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Popping out to the shops - 870 miles away
Jan Raath, The Times (UK)
October 01, 2007

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article2563344.ece

The heat was withering in the run-down wooden shack without a door handle that serves as the Mphoengs border post.

"There used to be a store here, but it closed long ago," the Zimbabwean immigration officer said. "You can get nothing this side. But it is OK for us," he added brightly.

Barely 200 yards away, across the dry, thorn-fringed river bed that forms the border between Zimbabwe and Botswana, is a tiny, tin-roofed building called Basilele's Butchery. Its stock of fresh bread, milk, maizemeal, eggs, beer, and even fuel, is more than any of the hangar-sized supermarkets in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, can manage now. President Mugabe's price controls, unleashed three months ago to control inflation by forcing businesses to sell at less than they produce goods for, have strangled the supply of nearly all goods.

Shopping in Zimbabwean supermarkets has become a matter of hunting and gathering. You walk quickly past the mostly empty shelves in the hope of finding perhaps a tin of shoe polish, a sack of potatoes or a bottle of mosquito repellent. There is almost no hope of getting essentials like bread or milk. Mostly you leave empty-handed.

The shortages have created new meaning to the expression, "I'm just nipping out to the supermarket". This week I drove 870 miles (1,400km) to and from Botswana to do my shopping.

Mphoengs is the more inaccessible entry point to the Botswana town of Francistown. Once a flyblown frontier railway junction, it is now a sprawling consumer city with gleaming shopping malls and vast South African-owned hypermarkets and chain stores, stocked with mountains of goods and surrounded by lawns and fountains rising out of the semi-desert scrub.

The city is efficiently run, a magnet for investment, with a low crime rate and a sense of civic pride. It is a product of Botswana's long tradition of democracy, tolerance and astute economic management. It stands in absolute contrast to Mr Mugabe's rule of brutality, cruelty, famine and failure.

The road to Mphoengs is avoided by the smoking, battered buses that are Zimbabwe's public transport, because of a long stretch of bad gravel. Instead, they pour into Plumtree border post, 60 miles north, bursting with shoppers whose numbers overwhelm the customs and immigration officers. A five-hour wait is normal at weekends.

At dawn the buses disgorge their passengers in their hundreds in the terminus off the city's main street. The Zimbabweans are instantly recognisable, often poorly dressed and struggling under the weight of enormous plastic zip-up bags stuffed with bottles of cheap cooking oil, bars of coarse soap, boxes of milk powder or loaves of bread to take back over the border.

"It is for selling on the black market," Patson Hunduza, with a load of plastic buckets, said. "I have no job but cross-border trading is profitable. I can feed my kids and pay their school fees doing this." It is worth the risk, he said, of being assaulted by and losing his goods to Zimbabwean police.

The presence of thousands of Zimbabweans shopping in Botswana - and in neighbouring South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique - is evidence of how the country's once prodigious distribution sector has fallen apart. It is the only way many Zimbabweans survive Mr Mugabe's state-induced famine.

The trip back through Plumtree is made even more excruciating by customs officers who order shoppers to pull out their bags from the holds of the buses and unpack them for inspection. "Usually the driver makes a deal with the customs officer," Everista Kasambuwa, who makes the trip each month from Harare, said. "He comes round and collects 100,000 Zimbabwe dollars [about 10p] from each passenger and gives it to the customs guy, who just waves us through, and it only takes a couple of hours."

A Francistown businessman, Krish Naidoo, estimates that Zimbabweans account for 30 per cent of his clothing trade. "I would be hurting if it wasn't for them," he said. "Mugabe's slashing of prices has been great for my business. When their shops ran out of goods, my sales volumes soared."

With no exports coming from Zimbabwe, the South African supermarkets, too, have no competition and have put up prices.

Back at Mphoengs with my pickup truck loaded with wheat, cooking oil, soap powder, long-life milk, rice, sugar, oats, soap, toothpaste, beer and wine, I waited an hour for the sole customs officer to come back from lunch, and contemplated the ten-hour drive back to Harare, most of it in the dark. I didn't mind - it was a small price to pay for a well-stocked larder.

Soaring costs

80 per cent of population is living below the poverty line

Sources: Times archives, Zimbabwe Central Statistical Office, www.fas.usda.gov

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