Back to Index

The real cost of bad governance
Joram Nyathi, The Independent (Zimbabwe)
June 01, 2007

http://allafrica.com/stories/200706010488.html

AS Zimbabwe slowly slides back to the dark ages, I was reminded of the old adage that "necessity is the mother of invention". Except that as a country we haven't invented anything but are adapting fast to our dire political and economic circumstances.

In street lingua, people are talking about this abiding crisis separating the "men" from the "boys".

The boys are found mainly among the urban poor. It is now common to see a man rushing from work with a packet of sugar in his hand or a 5kg bag of mealie meal on his shoulder. It was an unthinkable embarrassment only a few short years back. Buying sugar or mealie meal was a business for women and the kids in the townships.

The father of the house only bought meat at the end of the month. This took the form of a long entertainment drive with friends out of town to where meat was rumoured to be affordable - KwaBhora, Mutangadura or Landos on the Mahusekwa road in Mashonaland East province. There the men spent the day braaiing and plying themselves with beer before buying the home allocation late in the afternoon.

All that is a luxury left to real men today. They don't have to think about fuel. They can still afford to buy a whole beast or at least pool resources and share. The boys have been reduced to women who expect to be greeted with praise if they bring home a packet of tomatoes. Meat has become a rarity - a delicacy.

The differences go beyond that. Frequent power outages mean that buying a whole beast might turn into a big loss for the boys if it goes bad. So you can justify a daily purchase of a portion of meat from the local butchery without serious blushing.

Country has come to meet town. Every household worthy of respect must have stacks of firewood. The risk is to go without a meal. He is nearly a real man the father who can still afford either illuminating paraffin or cooking gas. The smallest child in the house knows where to fetch lighting matches and candles the moment the bulbs blink. It's a whole new culture and a survival strategy in the new Zimbabwe.

On the other hand, real men have gone a step further. Many have bought huge generators which automatically switch on the moment Zesa starts its pranks. Some have installed huge solar panels. They have also invested heavily in gas stoves, just to make sure.

In the face of unreliable water supplies from the latest thoroughly incompetent impost called Zinwa they have erected huge water tanks on their mansions in the northern suburbs which they fill with water on the day it comes. They drink healthy bottled water. Others have gone a step further and sunk boreholes on their premises.

Real men are creatures used to comfort and won't spare a penny to pamper themselves. It obviates the need to change the system, which they silently expect the expendable poor to spearhead. To them, money is the limit to a heaven on earth.

Those among the poor who have experienced losses in terms of groceries going bad because there was no power have quietly borne their misery. Those who have had their expensive electrical gadgets destroyed by frequent unplanned power cuts have silently replaced them if they could or are having to cope without. I have just noticed that a colour television set I bought for $3 000 in 1988 now costs $18 million.

Zesa didn't find it necessary to consult stakeholders about possible alternatives to its unilateral imposition of power black outs. The inconveniences we endure and the losses we incur daily have not stopped the parastatal from hiking rates at will. Like the Harare Commission which levies rates for garbage it doesn't collect, Zesa is accountable only to politicians, not to ratepayers.

What I don't know is whether people fully appreciate the true costs of this shoddy performance by both government and its bloated and unaccountable parastatals. For at the end of the day the costs of buying firewood and paraffin far outweigh what they would pay for electricity. Also, money which should have been invested in more productive projects is being spent on generators, solar panels, water containers, firewood and many other expenses which official inefficiency necessarily creates.

You would expect an explosion from an already overtaxed population. But we have borne these burdens of service failure with stoical equanimity. Yet we are being rendered indigent everyday while those who impose these burdens on us get fatter from looting the resources of the state. Whether it is a curse or a blessing to be Zimbabwean is the biggest question of our time.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP