All is not well on the Zimbabwean front
The mud cake thick charade that is Zimbabwe sunk to it's lowest yesterday when Botswana's president Festus Mogae officially opened the Harare Agricultural Show. That Mogae played along is no surprise, it is the audacity by Mugabe and his cronies in government to hold up a non existant relationship with a country that has made no secret of their contempt of Zimbabweans that is galling.
Years after independece in Zimbabweans and the batswana cultivated a famously cordial relationship. After all, most if not all residents of Matebeleland South province in Zimbabwe have lineages span across Zimbabwe and Botswana's boarders. Many a Tswana were educated at Zimbabwe's colleges university and returned to their home country for a job. Reciprocally, many a trained Zimbabwe established themselves in Botswana's smaller, but much more stable economy during the first fifteen years of our independence.
So it only seemed natural when things turned sour in Zimbabwe, that a mass exodus for Botswana beginning first in the south of Zimbabwe became one of the most plied routes to "greener pastures" for desperate Zimbabweans. For a while, our neighbors in Botswana tolerated the surging influx of Zimbo's. It wasn't anything new, our countries had mutually exchanged people, skills and resources for much of the last 20 years. I can even remember a family vacation in Gaborone, Botswana's capitol back in the day. And, if I am not mistaken, I remember my mother buying me my first "safari suit" outfit on that trip. Mugabe made safari suits popular to seven year old Zimbabwean boys in the mid-eighties.
After years of sustained heightened influx from their northern neighbors, the Batswana's longsuffering patience began to run. They had watched better qualified Zimbabweans come and take their jobs and enjoy a better quality of life in their own country and had had enough. Right around 2000, word of Batswana's targeted hostility began to leak out. Pretty soon after that it became news. Zimbabwean's were being murdered by angry Tswana's; Botswana was reipartriating Zimbabweans by the truckload everyday; Botswana was couping despertate Zimbabweans in inhumane animal pens for miniscule offences and the litany continues. There's one headline that definitively marked a new era in the relations between our countries and our people; Botswana erected an electric fence to slow down the tidal wave of Zimbabweans.
Despite their best diplomatic efforts to project the new fence is nothing more than a measure to stem the spread of foot and mouth disease between cattle heards close to the boarders, Botswana's government received several protests from their colleagues in Harare. All the while Zimbabwean border jumpers had figured out how isolate the portions of the fence long enough so that they could sneak back into what had become a promised land; Botswana. This controversy is well articulated in the PBS Wide Angle documentary Border Jumpers (more...)
Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe,, Zimbabwe Economy
Years after independece in Zimbabweans and the batswana cultivated a famously cordial relationship. After all, most if not all residents of Matebeleland South province in Zimbabwe have lineages span across Zimbabwe and Botswana's boarders. Many a Tswana were educated at Zimbabwe's colleges university and returned to their home country for a job. Reciprocally, many a trained Zimbabwe established themselves in Botswana's smaller, but much more stable economy during the first fifteen years of our independence.
So it only seemed natural when things turned sour in Zimbabwe, that a mass exodus for Botswana beginning first in the south of Zimbabwe became one of the most plied routes to "greener pastures" for desperate Zimbabweans. For a while, our neighbors in Botswana tolerated the surging influx of Zimbo's. It wasn't anything new, our countries had mutually exchanged people, skills and resources for much of the last 20 years. I can even remember a family vacation in Gaborone, Botswana's capitol back in the day. And, if I am not mistaken, I remember my mother buying me my first "safari suit" outfit on that trip. Mugabe made safari suits popular to seven year old Zimbabwean boys in the mid-eighties.
After years of sustained heightened influx from their northern neighbors, the Batswana's longsuffering patience began to run. They had watched better qualified Zimbabweans come and take their jobs and enjoy a better quality of life in their own country and had had enough. Right around 2000, word of Batswana's targeted hostility began to leak out. Pretty soon after that it became news. Zimbabwean's were being murdered by angry Tswana's; Botswana was reipartriating Zimbabweans by the truckload everyday; Botswana was couping despertate Zimbabweans in inhumane animal pens for miniscule offences and the litany continues. There's one headline that definitively marked a new era in the relations between our countries and our people; Botswana erected an electric fence to slow down the tidal wave of Zimbabweans.
Despite their best diplomatic efforts to project the new fence is nothing more than a measure to stem the spread of foot and mouth disease between cattle heards close to the boarders, Botswana's government received several protests from their colleagues in Harare. All the while Zimbabwean border jumpers had figured out how isolate the portions of the fence long enough so that they could sneak back into what had become a promised land; Botswana. This controversy is well articulated in the PBS Wide Angle documentary Border Jumpers (more...)
Technorati Tags: Zimbabwe,, Zimbabwe Economy
