BY CHELSEA MUSAFARE

AFRO-JAZZ crooner Alexio Kawara yesterday said his forthcoming video was designed to be a soundtrack for couples in love and likely to help improve their relationships.

The musician, who came out of hibernation last year following the release of his sixth album, Oyi, said the new track — Unombozviitirei? — would be dropped on January 13.

Kawara told NewsDay Life & Style that his fans would be able to see that the video was done with a high level of creativity lacking in many local productions.

“For this video, we went all out with the wardrobe and make-up as well as the choreography. The concept itself is something that people should look forward to as we tried to make it different from a lot of videos that are seemingly lacking creativity,” he said.

The Shades of Black frontman, who started off as an urban grooves artiste, said Unombozviitirei? had a mature feel with themes of love.

“This song is definitely one of those songs that if you listen to it attentively it should trigger something in people who are in a relationship and hopefully improve it. It is about two people who are stuck together in a relationship even though they wrong each other. I am mostly inspired by the need to transform people’s mindsets,” he said.

The video was produced and directed by Simba Gee and recorded by Cornelius Muponda of Harmony Studios.

Kawara, who has been one of the most consistent musicians since bursting onto the music scene with the group Guest at the turn of the millennium, rose to national stardom with his hit Amai and later released tracks such as chart-toppers Shaina and Tinodanana.

His discography include Usazondisiya (2003), Kumba Kwenyu (2004), Pfimbi Yangu, Kana and Tose (2011).

BY JAIROS SAUNYAMA

UPON arrival at Heather Chimhoga Orphan Care (HCOC) centre deep in rural Murewa North, one is greeted by modern and state-of-the-art infrastructure at the institution.
Sandwiched by Goromonzi and Shamva districts, the centre has become home to thousands of orphans in the poverty-stricken district, with the majority of beneficiaries having their fees paid while a total of five schools in the area are currently under a school feeding programme.

The centre has been taking care of several child-headed families while water projects have been installed at surrounding schools and health centres.

However, the sweet story of HCOC was born out of tragedy, as the lead person, Chimhoga from Nyamashato and a vendor in the neighbouring South Africa died mysteriously after initiating the idea to rescue children from abject poverty as well as empower orphans, some of whom have since obtained university degrees.

Chimhoga, a member of the Presbyterian Church in South Africa returned home to Nyamashato in Murewa with her white friends who, upon arrival, were shocked to learn that the local primary school was facing closure due to dilapidated infrastructure, according to HCOC chief executive officer Albert Mukondwa. Mukondwa, who has been at the helm of the centre since its formation over a decade ago, said tragedy struck when Chimhoga was found dead at a relative’s house in Harare in 1996 while en-route from South Africa.

“Together with her white friends, Heather brought gifts to the vulnerable members of the society in her rural village and promised that they were going to renovate the dilapidating infrastructure at Nyamashato Primary School,” he said.

“After spending sometime in the rural areas, tragedy struck when Heather was found dead in her room at a relative’s house in Sunningdale. It was sad,” recalled Mukondwa, who was also an environmental technician in the area.

The testimonies about Chimhoga’s charitable works attracted the attention of the United States-based Rotarians, Ralph and Roberta Pipitt who, in 1997, visited Nyamashato and renovated the school that has since become a modern example of learning infrastructure in Murewa district.

The Pipitt family also raised funds for the refurbishment of four more other schools in the area, among them teachers’ houses.

The Rotarians, later led the motion to establish the HCOC in honour of the late philanthropist, a move that gave birth to the centre — a success story in a rural set-up.

Currently, a state-of-the art clinic is being constructed while a thriving Moringa production project will leave many with envy. The centre also has a flourishing chicken rearing project of up to 21 000 birds, with the meat being sold at the organisation’s butchery located in urban Murewa, about 25km away.

Richard Kadyauta, a social worker at HCOC, said their operations have yielded positive results in empowering the orphans.

“The school feeding programme in this area among other endeavours has been of great impact and we are happy about that. The most educated child is the orphan, the most dressed child is an orphan and this has been motivating. We buy uniforms, pay fees for even those who are in boarding schools. Some of the beneficiaries are now graduates and that is refreshing,” he said.

As of December 2019, the centre catered for 234 orphans while a total of 810 including ECDs are on the feeding programme where each beneficiary getting two meals per day — a move that has resulted in the reduction of school dropouts due to hunger. At the schools, the centre established well-equipped kitchens with modern cookers all sourced by the Rotarians. HCOC has so far taken total ownership of 15 child headed families in the area.

At the centre is also a state-of-the-art safe house that will house at least six children with the officials waiting for government to officially register them. The safe house contains a television set, well-equipped kitchen, beautiful bathrooms and three bedrooms with each containing two beds.
Currently, the centre has 32 permanent workers including some who work at the Moringa project while a lot others do come as per contract or volunteers as caregivers in the villages. HCOC is operating in 21 villages.

“As our resource base grows, we are targeting to work in 10 wards that are within our catchment area. We currently need more Moringa processing equipment. We currently have one with the workshop having a capacity to carry four more. We are saying together let’s make the children smile again,” said Mukondwa.

The electric Moringa dryer was purchased at a cost of US$21 000 with the assistance of the Rotary Club of Harare City and has a capacity of drying 1kg of Moringa powder every four hours. The organisation boasts of a four-hectare field of Moringa plants while eight women have since been employed to harvest the medicinal plant.

HCOC also runs a well-stocked clinic at Nyamashato that is manned by professional nurses and has benefitted the whole community.

Beauty Mukondwa, who heads the health department said the completion of the clinic at the centre will see more people benefitting.

“We have a clinic at Nyamashato Primary School that caters for the orphans. However, we have cases where we assist people from the community. We have all the services and a professional medical doctor visits once a month. We also refer patients to bigger institutions like Murewa District Hospital. If the clinic under construction at this centre is complete, it will serve more people if not the whole community,” she said.

The organisation also works with a religious leader Stewart Marufu who conducts home-based visits to the orphans and guides them spiritually. According to Marufu, the spiritual assistance has shaped the behaviour and moral sides of the children in a positive direction.

HCOC centre has become an outstanding feature in rural Murewa, turning a somehow marginalised community into the most-sought-after. From solar-powered water systems at schools, feeding schemes for children and a close health centre, the beneficiaries have indeed their oasis in a desert — thanks to the Rotarians who revived Chimhoga’s dream of making the world a better place.

guest column:Clement Prince Addo

All over the world, the internet has provided extraordinary socioeconomic opportunities to businesses, governments, and individuals. But less developed countries still face numerous obstacles to maximise its potential. The problems range from obsolete infrastructure, the nonavailability, non-accessibility, cost, power fluctuations, policies and regulation.
Many countries on the continent still have bandwidth as low as 64 kilobits. This is in contrast to the 270 000 megabits per second in the US. Data also shows that downloading a 5GB movie took 734 minutes in the Republic of Congo, 788 minutes in Sao Tome, 850 minutes in Ethiopia, 965 minutes in Niger and 1 342 minutes in Equatorial Guinea. Singapore is the fastest, taking about 11 minutes and 8 seconds to download a typical 5GB high-definition movie.

In certain situations, bandwidths for the entire country is less than what is available to an individual residential subscriber in the United States of America.

Similarly, African countries are listed among those with the lowest internet speed yet with the most expensive communication and internet cost in the world.

Africa is on record to have had the fastest growing mobile telecommunication market over the years. But the continent still has the lowest mobile penetration. And developments in Africa’s telecommunications sector happen in cities and urban centres.

Service providers argue that it’s not economically feasible to roll out a network to cover an entire country.

But various advanced technologies are emerging to reduce the cost of internet provision and to increase accessibility. They also offer the possibility of developing communication networks in a way that does less harm to the environment.

The approach is called resource virtualisation, where multiple telecommunication services can be provided by less physical infrastructure.

Since the chunk of the cost transferred to the end-user comes from the cost of power and infrastructural management, this approach can reduce the operational cost, improve accessibility and cut the cost to the end user.

Like every architectural work, telecommunication masts must meet specific constructional requirements, including choice of location and risk analysis.

But unregulated construction is typical in many parts of Africa. Even where regulatory bodies exist, many media and communication masts are sited within very short distances and hilly grounds in big cities.

This is true in Ghana too where in an urban environment it’s possible to see 10 masts within close proximity to one another.

This does not necessarily guarantee quality service. In addition, it poses a severe environmental and physical risk.

Masts are also expensive to put up.

It stands to reason, therefore, that having fewer masts, hence using less energy and doing less damage to the environment would be the optimal way forward.

I have been involved in developing a framework along with other colleagues that can help policymakers demarcate, and zone major cities — or the whole country into zones. Each zone takes only one mast, owned by an infrastructure provider and shared by multiple service providers.

I focused on telecommunications, but the principle can be applied to TV and radio signal towers too.

My proposal involves a three-level architecture that includes a provider who owns and manages the infrastructure.

At the upper level is a Cloud-RAN macro-base station. A provider like the State regulator, can own and manage the data from the base station.

The macro base station is responsible for managing the system’s energy, bandwidth allocation, and flow management, including the handover in intra and inter mast zones.

At the middle level, service providers focus on providing tailored and quality of service to their users. The service providers will not have to spend their resources on managing the infrastructure they only have to deal with how to satisfy users.

The user on the third level has to only deal with the service providers.

This framework will bring an end to uncontrolled mast deployment seen in many African countries.

It would allow for power and bandwidth sharing among multiple service providers and would reduce the need for multiple masts. Traffic would be scheduled over limited masts or access points that reduce the system energy consumption and improve efficiency. The general impact on the environment would also be reduced.

Service providers could then focus on end-users and not on infrastructure.

guest column:Willard Chinhara

It is not surprising that the sanctions issue is also the unfinished business of the September 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA) between Zanu PF and the MDC formations. Although the parties to the GPA had about five years (2009-2013) to implement the provisions of the ill-fated GPA, whatever their shortcomings, it is safe to argue that the on-going anti-sanctions campaign is untimely because the processes of national dialogue and international engagement are still in their infancy.

This argument is neither for nor against the removal of sanctions, but the main objective is to set forth the logical equilibrium of the whole issue.

In simple terms, sanctions can be defined as punitive measures usually taken by several nations, together and at times one country, designed to put pressure on another country in order to force it to change its policies and actions or as a means to rehabilitate that country.

There are, however, various forms of sanctions, mainly comprehensive and targeted or smart sanctions. Comprehensive sanctions simply refer to wholesale or non-discriminating sanctions and are more austere than targeted or smart sanctions.

Thus, targeted sanctions can lessen the negative humanitarian impacts on innocent civilians associated with comprehensive sanctions. Targeted or smart sanctions are meant to focus their impact on leaders, political elites and segments of society believed responsible for objectionable behaviour, while reducing collateral damage to the general population and third parties. However, the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC) argues that “targeted sanctions have unintended consequences, including increases in corruption and criminality, strengthening of authoritarian rule, burdening neighbouring States, strengthening of political factions, resource diversion and humanitarian impacts.”

There are various types of targeted sanctions. According to the TSC, composed of more than fifty scholars and policy practitioners worldwide, the following are some types of targeted sanctions with varying degrees of discrimination:

Individual/Entity targeted sanctions (for example travel ban, assets freeze; most discriminating)

Diplomatic sanctions (only one sector of government directly affected)

Arms embargoes or proliferation-related goods (largely limited impact on fighting forces or security sector)

Commodity sanctions other than oil (for example diamonds, timber, charcoal; tend to affect some regions disproportionately)

Transportation sanctions for example aviation or shipping ban; can affect much of a population)

Core economic sector sanctions (for example oil and financial sector sanctions; affect the broader population and therefore are the least discriminating of targeted sanctions)
Since the year 2001 to date, Zimbabwe is said to have been under targeted sanctions imposed not by the United Nations (UN), but by the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU) who are the major players.

Historical context

In view of the sanctions concept, it is expedient to give an overview of the general history of sanctions as applied during the 20th and 21st centuries. During the 20th century, unilateral and autonomous sanctions were not as prevalent as they appear to be in the 21st century. According to Margaret Doxey, while both the League of Nations Covenant and the UN Charter directed sanctions at the unlawful use of force, in the UN context sanctions have also been linked to the defence of human rights. Prior and during the Cold War, sanctions included those of the League of Nations against Italy from 1935 to 1936 and the UN sanctions against Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1966 to 1979 and an arms embargo against South Africa since 1977 until May 1994 when democratic elections were held. These sanctions were usually comprehensive in nature.

Quoting several authoritative scholars, Daniel W Drezner submits that the origins of smart sanctions lie in the explosion of economic statecraft that started with the end of the Cold War. The UN Security Council (UNSC) voted for economic sanctions twelve times in the 1990s; between 1945 and 1990, the UN had only employed sanctions twice. “According to Hufbauer, Schott, Elliott, and Oegg (2007), there were nearly as many sanctions episodes after end of the Cold War as there were during the first 90 years of the twentieth century.

The most high-profile cases were comprehensive UN sanctions imposed on Iraq, Haiti, and former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It is worth observing that, in the end, all three sanctions episodes generated at least moderate concessions. Obviously, military statecraft was also used in all three cases, but Rogers (1996) argues that economic sanctions played a crucial supporting role in determining the outcomes.”

Analysts observe that measured in terms of cost, sanctions imposed against Iraq were, by far, the most comprehensive in history. It is estimated that Iraq lost between US$175 billion and US$250 billion in possible oil revenues from the sanctions. Further, the price for a family’s food supply for a month increased 250-fold over the first five years of the sanctions regime. It is estimated that the sanctions caused a minimum of 100 000 and up to 227 000 excess deaths among young children from August 1991 to March 1998. In view of these fatalities, Mueller and Mueller concluded that “economic sanctions may well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.”

However, according to Daniel W Drezner, Madeleine Albright — the US ambassador to the UN at the time — provided the defining sound bite for this culpability in May 1996. In a 60-minute interview, she said that even if the sanctions had killed half a million Iraqi children, ‘‘the price is worth it.’’ Conversely, humanitarian groups ranging from the Red Cross to the Human Rights Watch questioned the ethics of comprehensive trade sanctions. It is in this light that multiple UN agencies started to voice concerns about the UNSC’s implementation of comprehensive sanctions. Daniel W Drezner submits that then UN Secretary-Generals Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan both labelled sanctions a “blunt instrument” and asked whether the suffering inflicted on vulnerable groups was a legitimate means of exerting pressure on political leaders.

In view of criticism of the severity and fatalities of comprehensive trade sanctions, the idea of targeted sanctions emerged. Thus, in moving forward with the anti-sanctions campaign, it is important to avoid confusing comprehensive trade sanctions with targeted sanctions. It is also important to note that the UN has been somewhat antipathic about the idea of sanctions. Hence, we have a proliferation of autonomous and unilateral sanctions by nations and regional groups.

Pan-African solidarity

Daniel W Drezner argues that from a social science perspective, the perceived failure of the Iraq case seemed damning. The Iraq sanctions were an extreme outlier in terms of cost to the target — Iraq’s GDP was cut roughly in half. If sanctions this costly failed to yield concessions, then the entire sanctions enterprise could be called into doubt. Thus, the Pan-African solidarity is not a political misnomer, but there is total absence of sincerity in Africa’s anti-sanctions advocacy. SADC and the AU have all failed to deal with the root causes of Western sanctions.

The GPA of 2008 and the resultant Government of National Unity of 2009-2013 failed to yield a permanent solution to Zimbabwe’s internal and external dilemmas. In these circumstances, it is unfortunate that Africa pretends that there is nothing endogenous about the socio-economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe.

Polarized national psyche

Every country under the sun has a polarised national psyche. However, at the present moment, Zimbabwe’s national psyche is polarised beyond the point of reconciliation due to man-made ethnographic complexities and ideological differences. On the one hand, there is a generation of people who, on the political scale, believes in democracy and federalism. This generation considers sanctions as a valid political tool for a regime change agenda. It should be noted that historically, some form of loose pseudo-federalism existed during the pre-colonial era when Zimbabwe had the “Munhumutapa Empire” and the “Ndebele Kingdom” for example.

On the other hand, there is a generation of the radical power elite made up of mainly the liberation war veterans, the military oligarchy and the comprador-bourgeoisie. This formidable generation, believes in political power monopoly and hold the view that sanctions are a form of illegal foreign intervention in a sovereign state. The majority of the people in the latter generation are nationalist pretenders and a huge national security risk.

The third generation, are fickle-minded plebeians who believe in anything and move with the tide of affairs. They are like a football which can be used by all contesting teams to make scores and they reside in the “Eighteen-Areas” of the less powerful teams’ goals. In the case of such a polarized national psyche, there is need for a holistic program of action designed by parties to the National Dialogue. Such a program should strive to make the dialogue process as transparent as possible to convince and educate polarized political constituencies that something constructive is happening.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is imperative to emphasise that the untimeliness of the anti-sanctions campaign is vindicated by lack of convincing conditions for the removal of sanctions. The Pan-African solidarity against sanctions is necessary, but again Africa is caught up in the usual whirlwind of political rhetoric without adopting a pragmatic approach to resolve Zimbabwe’s domestic and international relations dilemma.