Posts by Angus Shaw

Power cuts can now be expected in our cities starting from as early as 4.00 a.m. and lasting through to 10.00 p.m. or thereabouts, says the electricity utility. It is no longer that we have crippling 18 hour cuts by day, but rather that we might be lucky to get six hours of electricity at…

Those who don’t like Rhodes have been at it again. They have cut off his nose with a power tool, probably an angle grinder. The bronze bust gazes into the Table Mountain National Park on Devil’s Peak overlooking Cape Town. It’s a clean cut into the light brownish colour of bronze behind a face tarnished…

President Robert Mugabe in the Harare parliament ….. What an extraordinary chain of events. Mr Mugabe, 91, delivered the wrong speech at the official opening of parliament, one he had already made there three weeks before. The apologists jumped in and said it could happen to anyone; he was given the wrong text by his…

These two brand new street sweeping trucks have been imported to clear up the mess Harare has become. Too little too late, once again? And will the ladies in city overalls with brooms and barrows join the riptide of unemployed? In unprecedented scenes in the Zimbabwe parliament, Mr Mugabe was roundly booed by the opposition during his…

When will the cactus really hit the fan? How deep in it are we? The electricity supply people just announced that from September 1 power output from the Kariba hydroelectric dam, currently the biggest provider, will be slashed from 750 MegaWatts to 475 MW until water levels in the lake rise again. That won’t be…

Thank goodness, this high rise neon hoarding imploring us all to ‘FLY air zimbabwe, non-stop to London’  has been removed after at least two decades as part of Harare’s skyscraper skyline – peering from 25 floors above the Ambassador building, the foreign ministry, the president’s town office, the High Court and other state edifices below.…

Now a little respite from quick, back-to-back cricket tours by India and New Zealand. Zimbabwe might well have been hammered all round but fans who saw the Kiwis, sent in to bat first, notching up 303 runs for four wickets in their first One Day International were electrified  when the home team – greatly troubled…

It is a common belief that you should not speak ill of the dead. You should not rake up old bones either. What happens if you do is not clear. The writer Alexander Kanengoni tells us in The Patriot newspaper that fellow poet and writer Chenjerai Hove died “a miserable man in deplorable and shameful…

An official report shows that just four of the 29 grain silos at Lions’ Den are usable after years of neglect. Most of the unusable ones are cracked and crumbling inside and out. The depot was built in the 1970s and silos of this type need re-lining and re-sealing after about 15-20 years to protect…