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shopping offers lifeline in Zimbabwe
Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times (UK)
May 27, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article1845279.ece
Like millions of people
across Britain, Tracy Mavuka does most of her grocery shopping online.
Each week the 27-year-old care worker sets aside £20 and orders
items such as rice, cooking oil, salt, chicken and soap.
But no van draws up outside
her flat in Southend, Essex. Instead, the box will arrive two days
later at her mother's shack in Chitungwiza township, just outside
Harare. Without it, Mavuka fears that her mother and five younger
brothers and sisters would starve.
"I used to send
money home," she says, "but inflation is so high that,
from the moment Mum got it, it would be losing value. Then it would
cost her a fortune for transport to the shops, which half the time
had empty shelves. Now at least I can make sure they eat."
Over the past year several
innovative UK-based websites and text messaging services have sprung
up enabling the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled their country
to transform hard currency into anything from a tankful of petrol
for a friend in Harare to a month's supply of blood pressure tablets
for an ageing aunt in Bulawayo.
Such transfers are enabling
friends and family back home to survive amid inflation of more than
3,700%, which has rendered the Zimbabwean dollar almost worthless.
Apart from food and petrol, these websites offer generators to survive
Harare's 20-hour power cuts, satellite TV subscriptions, mobile
phone time and even the chance to pay for medical check-ups.
More than a quarter of
Zimbabwe's population has left since 2000 - an estimated 3.4m people.
Most are in South Africa but hundreds of thousands are believed
to be in Britain. According to the International Organisation for
Migration, 74% of Zimbabweans abroad send money and goods back home.
Research presented
at a migration forum two weeks ago by Basirai Mubaiwa, from the
Institute of Development Studies at the University
of Zimbabwe, revealed that more than half of all Zimbabweans
are now dependent on relatives abroad.
While the official exchange
rate is Z$500 to £1, the market rate is Z$80,000 to £1.
Thus someone remitting £100 per month from Britain is providing
Z$8 million - about 20 times the average monthly salary for a secretary
in Zimbabwe.
Without these remittances,
many Zimbabweans say they would starve. The cost of living doubled
last month and, according to the Central Statistical Office, prices
rose by 100.7%.
Four out of five Zimbabweans
are jobless, and those in work earn on average only Z$300,000 to
Z$600,000 a month, not enough to buy groceries for the family, let
alone to pay for transport, clothes and education.
Zimbabwe, under the rule
of Robert Mugabe, now has the world's lowest life expectancy, and
people say they are living "an 001 type of life", explaining:
"0 breakfast, 0 lunch, 1 dinner."
It is not just the poorest
who have become dependent on relatives overseas. "I've started
sending money back to my mum," said James Mushore, a merchant
banker now living in Surrey. "Yet my dad was the first black
millionaire in the country. Everyone is being pauperised."
A study by a London money-transfer
company has estimated that half the Zimbabweans in Britain are sending
£50 a month, making a total of many millions per year. Even
more is thought to be sent back by Zimbabweans in South Africa.
"That's what keeps the regime going," said Mushore. "They've
destroyed exports and it's their main source of foreign exchange."
But with the value of
the currency declining so fast that workers are demanding to be
paid weekly, many Zimbabwean exiles share Tracy Mavuka's preference
for sending goods rather than money.
Perhaps the most innovative
site is Mukuru.com through which petrol can be ordered by text message.
The company is the brainchild of eight young Zimbabweans working
from their bedsits in London. One of them, Rob, explained: "We're
basically a bunch of geeks playing around with SMS and realised
the power of sending text directly from the First World into the
Third World."
A payment made in sterling
over the internet leads to a 10-digit number being sent by SMS to
the mobile phone of the recipient in Zimbabwe. He or she can then
collect 20-litre vouchers redeemable at six different petrol stations
in Harare, thus avoiding long queues as well as having to find the
money.
Since the company started
last year, Mukuru.com has acquired 8,000 clients. "Yes, we
may be propping up the regime," said Rob, "but if it comes
down to your own flesh and blood - is your sister going to eat or
starve - what would you do?
"You send them money;
now you can send them health" states the website of Beepee
Medical Services, which offers anything from a regular supply of
insulin for diabetics to open heart surgery. The company was set
up in November by a Zimbabwean doctor in Canterbury after he lost
his 19-year-old brother to kidney failure in 2005.
"He could have lived
for years with regular dialysis," said Dr Brighton Chireka,
who has lived in Britain since 2000. "We could not get the
medicines in Zimbabwe and had to get people to bring them in from
South Africa, which was very difficult and haphazard. The time came
when he needed medicine and we couldn't get it and we lost him."
Anyone with hard currency
can go to Chireka's site and book a medical consultation or order
medicines for a relative in Zimbabwe. He works with a group of doctors
and pharmacists who bring in the medicines from South Africa.
"The situation in
Zimbabwe is critical," he said. "If you go into hospital
in Zimbabwe, it's like going to a bring-a-bottle party: you have
to bring your own medicine, your own drip, everything. Doctors are
on strike. I have no doubt thousands of people are dying unnecessarily."
Zimbuyer.com, where Mavuka
does her shopping, is an online supermarket that works like Ocado
or Tesco.com but has no name on its lorries for fear of reprisals.
The company takes 60-70 orders a week for deliveries in Harare and
Bulawayo, and its most popular products are cooking oil and salt,
which are hard to find.
"Previously people
would send money to their families to buy groceries," said
a spokesman for the company in Harare, "but because of shortages
and constant price increases, money wouldn't be converted to food.
"Prices are going
up every day. Yesterday I was looking at some electricity cable
and it was Z$1.9m. Today I went back to the shop and it was Z$2.5m."
One of the biggest
difficulties for Zimbabweans is finding money for education. When
the new term started last week, school fees had risen by 600%-1,000%,
forcing many parents to withdraw their children.
The Progressive
Teachers' Union of Zimbabwe said recently that the country had
already lost 4,500 teachers this year. Last year the figure was
6,000. Some have emigrated. Others cannot afford to teach and look
for jobs elsewhere.
Yet astonishingly this
country - which has seen its economy shrink more than any country
in peacetime - was last week elected deputy head of Africa's largest
trading bloc and will host its next summit. The state-con-trolled
Zimbabwe Herald described it as "another show of confidence
in Harare's leadership in regional and international fora".
The election of Zimbabwe
as vice-chair of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa
comes on the back of its much criticised selection to head the United
Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and a seat on the
executive board of the African Development Bank.
Not only is the country's
maize crop predicted to be less than a third of requirements, making
this the sixth consecutive year of insufficient food, but widespread
bread shortages are expected. The state media reported last week
that only 10% of the targeted winter wheat crop had been planted.
This was blamed partly
on a lack of tractors. As the slide backwards continues, the Central
Bank announced last week that it was setting up technical colleges
to produce at least half a million ox-drawn carts and ploughs.
Cost
of helping
One month's
supply of frusemide blood pressure pills: £1
An x-ray:
£10
20 litres
of petrol: £10
10 chickens
delivered to the doorstep: £25
Two litres
of cooking oil: £3.28
School
exercise book: 85p
Four toilet
rolls: £2.95
Small
generator: £375
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