Every window and door is open, shoes are abandoned, blankets are back in cupboards and now we wait, every day looking upwards, waiting for the rains to come. It's a blistering hot October and yet shortly after dawn every morning silhouettes appear in the vleis, along the railway lines and even on roadsides in residential areas. Bent in half, hacking away at baked earth, men and women are preparing a place in which to drop a few maize pips. Little children sit on their mother's wraps under the few trees that have been spared the firewood axe, and they play in the dust.

The irony of a decade of propaganda about "our land and our sovereignty" accompanied by a decade of agricultural destruction is never more apparent than now. The very people who are prepared to toil on the dusty roadsides at dawn in order to grow food, still have no land. One man I spoke to said that four times he has filled in the paperwork necessary to receive land from the Zimbabwe government. He says he meets all the requirements but each time he has been turned down. He collects leaves, makes compost and now trundles backwards and forwards depositing his precious black gold onto the roadside where he will plant maize when the rains come. "There's no better fertilizer than the farmer's footsteps," my friend says, and the man smiles and nods as he sets off again, with his squeaking wheelbarrow, to collect another load.

Land is one of a raft of contradictions obstructing progress here. Every day the state propaganda burbles on about developing tourism and how we're apparently set to benefit massively from the 2010 football games to be held in South Africa. And yet Beitbridge, the main entry point into the country from South Africa remains a mafia headquarters where even the most hardened visitors are harassed by touts, forced to pay bribes and made to wait hours in queues in order to get into the country. One recent visitor told me how every official at Beitbridge was in on the scams and backhanders and said she was ashamed to watch border officials treating people in buses like livestock, reducing old ladies to tears.

Then there's the contradiction of investment. We desperately need people to come back, old and new businesses to open, factories and industries to get the country going, and yet the ground rules remain murky and the boundaries unclear. Law and order, property rights and Title Deeds are some of the problems. Double standards are another. This week during the opening of parliament Mr Mugabe talked about how Zimbabwe would be following SADC protocols on environmental protection, wild fires, water, women, gender equality and others and yet just a month ago Zimbabwe refused to accept a SADC tribunal ruling on land.

The final contradiction this week came when a BBC reporter said the Minister of Youth was happy the BBC were back in Zimbabwe and that we had nothing to hide. Oops, this coming from the Ministry that spawned the Youth Brigade, green bombers we called them. Youngsters notorious for intimidating, beating, raping, and re-educating people - particularly before and after elections. Indeed Zimbabwe has nothing to hide, so long as you don't look under the carpet or behind the door.
Until next week, thanks for reading.