ELECTRICITY power generation at Lake Kariba has been cut due to falling water levels in the dam," reported Bulawayo 24.
"In a statement, the Zambezi River Authority said water allocation for power generation at Kariba North and South would be reduced from the current 1 476mW to 890mW.
"Lake Kariba is currently five metres above the Minimum Operating Level when it should be eight at this time of the year."
It never rains but pours! The country has been hit by the drought, then Cyclone Idai and now reduced power generation because of water shortage. These natural disasters are unpleasant enough no matter who you are but they are felt even more by those with no reserves to fall back on.
Ever since the seizure of the white owned farms in 2000 Zimbabwe has fallen off its parch as the breadbasket of the region. The country used to produce enough food to feed its own people with plenty left to feed others in the region. The country also earned billions of dollars from selling cash crops like tobacco and cut flowers. The country’s agricultural sector collapsed when Mugabe seized the farms, mostly for himself and his cronies.
Mnangagwa has poured billions of dollars to revive the agricultural sector with his ‘command agriculture’. It has been a failure because of corruption and mismanagement.
The collapse agricultural sector took down with it the country’s economy leaving the country dependent on important food aid - so impoverish we could not even pay for it.
We live in the day and age when human ingenuity has turned deserts in crop fields or orchards stretching from horizon to horizon all round. And yet we are starving in a country with idyllic weather and soil for growing crops and farming animals, the Garden of Eden. A damning testimonial to the sheer incompetence of the nation’s post independence leaders!
Worse still, we, the people of Zimbabwe, have for the last 38 years and counting allowed these Zanu PF thugs to ride roughshod over our basic freedoms and rights and to destroy the nation’s economy. The drought has caught us with empty silos, for decades we have lived from hand to mouths topped up with imported food and aid.
Cyclone Idai has destroyed many schools, hospitals, homes, roads and even killed many people. The damage was much worse that it would have been where it not for the sorry state of our infrastructure. Decades of neglect have left many roads in our cities and towns full of potholes; how much worse the roads in the rural backwaters.
Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless because their mud-brick homes collapsed. It is now 2 500 since the Romans invented cement and yet millions of our rural people still live in mud hut!
Ian Smith gave Mugabe detailed drawings of the Batoka Gorge Dam, another Kariba Dam, which would have double the hydro power generation capacity and a number of other power projects. 38 years latter, not one of these projects have been carried out. Many companies have closed sending unemployment to nauseating heights of 90%. The prospect of forcing the few companies still operating to shut down because of electrical power cuts due to reduce generation at Kariba Dam is sickening!
It never rains but pours. For the last 38 years we have done little to end our man-made problems of criminal waste of the nation’s human and material resources through corruption, mismanagement and tyrannical oppression. So when such natural disaster as drought and cyclone Idai occur we are as helpless as a chicken caught in haul storm.
The next eight months or so are going to be tough, real tough, and no doubt many more lives will be lost. What we must never ever forget is that the suffering and deaths could have been avoided if we had dealt with the country’s root problem of rigged elections and bad governance.
Zanu PF has managed to stay in power all these last 38 years regardless of the regime’s clear track record of being corrupt and incompetent because the party rigged elections. Mnangagwa rigged last year’s elections just as the party has rigged past elections.
Zanu PF does not have the mandate to govern and therefore must be pressured to step down. The prospect of another four more years of this corrupt and mediocre Zanu PF government is unthinkable.
But worst of all; if Zanu PF is allowed to remain in office till the 2023 elections, we can be 100% certain that the party will rig the elections and extend its ruinous and tyrannical reign another five years. We will only have ourselves to blame if that happened!
By Jeff Kurai Chakanyuka
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