15th Dec. Chewing The Fat

15th Dec . Chewing the Fat.

The drive to Bulawayo and ensuing family conversation revealed a couple of things. The dual carriageway that 2-3 year's ago when my brother last visited, had stopped dead in its tracks mid-construction, just outside Mugabe's neighbourhood, and had for a long time remained incomplete, had now been extended a bit further, but had still not reached Bulawayo, its intended destination.

 Stopping on the way to chat some family friends, a commercial pilot and  wife who owns lingerie and women's clothes and accessories business, reflected the positive entrepreneurial comfort zone in which many Hararians  currently find themselves. There is no insurance for cars, houses, property or businesses here. You just take risks or sink. The cleverest and best connected are making the prevailing non-interventionist  capitalism  work for them. I dare say this is not just a slight deviation from the Marxist-Leninist  philosophy that dominated Mugabe’s manifesto and Zanu-PF policies back in the 1980’s, or did I miss his all-important announcement about this radical shift towards far right wing politics?  Corruption is understandably rife, especially amongst civil servants  (or is it just those who, unlike the army lack the importance to be placated with the odd payment in diamonds?) Of course the government can’t pay them because in early February this year, the Zimbabwean minister of finance, perhaps caught off guard, is reported to have admitted to a bank balance of US$217 in the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/30/zimbabwean-government-bank-balance-down)!

On the up side there is an excellent choice of private schools, (government schools are not even a remote consideration for middle classes). My favourite schools are those which have a fixed fee for all. They are highly over-subscribed due to their corruption -free policy. In some of these boarding schools, mobile phones are completely disallowed and internet /television time is supervised, monitored and restricted, balanced by a broad well- rounded and international curriculum. Weekly one to one tuition slots with every subject teacher are in place and there is a no favours or donations policy  to  prevent discipline-avoidance by the rich and influential ie if you break the rules you get  excluded ......no complications. J’s niece attends just such a boarding school in the gorgeous Inyanga Highlands to the East of Zimbabwe, where the climate is more temperate and the mountainous breath-taking landscape is carpeted with deciduous forests as well as fruit, tea and coffee plantations. Unfortunately time did not allow for us to visit Inyanga, on this occasion.

I was however, baffled to find that Ian Smith’s two-tier apartheid education system of having A and B schools has been kept, no longer based on racial  but socio-economic lines.( A- schools, superior state schools, formerly purely for white children, now have a very limited government subsidy which is topped up by a levy paid by parents, directly to the school.  B-schools, inferior state schools, formerly for black children,  are still run by government and are purely government funded.) This means the poor rural and much of the township population are confined to poorly resourced schools with limited or no English teaching, and a non-international curriculum. This obvious convenience to prevailing party propagandists had not escaped my attention. I was however more amused by the revelation by one of my nieces in Harare,  that although she went to a B school, by year 12 she had received her first taste of European literature in the form of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” Dear reader, I hope the irony here is not lost on you.