Zimbabwe crisis strains Botswana's nerves

Financial Times ^ | October 15 2003 | John Reed

[Tailgunner Joe]

The morgue in Francistown, Botswana's second-largest city, has been filling up with unclaimed corpses.

In January to September this dusty border town buried 36 Zimbabweans who died far from their families, many in pauper's graves. Some died in accidents, others of HIV/ Aids.

Dizzy Sebeo, deputy town clerk, tells me the burials have set back the city's modest budget by 16,530 pula ($3,500) so far this year. The municipality has also been splashing out on fuel and per diems for city council members deporting illegals back to Zimbabwe.

Botswanans tend to be laid-back people, but Zimbabwe's worsening political-economic crisis, which has been spilling beyond its borders, is visibly straining nerves.

Sylvia Muzila, Francistown's district commissioner, says: "On every street in this town, when you go to talk to a person, you can tell from their poor accent in Setswana that they are Zimbabwean.

"And I'm just talking about Francistown, my dear," she says. "Gaborone [Botswana's capital] is something else."

Estimates of the number of Zimbabweans in Botswana - firm figures don't exist - range as high as 150,000 to 200,000. The former, more modest number would amount to nearly 10 per cent of the country's population - the highest proportion anywhere in Africa.

Goats and television sets have been reported stolen, presumably by 'border-jumpers,' from villages along the frontier. But the illegals' impact is most visible in Francistown, this sleepy city of 83,000 just over the border from Zimbabwe's hunger-stricken Matabeleland.

Economic migrants from Bulawayo, the region's capital, arrive daily by car or bus, bearing clothes, peanuts and other food for sale, and stocking up on subsidised petrol to take back. Zimbabwean girls sell their bodies outside The Chicken Run takeaway and the Night Moves club by night.

Precious, one of the prostitutes, told me she has been shuttling here from Bulawayo since early this year. Her husband and son live in South Africa - itself home to as many as 2 to 3m Zimbabwean immigrants - but she rarely sees them.

Unusually for Africa, Botswana has a vigorous democracy, transparent public institutions, and higher credit ratings than neighbouring South Africa. But its status as a rare success story faces unprecedented threats from its high exposure to southern Africa's two open sores: HIV/Aids and the economic collapse of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

With about one in three of its people HIV-positive, the Botswanan government is fighting back as best it can. In positive contrast to South Africa, antiretroviral drugs are available in the public-health system, and Aids-prevention messages are ubiquitous and clear.

But Zimbabwe's political crisis lies beyond Botswana's control. South Africa, the region's diplomatic heavyweight, has been pushing for talks between representatives of Mr Mugabe's government and the foiled opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

Botswana, with perhaps less faith in a diplomatic solutions, has been building an electric fence. The barrier, now in progress, will run when completed all along its 500km border with Zimbabwe.

Officials insist the fence is meant to keep foot-and-mouth disease from tainting Botswana's lucrative beef exports to the European Union. "It's not intended for people," Mmapula Modise, permanent secretary in the agriculture ministry, assures me.

An official in the president's office points out that the voltage in the fence is in any event too low to deter border-jumpers, who have been busily cutting holes in it.

But another Botswanan official tells me privately: "If we want good-neighbourly relations, we can't say it's to stop the Zimbabweans." The neighbours appear to be irritated anyway: The Botswanan press last month quoted Zimbabwe's High Commissioner, Phelekezela Mphoko, accusing Gaborone of "trying to create a Gaza Strip."

With independent local and foreign media under tight constraints, Zimbabwe's downward spiral is occurring largely out of view. Humanitarian officials, including the United Nations World Food Programme, which plans to be feeding 4m Zimbabweans by January, speak worriedly about 'Zim fatigue.'

Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's pinsists a political solution is possible, and has staked his reputation on a pledge to deliver a solution by mid-2004. For now the two sides are still bogged down in "talks about talks," divided over basic issues such as the legitimacy of Mr Mugabe and the future of the land grabs undertaken under his tenure.

My driver in Francistown has been one Martin Sibanda, a Zimbabwean from the central town of Kwekwe who has been in Botswana since 2001. He assures me his country was better off under Ian Smith, Rhodesia's white-supremacist leader until 1980 - a dispiriting sentiment that rings true, and one I have heard from other black Zimbabweans.

Martin's wife Josephine is in town today, stocking up on what he calls "critical goods" - soap, cornmeal, cooking oil - for their seven children back in Zimbabwe. "She comes over once a month; I go there once a month," he says.

Martin is discouraged by the increasingly chilly reception his compatriots are getting in Botswana. "Everybody's running away from starvation on that side," he says. "We are all the same race - Africans or human beings," he muses. "Why should we segregate?

After all, he says: "Tomorrow it could be them."

[Dante3]

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[Libertarianize the GOP]

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[Clive]

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