1. ERADICATING SLUMDWELLERS

Operation Murabatsvina appears to have started out as a drive by the ruling party to bring the war veterans to heal. The ZANU Government had used the war veterans to occupy white commercial farms and to play a leading role in terrorizing all ZANU
opponents. Predictably the war veterans, who had been given free rein to break the law,had a become a law unto themselves and were regularly holding the government to ransom.

From their strongholds on the farms they began to present the ruling party with ultimatums – even threatening to campaign against them if their demands were not met. This presented a serious risk especially in peri-urban areas, The occupied farms on the
peripheries of the cities and larger towns, located as they were alongside high density suburbs, became a magnet for tens of thousands of urban poor families who were holed up in squatter camps and backyard shacks.

Many of the war veterans, who effectively were in control of the white commercial farms, and who had little interest and less capacity in commercial farming, quickly spotted a money-making opportunity. They became shack farmers, randomly subdividing the
farms into plots and selling these off or renting them to urban slum dwellers.

The top brass in ZANU soon realized that they were facing a major threat of their own making. Their desperate and destructive land reform strategy had lead to the coming together of armed ex combatants, accustomed to officially sanctioned violence and criminality, and highly politicized and deeply disaffected urban slum dwellers who, since the late 1990s, had consistently voted against the ruling party in overwhelming numbers.

This was the basis for the police and army demolitions, but not the explanation given by the state. The pretext became the eradication of unplanned settlements. The peri-urban farms were the first to be targeted on the grounds that subdivisions and shelter construction had been unplanned and without access to services – thereby violating all kinds of municipal by-laws. Demolitions were therefore legitimated as the act of a caring government that was determined to root out illegal activities and those who perpetrated them.

Once Zanu’s top brass unleashed the army and the police to smash the peri-urban farms, city authorities came to the party and seized the opportunity to eliminate informal dwellings and informal markets within their jurisdiction - that is within the formal boundaries of the cities.

2. A CHRONOLOGY OF ZIMBABWE’S DEMOLITIONS

• War Veterans hold Ruling Party to ransom demanding concessions in return for campaigning for Zanu candidates for elections.
• On peri-urban farms they get involved in land speculation, illegal subdivision, and the drawing of disaffected urban slum dwellers into their ranks, thereby increasing their potential threat to the State
• They allow citizens to erect shelters without approvals, without integration into city plans and without access to services such as roads, water, drainage.
• The ruling party – probably its intelligence agencies – advise the President that war veterans pose a threat and need to be smashed.
• They come up with Operation Murabatsvina – which means “get rid of the trash”. At this point “trash” probably refers to the war veterans that the party is unable to control.
• The party uses the attack on the war veterans and the occupants of peri-urban farms to act against poor people within town and city boundaries, who have done what urban poor people all over the world are forced to do by the failures of the state and the market – that is to erect shacks and run businesses illegally. At this point “trash” becomes a reference for the urban poor.
• The campaign quickly extends to all parts of the country as the logic of totalitarian action takes its course. “Let’s get rid of the political threat and punish the poor at the same time” becomes the strategy of the state
• Since people have no other choice they begin to return to their demolished sites and camp out in the open. Even a makeshift tent is not tolerated and is immediately torn down by the army or the police
• International condemnation and the horror of the humanitarian crisis spawned by the operation leads to a rethink by the party. To use their own odious metaphor, it dawns on Zanu that they have not been able to get rid of the trash. They have simply ripped open the trash bags and scattered the trash to every corner of the country. They embark on a charm offensive, called Operation Garikai
• The army is called in again, this time to build formal houses. It is claimed that this was the intention all along and that the houses are for the people whose informal shacks were demolished during Operation Murabatsvina. Nobody appears to be convinced except the ruling party itself. Everybody knows that the state does not have the money to build houses for the hundreds of thousands of homeless and landless families and that the few houses that will be built will go to party loyalists in the army and the police and to those who can afford to pay expensive leases.
• The strategy to build a few thousands houses is designed to give maximum visibility to their claimed commitment to formally house the people. The houses may be real but the strategy is nothing but smoke and mirrors. The army builds five thousand houses (nationally) on registered stands but no attempt is made to cost the units and to link the cost to affordability levels of the poor. Neither is any attempt made to service these units nor change a blanket policy that forbids occupation unless water and sanitation is provided. In fact most houses are built in areas where bulk services are not available and there is no money or capacity in local
  government to provide them. Even in the capital city Harare the existing infrastructure is not able to meet existing demand.
• The state begins to permit the construction of temporary houses and the peri-urban and slum landscape of Zimbabwe’s cities and towns assumes the bizarre character of people living in flimsy, makeshift shelters, frequently erected on the rubble and ashes of their former homes.
• But the relaxing of regulations and the begrudging acceptance that the urban poor or not simply going to disappear now that their shelters have been demolished leads to opportunities for change and to some hope for a more secure future for the urban poor in terms of tenure and affordable, incremental housing.
• As for the political situation, for the moment the war veterans are as cowed as the opposition, but the material and structural conditions that have caused the crisis remain unaltered. They continue to push the overwhelming majority of Zimbabwe’s population into poverty, suffering and to drive the state and the economy towards total meltdown.

3. RESPONSE FROM DIALOGUE AND SHELTER AND ZIMBABWE HOMELESS PEOPLE’S FEDERATION (THE ALLIANCE)

In the wake of this man-made “tsunami”, there were many angry activists, Zimbabwean and international, asking pointed questions to the Zimbabwe alliance and SDI: “What are you doing about this?” “How can you be so silent in the face of such flagrant violation of human rights?”

These were perfectly appropriate questions to ask in the light of the actions taken against its own citizens by the Zimbabwe state. And a large percentage of the middle class activists in Dialogue on Shelter and SDI as a whole felt their worth could only be measured by the degree of their protest. They wanted to (and did) engage in the usual protest activities such as writing articles in newspapers, marching on Zimbabwe embassies, sending petitions …

But those in the Zimbabwe NGO had a much tougher challenge to face. Were they going to engage with a rogue state or were they going to adopt a position of non-collaboration? Were they going to assist people who had been left homeless and destitute by Operation
Murabatsvina by brokering deals with the very institution that created the crisis in the first place, or were they going to refuse to be involved in development activities that might sanction the actions of the Government in any way? This alone forced them to look deeper into what was happening and try to develop a strategic and sustainable response to such terrible and yet regular behaviour by the Zimbabwe government.

Luckily they were in a position to listen to the voice of the affected themselves and to be guided by their own strategic responses to the predicament in which they now found themselves. Those who had been evicted from the farms and from the informal settlements in the cities and the towns knew from first hand experience that they had ended up in these unacceptable conditions because better and more appropriate alternatives had simply not been provided by their government. It was in the total absence of an enabling environment and in the absence of suitable alternatives provided by the state that they had to address their shelter needs by placing themselves at the
mercy of land speculators and shack farmers.

What is more the urban poor, especially women, are clear that spurts of defiance in which their youth and men participate with long to middle distance support from middle class activists might look good on CNN and in the international newspapers, but they serve merely to provoke even more brutal responses from the repressive arms of the Government. The aftermath is more destruction, more suffering and more angst and fear for the women and children themselves.

The professionals in Dialogue on Shelter and in SDI as a whole had to struggle to reconcile the right to protest against injustice with working hard to create the basis for sustainable entitlements, such as land tenure, services and affordable housing.

The message from the Zimbabwe Federation resonated with their experience and with the experience of their brothers and sisters in other parts of the world who had also faced demolitions. They made it clear that the only way for them to get entitlements such as land, housing and infrastructure was to survive and endure the evictions and demolitions until such time that the state concedes to the futility of their actions and allows resettlement and even a relaxation of regulations. If the right precedents are set during this uneasy inter regnum, protective legislation could follow and later even legal entitlements.

However irrational this may sound, this is the real insight, in terms of understanding how to assist the urban poor in the ongoing war of attrition with the state.

The alliance has chosen to negotiate with the Government. These are their terms.

• The Federation has 2500 stands throughout the country. Government has
  granted this land to the Federation and they have the agreements and the
  documents to prove it.
  
• The Federation will contribute all available funds in Guungano, its own urban
  poor development fund and will call on SDI and UN Habitat to seek funding for an
  initial 2500 temporary units.
  
• The Federation will use these funds to build temporary houses on these stands
  and transfer them to Federation members.
  
• Federation members will repay the fund in building materials.
  
• For every unit that the Federation builds Government will provide a vacant plot
  with access to some form of basic services.
  
• Government will assess and approve the Federation’s design for
  temporary/incremental housing.
  
• Government will assist the Federation to procure building materials.
  
• The alliance will set up a factory for the production of prefabricated housing that
  is affordable, easy to manufacture, transport and erect.
  
• The alliance will explore alternative methods for water harvesting and sewerage
  disposal that does not depend on the infrastructure of the cities or the towns.

Their challenge is that they have to find reliable partners in local and national government with whom to negotiate.

4. PHOTO ESSAY

Operation Murabatsvina – Porta Farm Harare

 

Operation Murabatsvina – Kariba. War against slums or against slumdwellers?

 

Plastic shack where a brick house once stood. Hatcliffe Extension.

Rubble of a demolished house, replaced by a flimsy shelter, with Garikai (Govt) houses in the background
that cannot be occupied because there are no services.

Federation response at Hatcliffe Ext.: build 25 houses in 30 days.

Federation response at Hatcliffe Ext.: manufacture materials on site

Turning adversity into opportunity – mason builds Federation house to be occupied by at least one family
within a day-and-a-half.