Denford Magora's Latest Zimbabwe News Blog

You may have noticed that I am having image problems with my articles starting yesterday and I am hoping to clear this up soon, even if it means I leave Blogger and host the Blog elsewhere. You can still click on the images to make them larger, though and view them in detail. The problem started when Blogger, who host this blog, changed their backend and there is now a fancy edit/compose interface when you post your articles. I suspect this is what the problem is and I will try and find a solution by the weekend. Rest assured things will be back to normal. UPDATE: I HAVE NOW SOLVED THIS AND YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO SEE PHOTOS PROPER:Y ON THE BLOG NOW.

Time again for a blog announcement to update you on how this blog is being received all over the world. I hardly ever find time to trawl the Internet for news and the like, what with our creaking Internet connections, but this one was a heads-up from Munya, a regular reader. It turns out that on opencongress, a website run by the US Congress, this blog is the highest rated for "most useful" coverage of the bill that sought to maintain sanctions on Zimbabwe on the eve of a visit to the USA by Morgan Tsvangirai, PM of Zimbabwe. The voting is done by patrons of the opencongress website. The article I did was in the context of Tsvangirai's visit, the fact that this was futile mission from which he would return empty-handed and also examining how Tsvangirai's rosy painting of the situation in Zimbabwe was at odds with reality. This is of course coming in the wake of other recognitions, such as being voted as of the "100 Best Blogs To Learn About Africa". Tweets f...

Nelson Chamisa, the MDC-T Minister of ICT, who is presiding over the complete and utter massacre of quality Internet services in Zimbabwe. The 100 days in which he promised to have upped quality and capacity by 60% are almost over and instead we have a 60% decline in the same! Harare, Zimbabwe, 06 August 2009 Glitches with Internet connection have prevented me from posting since last night. It really is a complete meltdown, for me at least. As you know I have several ways in which I try to connect online and get on with the job. But all three ways broke down at the same time starting last night. At the office, our so-called broadband connection turns out to be nothing of the sort. The ISP was very helpful, they came in today with a new ADSL modem to try and see if the problem was our modem, but it was not. In the end, with the new-fangled advanced modem, they managed to pinpoint the problem as emanating from TelOne, the State-owned phone company who supply our lease line for broadband....

I hope you like the new look. I basically worked non-stop through the night to change from the old blogger template, which has served me quite well, taking me to Page Rank 5, Number 1 in Zimbabwe on Afrigator and also in the mid-fifties in all of Africa out of 10 445 blogs! Some amongst us have been complaining that they missed some stories and articles because of the previous format, which displayed my famously long posts on the home page. This template is specially for you, then. At a glance, you can scan my posts and articles (yes, there is a difference!) from the last 4 days or so without having to scroll down much. It is not perfect yet and I am still refining the layout, adding, subtracting and especially fine tuning how the full post looks when you click on the title to read it. I will be adding a Read More button at the end of the summaries you see on the front page, and an anchor to take you back to the that same front page from the full post. I am beat right now, so that will...

Arthur Mutambara is seen here with harassed, assaulted Zimbabwean farmer, Ben Freeth. We broke the story about the intended recall of Mutambara by his party right here on this blog last week on Wednesday. This blog continues its fine tradition of publishing scoops and inside information that is being proved true left right and centre. Just in the last week we brought you two such scoops.  On Wednesday, I published a story scoop here telling you news about the imminent "firing" of Arthur Mutambara, Zimbabwe's Deputy Prime Minister. The very next day, on Thursday, Zimbabwe Financial Gazette carried that story on their front page!! Then on Friday, we brought you the story about the Reserve Bank Zimbabwe Governor asking all his staff to return their cars to the Reserve Bank Sports Club so that he could offer even more cars to even more MPs.  On Sunday, two days later, the Standard confirmed that story and did an even longer piece on the issue, saying some of the RBZ staff had...

Zimbabwe's dictator, Robert Mugabe, is flanked by a saluting Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, General Chiwengwa, during the singing of the national anthem at the National Sports Stadium on Saturday as Zimbabwe celebrated Independence Day Somebody calling themselves "Anonymous" (how unimaginative!) left a message overnight on this blog saying that I would be lucky to get to the end of the year alive. I don't publish comments from Anonymous contributors because anyone without the guts to identify themselves loses their right to be heard on this blog. I consider this desperation which is coming from an MDC-T supporter who misguidedly believes that democracy means agreeing with everything the MDC-T does no matter what. But on a more general note, there are things that I feel I should, just this once, address. It is the first and last time I will devote a post to anything other than the examination of the goings on in Zimbabwean society and government. So here it ...

This Blog is extremely delighted to announce that we have been given an award, the Best Blog Thinker Award, from Mama Shujaa over at Mama Shujaa blog . As most of you reading will know, we normally don't do awards here and when we do accept an award, it is because there is meaning behind it. This one is one of those meaningful ones. We are quite honoured and grateful for this, the second award this blog has received in its short life. The first was when we were voted one of the Top Five Blogs For Amnesty Day by Reconstitution , based in the USA. The Best Blog Thinker Award we have been awarded by Mama Shujaa was created by B. J. Roan who says of the award: "This award acknowledges the values that every Blogger displays in their effort to transmit cultural, ethical, literary and personal values with each message they write. Awards like this have been created with the intention of promoting community among Bloggers. It's a way to show appreciation and gratitude for work tha...

I would have liked to give you live-updates (what we call live blogging) on the fueral of Susan Tsvangirai. In fact, because I live in Zimbabwe, and in Harare specifically, you will see that most news appears here on this blog before it is even known to the world. But of late, this has not been possible for the reason explained by the picture above. The picture shows what is called the ComOne National Backbone for Internet (the green boxes at the top of the diagram), together with what are called gateways, basically, the points through which ALL Internet information flows either to or from Zimbabwe. ComOne are, by law, the only company allowed to be the gateway out of Zimbabwe with regards to data (Internet). They are a government-owned company (that should explain everything, then). Apparently the main Global Connex gateway was switched off because ComOne had not paid their supplier. This happened on March 5 and as of today we are still not back on line. Since then, we have been relyi...

This latest news is about this very blog. Reconstitution , an incisive American website run by Jolly Roger has just voted Denford Magoras Zimbabwe Blog one of the Top Five Reads for Amnesty Day. In voting for this blog as one of his top Five, Jolly Roger says: "Denford Magora’s Zimbabwe Blog  will give you a view of the troubles in Zimbabwe that you absolutely will not receive from any media that I know of. Hear about the struggle for freedom from the strugglers THEMSELVES. I’ve been hooked on this one since I first opened it up. The background that Denford puts into every post will make your understanding of both Zimbabwe and southern Africa far stronger." It is great to recieve such high praise from one of the most intelligent blogs on the internet. On another note, most of you already know that the blog is also listed on Entrecard, a massive directory of blogs and sites designed to allow bloggers to advertise their blogs on other blogs all over the world. Today is Entrecar...

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Barely two months old and already one of the fastest rising websites in the world I really want to thank you all for the support you are showing this blog. Your blog has risen stratospherically in the last month and a half. Launched at the end of October, this blog has already risen more than 7 million places in world rankings, making one of the fastest rising websites in the world . We have risen so fast in fact, that, although we are now in the top 1.5 million sites in the world (there are  more than 187 million websites in the world, according to netcraft ) , Alexa, the world ranking people, are still to take a snapshot of the site! I guess it is a combination of two things, your loyalty over the last month and a half since the site was launched and our focus on quality content. I really do try to give you special insights into the current events in Zimbabwe, to help readers locally and elsewhere to truly understand what is going on in this little country that is now the talk of th...