TSA Press – Page 2824 – Thompson Stevenson & Associates

Could Zimbabwe really be heading for a mass starvation? – The Zimbabwean

Posted on 11th October 2019 by TSA Press

There was one particular rumour that rocketed around the city of Harare this week.

It was a scrap of information, shared on the streets and on social media, which speaks volumes about the desperate state Zimbabweans now find themselves in.

The word was, staff at a government office had started printing Zimbabwean passports.

A massive queue, thousands of people long, formed in the early morning light as residents of the capital grasped the opportunity to get their travel papers. If there is a communal dream in this beleaguered nation, it generally involves leaving it – to find food, work and a little stability abroad.

Unsurprisingly, their hopes were dashed. Members of the queue were told to come back later in the month “for an assessment of the reasons why you need to travel”.

The fact is, civil servants cannot produce passports because the government cannot afford to pay for the paper and ink. The country’s registrar general, Clemence Masango, recently admitted to a whopping backlog of 370,000 passports.

Nor is Mr Masango likely to get the supplies he needs because this crisis-ridden government is not governing and the economy has virtually collapsed.

Inflation is running at more than 300% and the Zimbabwean dollar, introduced last year to restore “normality”, has lost more than half its value. The country suffers from rolling electricity blackouts and water and food shortages. Government hospitals barely function and doctors have been on strike for nearly a month.

“The country is basically falling apart,” said one man, called Norman, outside the passport office. “You want fuel? Well you won’t get it. Want to buy a chicken? That will cost you half a civil servant’s monthly salary. It can’t go on like this.”

It is a sentiment that just about every Zimbabwean agrees with – including the country’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who described the economy as “dead” in a speech last week. But activists and international aid officials fear the economic meltdown could lead to something even worse – mass starvation.

“Look around you,” said one NGO official. “We are dying a slow death here. People can’t buy anything. People are getting slimmer.”

According to documents prepared by international aid agencies and seen by Sky News, Zimbabwe now faces its “worst ever hunger crisis” – an emergency caused by severe drought and compounded by government mismanagement.

More than two thirds of the rural population (5.6 million people) will experience “crisis” levels of food insecurity by January according to experts, as the country heads into the six-month “lean” period before the next harvest.

Aid agencies are also worried about people starving in the cities. Officials are conducting nutritional surveys in places like Harare for the first time in history, as residents complain of 400% increases for basic staples like maize.

“We really don’t know what is going to happen,” said one senior aid official speaking to Sky News. “By the end of November, the government will run out of grain and they (do not have the funds to) buy anymore.”

The World Food Programme is trying to secure £153m from donors to feed two million people into the next year.

But this crisis will ask more of the people who run this country – like Mr Mnangagwa.

Many Zimbabweans doubt his ability to provide even the most basic assistance.

Provided with a passport, the majority would surely leave.

‘It’s a nightmare’: Zimbabwe struggles with hyperinflation – The Zimbabwean

Posted on 11th October 2019 by TSA Press

A woman does a quick calculation on her phone before buying groceries at a shop in Harare, in this Wednesday, Oct, 9, 2019 photo. Hyperinflation is changing prices so quickly in the southern African nation that what you would see displayed on a supermarket shelf might change by the time you reach the checkout. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

Hyperinflation is changing prices so quickly in Zimbabwe that what you see displayed on a supermarket shelf might change by the time you reach the checkout.

“It is a nightmare,” Macheku said. “I can’t plan.”

Before a coup unseated the late president Robert Mugabe in late 2017, Macheku could afford all his family’s basics on his salary, which equals about $24. Now the same amount can hardly buy 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds) of beef.

He ended up buying chicken skin for his family’s supper. “I cannot afford the actual chicken,” he said. It is the closest his family gets to eating meat.

Zimbabwe now has the world’s second highest inflation after Venezuela, according to International Monetary Fund figures. The southern African nation went through this a decade ago but says there is no getting used to it, and coping has become both creative and desperate.

This time Zimbabwe’s economy has been on a downward spiral for more than a year as hopes fade that Mugabe’s successor and former deputy, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, will deliver on his promises of prosperity.

“Anyone who thinks a solution is in sight must be very brave,” said economist John Robertson in the capital, Harare. “Government officials don’t want to admit the real causes and don’t want to fix the real problems. People should brace for worse.” He said the real causes include the government spending beyond its means.

To shop, money alone is no longer enough. Calculators, mobile phones and notebooks have become necessary tools. In one sparsely attended groceries wholesaler, there were more people taking pictures of price stickers than those picking items from shelves.

“I sent the pictures to my husband. We have to decide fast before the prices go up again,” said one shopper, Marianne Hove. “He is in another supermarket sending me pictures of the prices there. We compare and decide which items to buy and from where.”

Others did quick calculations and called home to confirm items to buy.

In other shops, prices are only available at the checkout – and even then the cashier might stop a customer mid-payment to change prices.

Retailers said they would go out of business if they don’t adjust prices frequently.

“It is becoming increasingly impossible to appropriately price goods. The replacement value has been our Achilles heel,” said Denford Mutashu, president of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Retailers.

The situation is “synonymous with hyperinflation” even though the government statistics office has stopped publishing annual inflation data, Mutashu said.

Some businesses are closing while others are limiting their product range to reduce risk, he said.

Prices in Zimbabwe are changing faster than at any point in a decade. In 2009, the country’s currency collapsed under the weight of hyperinflation. The government then adopted a multi-currency system dominated by the dollar.

This year the government outlawed the use of foreign currencies, part of frequent and sometimes confusing changes to the country’s complicated monetary framework.

The local currency has been rapidly devaluing, “fostering high inflation, which reached almost 300 percent in August,” the IMF said after a review mission last month.

Weakening confidence, policy uncertainty and a continuation of foreign currency market distortions are exerting pressure on the exchange rate, the IMF added, while a severe drought and foreign debt hampering Zimbabwe’s access to external funding have impacted the economy hard.

Most businesses import products from abroad due to the collapse of local industry. Foreign currency shortages and rapid devaluation of the local currency are hard on both businesses and customers.

Zimbabwe’s president, Mnangagwa, continues to appeal for more time.

“Getting the economy working again from being dead will require time, patience, unity of purpose and perseverance,” he said in a state of the nation address on Oct. 1.

Like Mugabe, the president largely blames U.S. sanctions for the crisis, while the U.S. points out that the sanctions don’t target the government but selected officials, including Mnangagwa himself, over past alleged human rights abuses.

The patience of many Zimbabweans is wearing thin, considering the lengths they are going to cope.

“We cannot continue to live like this. Why did they remove Mugabe if they had no solutions?” said Harare resident Praise Sibanda.

“We are tired of 001,” she said, using the local slang for the growing trend of families resorting to a single meal a day.

Some innovative vendors have begun repackaging items such as cooking oil into sachets small enough to prepare a single meal.

According to the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe, people are increasingly using such sachets known as “tsaona,” a word in the local Shona language that means “accident.”

Bindura councillor pleads not guilty in trial over anti-Mnangagwa slur – The Zimbabwean

Posted on 11th October 2019 by TSA Press

President Emmerson Mnangagwa

A BINDURA man on Wednesday 9 October 2019 pleaded not guilty to charges of disorderly conduct as his trial for allegedly stating that President Emmerson Mnangagwa is liable for causing the suffering that
citizens are currently enduring and for authoring the country’s economic crisis.

Brian Kembo, a resident of Bindura in Mashonaland Central province, who is also a Councillor for
Ward 3 appeared before Magistrate Maria Musika who presided over his trial on Wednesday 9 October
2019.

During the trial, prosecutors alleged that the 36-year-old Kembo, who is represented by Idirashe Chikomba of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) engaged in disorderly conduct when he allegedly stated that several people in Zimbabwe were stressed owing to President Mnangagwa’s failure to fix the country’s economic crisis after winning the 2018 presidential election.

The prosecutors claimed that Kembo boarded a commuter omnibus on 24 October 2018 in Bindura where during a conversation with another resident he blamed President Mnangagwa for failing to alleviate the current economic crisis, which has led to price hikes of basic commodities in the country.

Two witnesses have testified against Kembo, who returns to court on Thursday 24 October 2019, when
Magistrate Musika is expected to hand down her ruling on his application for discharge at the close of the prosecution case.

Meanwhile, Bindura Magistrate Langton Ndokera on Tuesday 8 October 2019 set free Saymore
Mashorokoto who had been on trial on charges of disorderly conduct for allegedly telling Tichaona
Svinurai, a fellow resident that President Mnangagwa had dismally failed to revive the country’s political and economic fortunes and that he should hand over power to opposition MDC Alliance party leader Nelson Chamisa.

During trial, prosecutors said the the 45 year-old Mashorokoto, who was charged with contravening section 41(b) of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act, had acted in a disorderly conduct and had used threatening, abusive, or insulting words intending to provoke a breach of the peace or realising that there was a real risk or possibility that a breach of the peace may be provoked.

But Magistrate Ndokera acquitted Mashorokoto, who was represented by Tinomuda Shoko and Blessing
Nyamaropa of ZLHR, after ruling that the evidence presented in court during the trial by the State does not warrant a conviction.

Magistrate Ndokera ruled that there was no evidence presented in court to corroborate the testimony of the witness who testified in court against Kembo.

Magistrate Ndokera also stated that before bringing such cases as Kembo’s to court, the complainant and
ZRP should seriously consider the impact they pose to the country.

Post published in: Featured

Neuberger Berman, Saba Capital Disagree On Definition Of ‘Winning’

Posted on 11th October 2019 by TSA Press

You’d think it wouldn’t matter, given that both agree on the practical implications, but the hedge fund hopes the SEC sees it differently.

One thing is clear: Hedge fund Saba Capital Management’s slate of candidate for the board of a Neuberger Berman closed-end fund were not elected. Saba says this. Neuberger Berman says this. How they say it is different.

Neuberger Berman says Saba’s proposals were “resoundingly rejected.” This is an interesting choice of phrase, insofar as one of the three proposals—calling for a share buyback—was approved (Neuberger has graciously agreed to “consider” such a move following the non-binding proposal); the proposal to fire Neuberger as the fund’s manager, by Neuberger’s own count, got 2.6 million more votes in favor than opposed, and each of Saba’s three nominees received 2 million more votes than any of Neuberger’s nominees; and the only reason the latter two efforts failed were due to supermajoritarian voting rules that would have required Saba to win 90% of the votes cast, on account of the fact that more than 8 million shares weren’t voted at all. Neuberger justified its statement by noting that fund shareholders—those that bothered to vote, anyway—“rejected Saba’s proposals by greater than 2 to 1 margins,” which is a strange thing to say about an election in which your side received significantly fewer votes than the other side. But that’s only because those of you uninitiated in the Trumpian ways of counting the votes of closed-end fund investors are probably taking into account the 3.8 million shares voted by Saba and its “followers,” which apparently don’t count for rhetorical purposes in a poll in which it had no shot thanks to rules which Neuberger say are laid down by the Investment Company Act of 1940 but which Saba says puts the fund at risk of falling out of compliance with the very same law. No wonder this fund is trading at a discount.

Anyway, suffice it to say that Saba is not at all amused by the way Neuberger is portraying an election that it won approximately 60% of the votes cast.

“Although Saba received 50% more votes for its nominees than Neuberger did for their nominees, because of the high election standard implemented by the Fund, neither slate of directors were elected,” he said in an email. “Any statement saying that Neuberger won the election of directors is categorically false.”

Is that the end of it? Is it hell. Saba is taking a page from another of its closed-end fund adversaries, BlackRock, whose law firm suggested the SEC have a look at Saba’s closed-end fund campaigns.

They Didn’t Teach This in Law School: Interviewing Clients Who Have Experienced Trauma

Posted on 11th October 2019 by TSA Press

Client relations is one of the most important – and difficult – aspects of lawyering, and when your clients have experienced serious trauma, you need to bring your full set of tools to the table. You need to navigate boundaries and potential triggers carefully, while also getting all the information you need to build your case and advocate for your client. Check out the following tips from Best Practices for Interviewing Traumatized Clients to help you navigate this sensitive process and grow as an attorney.

Understand how trauma manifests. Trauma can cause significant changes to the brain. From altering memories to causing someone to relive a traumatic event, trauma causes the brain to rewire itself.

Believe your clients. Members of marginalized groups (such as non-citizens and LGBTQ individuals) have frequently been mistreated by state institutions and are rightfully afraid – not just paranoid. Remember that trauma is a subjective experience – a single sexual assault may be just as traumatic as serial abuse. This is about the client’s personal experience – not an attorney’s opinion.

Make your client comfortable. This is key to a successful interview. A few tips: Let the client know about any security check procedures in the building beforehand. Create a space that feels safe – ensure that there is a visible exit in the room. Provide gum or mints and water. For LGTBQ clients, let them know if there will be gender neutral bathrooms available.

Prepare your interview questions with trauma in mind. Acknowledge that some of the questions you ask will be “stupid.” Don’t apologize more than twice – this can make clients feel like they have to make you feel better. Find ways to ask about trauma indirectly (for example, don’t ask “Are you a victim of domestic abuse?” but instead “How was your life growing up? Were there any windows in your room? Were you allowed to use the bathroom when you wanted?”). Don’t ask for specific dates – these are hard to remember – but about the season or holiday. Educate yourself on what being transgender means before you interview a transgender client. Make small talk. Say thank you.

Take care of yourself. Many attorneys will suffer from vicarious trauma – constant exposure to clients’ trauma can cause attorneys to experience similar symptoms. To combat this, count your wins. Send dog videos and memes to your friends. Remember how vital this kind of work is.

For more tips like this, check out What Lawyers Need to Know About Representing Clients Affected by Trauma.

*This article was prepared with assistance from Tamanna Saidi, a pre-law sophomore at Baruch College in New York City.