sustainable development mainly because they focus on self interest and taking what others have sweated for under the guise of economic justice. That will not create new jobs or the economic prosperity they continue to promise.

I urge all progressive black middle class South Africans to fight these lies; the lie that taking over assets owned by whites creates wealth; the lie that we are entitled to reap where we have not sown. This does not work; it actually destroys wealth and investments as we have seen here in Zimbabwe. Nothing can replace hard work and patience.

The emerging picture in South Africa is pretty worrying to us progressive Africans who know that Africa will never develop by taking from others but by building new economies and wealth while educating the masses so that they may make better life decisions.

We must all work to reject that narrative that we are victims and some one out there owes us. We must reject being continually duped by clever politicians who continue to re-frame how imperialism is our enemy.  Yes it may be, but our number one enemies are blacks who are hiding under empowering of the masses and yet all they do is to accumulate personal wealth without sweating. Our enemies are those who take advantage of the ignorance and poverty of the masses and make promises that they can’t meet.

Malema is doing just that and must be stopped!

Vince Musewe is an economist based in Harare. You may contact him on vtmusewe@gmail.com

Cape Town has twice the murder rate of Johannesburg

Cape Town, danger lurks here...
Cape Town, danger lurks here…

According to an analysis of the latest crime stats by the Istitute for Security Studies, the murder rate in Cape Town is almost twice as high as that of Johannesburg.

Lizette Lancaster, a researcher at the Institute, writes: “Between April 2011 and March 2012, police recorded more murders in Cape Town than in Johannesburg and Pretoria combined. This means that, taking population into account, Cape Town residents are 1,8 times more likely to be murdered than Johannesburg residents. Yet this information is potentially misleading because the likelihood of being a crime victim depends in large part on race, gender, age, economic profile and where in a city a person lives.”

For example, almost two-thirds of the Cape Town murders took place in just ten of the 60 police station precincts in the city, according to an analysis of crime hotspots by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). For years, the Coloured area of Mitchells Plain has experienced the highest violence and property crime rates in the country.

Black areas in Cape Town show ‘abnormally high murder rates’

Although surpassed by Coloured (mixed-race) areas regarding general violent crime, black townships in Cape Town showed the highest murder rates. According to Lizette Lancaster, “Nyanga, Khayelitsha, Gugulethu and Harare remain the most murderous in the peninsula, according to an analysis that takes population size into account. These areas have experienced abnormally high murder rates for more than a decade.”

Similarly, a countrywide analysis of police precinct statistics suggests that income levels matter. Residents in low-income areas are far more likely to be murdered than their middle- and high-income counterparts. Half of South Africa’s murders occurred in only 13% of police precincts (or in 143 out of 1 127).

The focus tends to fall on South Africa’s national murder rate, which is almost five times higher than the global average of 6,9 murders per 100 000 people. However, about 13% of police precincts in South Africa had lower murder rates than this, including affluent areas such as Brooklyn (Pretoria), Garsfontein (Pretoria), Camps Bay, Claremont, Rondebosch (Cape Town), Edenvale and Linden (Gauteng). Over 10% of South African policing precincts – more than 115 stations – experienced no murders, while three in four murders occurred in just a quarter of the country’s police precincts. Suburbs like Sandton, Parkview (Johannesburg), Durban North, Table View and Woodstock (Cape Town) had a murder rate of just under 10 per 100 000 people.

Although murder is often used as the main indicator to support arguments that South Africa is a violent country, it makes up only 2,5% of all violent crime. While there were 16 259 murders in 2012/13, over 600 000 other violent crimes were also reported to the police, including attempted murder, rape, robbery and assault.

Most murder victims are young black men

A vast majority of the murders that take place daily do not make the news. They happen in areas where crime and violence are the norm, and where residents already feel marginalised and forgotten. The majority of murders are neither premeditated nor committed as part of a crime, but occur when an argument leads to physical assault. Research shows that most victims are killed by acquaintances, friends or family members during disputes fuelled by alcohol or drug abuse.

Victimisation surveys, police docket surveys and mortuary surveillance studies reveal that most South African murder victims are young black men. These studies also reveal that most murdered women are killed by their intimate partners, and that men are six times more likely to be killed than women. However, violence affects all South Africans, and the resultant trauma has lasting physical, emotional and often financial consequences.

Read Lizette Lancaster’s entire report here.

Counting underway in knife-edge Zimbabwe election

Zimbabwe ballot paper
Zimbabwe ballot paper

Vote counting was underway in Zimbabwe’s tightly fought election Wednesday, amid high turnout and accusations of rigging by President Robert Mugabe’s allies who wish to extend his 33-year rule.

The 89-year-old Mugabe is Africa’s oldest leader and is running for office for the seventh and perhaps final time.

His rival Morgan Tsvangirai hopes the election will usher in a new era for the troubled southern African nation.

Organisers reported high turnout across the country for the first election since the violent polls of 2008, that led to an uneasy power-sharing government between the two men.

There were no reports of widespread violence this time round, despite the fierce rhetoric of the campaign.

Police said officers in Harare fired warning shots in the air and arrested 10 soldiers who tried to jump the queue to vote.

At many stations voters started queueing before sunrise in the winter cold hours before polls opened. The lines continued well into the evening, with many marking their ballots by candle light.

Mugabe voted before lunchtime in a Harare suburb, where he insisted the poll would reflect the will of the people.

“I am sure people will vote freely and fairly, there is no pressure being exerted on anyone,” he said.

The one-time teacher came to prominence as a hero of Africa’s liberation movement, guiding Zimbabwe to independence from Britain and white minority rule.

But his military-backed rule has been marked by a series of violent crackdowns, economic crises and suspect elections that have brought international sanctions and made him a pariah in the West.

On Tuesday Mugabe vowed to step down if Tsvangirai was the victor. “If you lose you must surrender,” he said.

Tsvangirai, the current prime minister, said that promise should be taken “with a pinch of salt”.

Tsvangirai won the first round of voting in 2008, but was forced out of the race after 200 of his supporters were killed and thousands more injured in suspected state-backed attacks.

But the 61-year-old former union boss has repeatedly voiced concerns that the election is being rigged.

Tsvangirai’s party on Wednesday listed a battery of alleged irregularities.

Finance Minister Tendai Biti, a senior member of Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change, said the names of thousands of voters were missing from the electoral roll.

Biti, speaking after a meeting with the electoral commission, added: “They are admitting that there’s still two million people who are dead on the voters’ roll, but they said ‘because they’re dead, they can’t vote’.”

The MDC has handed its evidence to observers from the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Since no Western groups were allowed to cover the presidential and parliamentary poll, the SADC’s account will be closely watched.

The African Union, which has been accused of whitewashing problems in the run up to the vote, said initial reports indicated it was “peaceful, orderly, free and fair”.

In Washington, US State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf also said that early signs indicated a “peaceful environment” — but that it was too soon to say if the election had been fair.

“We’ve made clear to the government of Zimbabwe and the region that further reductions in our sanctions will only occur if these next elections are credible, transparent and reflect the will of the Zimbabwean people,” she told reporters.

Tsvangirai cut a confident figure as he cast his own ballot, predicting his MDC would win “quite resoundingly”.

“This is a very historic moment for all of us,” he said. It is the time to “complete the change”.

Turnout appeared to be particularly brisk in the urban areas where Tsvangirai has enjoyed his strongest support, and which he must retain to stand any chance of victory.

But some analysts cautioned against interpreting the high urban turnout as a sign Tsvangirai would sweep the election.

“This election is going to be decided in the rural areas,” where two thirds of Zimbabweans live and where Mugabe enjoys strong support, said Michael Bratton, founder of polling organisation Afrobarometer.

Police warned on Wednesday that anyone trying to release unofficial results ahead of the official figures risked being arrested.

Already Sunday, Mugabe had threatened to arrest Tsvangirai if he tried to declare an early victory.

Some 6.4 million people, around half of the population, are eligible to vote. A candidate needs 50 percent of the vote to avoid a run-off.

The sharp-tongued Mugabe has focused his campaign on attacking homosexuals and on promises to widen the redistribution of wealth to poor black Zimbabweans.

As the economy recovers from a crisis that saw mass unemployment and galloping inflation, Mugabe loyalists insist their hero is “tried and tested”.

Tsvangirai hopes his plans to lure back foreign investors, create a million jobs in five years and improve public services will deliver a long-awaited victory.

The final results are expected within five days. – AFP

Zimbabwe’s ‘Cattle Bank’ takes deposits – with 4 legs

Cattle in Zimbabwe
Cattle in Zimbabwe

William Mukurazita’s deposit at the bank has four legs and moos.

Zimbabwe’s first “Cattle Bank” has just opened its books in a unique kind of banking where owners bring in their animals as collateral against cash loans.

For many rural poor in this southern African country once wracked by world-record inflation, it’s the first bank account they’ve ever had.

“Cattle banking is the only way owners can get monetary value for their animals without having to sell them,” bank executive Charles Chakoma told Associated Press, speaking from a smallholding near Marondera, east of Harare.

Owners accrue interest and have the option to get back their cattle after an initial two years or leave them with the bank for longer. Depositors can get loans of an equal value of the cattle they have put in the bank.

In the event the owner fails to repay the loan, the bank keeps the animals. When an owner dies, a close member of the family can take over payment of the loan and ultimately get the cattle back.

The bank, which owns several fast food outlets across the country, says it also will slaughter aging cattle for beef and replace them with more productive cattle of the same value.

Mukurazita, 69, and his wife, Elizabeth, 66, kept about 70 head of cattle at Masomere village, 140 kilometers (90 miles) from Harare. But poor health stopped them from looking after their herd and at least 20 animals died or were stolen, Elizabeth Mukurazita said.

Now they have “deposited” 24 cattle at the TN Bank, named after its founder, financier and social innovator Tawanda Nyambirai. The couple now has $10,000 worth of cows in the bank.

“If we only knew about this cattle banking before, we could have saved all of our herd,” Elizabeth Mukurazita said.

A veterinarian checks the animals and the bank pays to transport them to paddocks it has bought across the country for fattening and cross-breeding programs. Owners are issued with the bank’s ‘Certificate of Cattle Deposit’ as proof of a transaction.

As bank officials log in their cattle, the Mukurazitas look worriedly at a scrawny calf whose mother has died days before. Two other calves nurse from their mothers. The envious, starving orphan makes an attempt to reach for the cow’s udder but is kicked aside and wanders off to graze awkwardly on a small patch of grass.

Untended, it will die within days, said Chakoma, the banker. The state veterinary official passes the calf and values it at $49.

He said the bank wasn’t supposed to accept unhealthy animals, but that this particular calf might survive because it was able to graze on its own. He requested anonymity saying he needed his superiors’ permission to speak to reporters.

Only 20 percent of Zimbabwean cattle are in commercial ranches. The rest – some 3.5 million village animals – are valued at more than $1 billion, Chakoma said. The TN Bank wants to reassure Zimbabweans that despite years of world record inflation their bovine savings are safe, he added.

In traditional rural society, cattle symbolise wealth and play a role not just in farming but as marriage dowries, funeral sacrifices and appeasers of ancestral spirits. Many cattle owners are reluctant to give up such a valued status symbol, but Chakoma said cattle banking eases the burden on the elderly, left behind as young people head for the cities.

“Farmers may not want to part with their animals but we try and persuade them to keep a few for tilling and milking as the rest will just be a burden to them,” he said.

During the dry season, there is less pasture and cattle roaming in search of grass often get lost or stolen. In winter, the cold can kill them.

Interest can be paid in cash or cows. The Mukurazitas say they’d prefer it in cows so that their son can take over managing a new herd and get more land later.

“We don’t necessarily want the cash; we want to improve our herd, ” said William Mukurazita. – Sapa