The mess that is Tokwe Mukosi

I am not a reporter neither I am I an investigative journalist. I am just an ordinary Zimbabwean citizen who observes and asks.

I have been watching the Tokwe Mukosi story unfold for a while now. A year ago an elderly gentleman from an area called Masimbiti stopped me while I was working (I get a lot of elderly people disrupting me while I work to tell me all sorts of stories, I have grown not to mind the disruptions) to tell me about he had relocated from Tokwe Mukosi, he told me about how the Government had given him his compensation money and how he used the money to build a house, buy a car and build a shop. He was quite pleased with his move. He did also mention that some of the beneficiaries of the compensation monies were not residence of the Tokwe Mukosi area but that’s another story for another day.

Now we have this situation where a number of families have to be abruptly removed from their homes because the incomplete dam has filled up and they are at risk of being flooded. The Ngundu area, which I have visited 5 times in the past two weeks, is a hive of activity with helicopters ferrying people from the Tokwe Mukosi area to dry land, soldiers packing them and their possession into trucks and delivering them to the area that they had initially been told to relocate to before this whole mess. We have over 100 families currently putting up at a nearby school waiting for the trucks to take them away from their homes forever. The community has resorted to soliciting donations as there is not enough food and other resources at the school for all these people.

Some are said to have received their compensation monies and used them to buy cars and build shops. Others had not received their money. Others had decided that they would move after they had harvested their crops. Most just never thought the dam would never spill over.

So what do we have now? A sad and unpleasant situation where one has to leave the place they call home with little or no money and has to settle uncomfortably in the new area. We have children who at the moment are not going to school because their family is “moving”, we have an old man who is distraught because he is afraid his children who left for South Africa will come back one day and not know where to find their father, we have scared grannies being forced into helicopters for dear life’s sake. We have families living in dire conditions.

And so now people begin to sit up and pay attention. Now when the situation is already a life changing mess…

 update- Just today reliable sources informed me that the wife of a prominent "Party" person was seen in Masvingo with a car full of food items, they say she looted the food items that were donated yesterday towards the cause. Taking from the poor to feed the rich. How embarrassing!!!!!!