HARARE - Thirty-four year old Mavis
Mlambo holds her six-month old baby tightly against her body to keep it
warm as the relentless blows from the tempestuous winds and heavy rains
threaten to tear away her plastic shack on the banks of Harare's Mukuvisi
River.
Her two other children, Tracy and Givemore,
aged four and six respectively, are wrapped under a threadbare blanket
as they try to shirk off the cold.
"I fear the children will soon fall ill from this cold. They are too young to endure this sort of lifestyle," says Mlambo.
Only a short 10 months ago, Mlambo and 150 other families squatting here on the Mukuvisi's banks would not have had to experience the pain of having to watch their children endure this rain and biting cold.
She and her husband used to rent a two-roomed brick and asbestos backyard cottage in the low-income suburb of Mbare until one morning in May last year, armed police backed by bulldozers descended on the suburb.
The police told bemused residents that they were on an exercise to clean up Harare and that all backyard cottages were going to be destroyed as part of the exercise.
"We were given only an hour to remove our household property and find alternative accommodation," Mlambo says, fighting hard to keep back the tears swelling in her eyes.
By July when the government agreed under pressure from the international community to halt the urban clean-up campaign, the number of people whose home had been demolished by police bulldozers was estimated by the United Nations (UN) at around 700 000.
The UN, which dispatched a special envoy to probe the home demolitions, says another 2.5 million people were also indirectly affected by the clean-up campaign that President Robert Mugabe defended as necessary to rid cities and towns of filth and smash the illegal foreign currency parallel market.
However, Mugabe in a bid to parry off rising international condemnation for the home demolition exercise announced a fresh campaign codenamed Operation Garikayi to build thousands of houses for people made homeless by his clean-up operation.
But ten months after the housing demolitions, victims are still staying in shacks along Mukuvisi River and at many squatter camps dotted across the country without ablution facilities and or clean drinking water.
The few houses that have been built under the government programme have been quickly snatched up by senior ruling party officials and the well connected.
"The government has totally forgotten us," says Charles Chinyepe, who is also staying along the river.
"They promised the whole world that they would quickly build new houses for us but the have not done so .... We are suffering here," adds Chinyepe, a self confessed supporter of Mugabe's ruling ZANU PF party but who describes the government's failure to build the homes it promises as the ultimate betrayal.
But the Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA) says houses are not even top on the list of these homeless families' needs. Instead basic survival commodities such as blankets, food, clean water and medicines to treat diseases such as diarrhoea are what the government should urgently provide to Mlambo, Chinyepe and their colleagues.
"We talked to the people and they say there have been serious cases of diarrhoea in the area which affected nearly 50 people. The situation remains desperate," said CHRA spokesman Precious Shumba.
But economic experts told ZimOnline the cash-strapped Harare government is not able to provide even these basic needs let alone modern houses for the hundreds of thousands of displaced families across the country.
"The government is unable to do anything because it does not have the resources. The meagre resources available are being channelled to other areas perceived to be of more immediate concern," Harare-based consultant economist John Robertson said.
The Harare administration, grappling its worst ever economic crisis, needs money to import food, fuel, electricity, essential medical drugs, among many key commodities in critical short supply in the country.
It certainly will be a long while before the government is able to, if ever, divert its energies to providing houses for Mlambo and other people it made homeless. - ZimOnline