Denford Magora's Latest Zimbabwe News Blog

Harare, Zimbabwe, 19 September 2009 The Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ), has issued a public statement notifying the country that there will be no more licences issued for Internet Access Service Providers in Zimbabwe. The Authority, which is supposed to be under Nelson Chamisa, has been snatched back by Robert Mugabe and given to Nicholas Goche of ZANU PF. What the government is trying to do here is to ensure that the small number of ISPs in Zimbabwe are put in a pen and then they will be tightly controlled. Already, there is a law that requires ISPs to spy on their customers' emails and to hand these over to government at a moment's notice. Failure to put in the spying equipment means that the ISP could lose their licence. Hence, as the noose tightens around the ISPs currently operating, you will see a lot of them fall by the wayside. The end result that Mugabe and his men would like to see would be a situation where only one big govern...

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....

This is the status of the Zimbabwe internet connection at the moment, 3:50p.m. on 15 July 2009. Despite the Prime Minister and his Inclusive Government issuing a 100-day Wishlist in which Nelson Chamisa, who is now in charge of all things Internet in Zimbabwe, is tasked with rehabilitating the infrastructure of our data communications, things have not changed much. Chamisa himself, who is also MDC-T spokesman, boasted at the time of the launch of the 100-day Wishlist launched Tsvangirai that we would see a 60% improvement. What we are experiencing is in fact a 60% decline in quality. ISPs who use satellite can still connect, but almost 90% of Zimbabwe relies on these Telone conenctions shown above. Which means they are cut off as I write. It changes every minute, literally, with the gateways going up for a few seconds, then down again... Like I said before, It is scary to realise that this Inclusive Government really has no clue what it is doing. I expect at the end of their fake 100 d...

So, you missed me, huh? I went AWOL because starting Friday, Internet connections in Zimbabwe went haywire. As is typical of customer service from our Inclusive Government, which believes people must just shut up and bear it, there was no communication whatsoever as to what had gone wrong. Today, I spoke with the government-owned company that is supposed to be in charge of these things. Here's what they said, verbatim: "Starting Friday afternoon, something went wrong with base stations and affected ISPs. Because we do not work at weekends, the fault was only found out today, and our people are trying to see what they can do" "When will we back on line?" I asked the nice lady who attended to me. "I don't know" "Can you ask someone who will know, I am willing to wait." 'No one knows. But it will be soon?" "Three weeks?" I asked. "No one knows. It affected everybody. It's not just you, lots of people have been pho...

Either the MDC and Morgan Tsvangirai have been corrupted by ZANU PF or they were always like this and never really represented the change and seismic shift in focus that Zimbabwe needs in order to rise and start working again. We had interesting meeting with a western diplomat stationed in Harare today and what he had to say reveals just why the west, especially, is not going to come to the aid of the GNU with funds. The western diplomat minutely detailed his country's concerns about the way the MDC is going about things and here are some of the things he says show that Morgan Tsvangirai has either been corrupted by ZANU PF or that the MDC was always a corrupted party and are now simply showing their true colours because opportunity has been granted them The MDC-controlled Harare City Council set the minimum wage for its workers at US$379. This means that the least paid municipal worker is getting this amount from the City Council. The same MDC council had allocated its councillor...

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...