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Pensioners bear brunt of inflation
Marko Phiri
April 25, 2005

A group of men with greying hair sit at a funeral wake in one of the many townships that litter Bulawayo and exchange stories about the hard times that have visited them with a vengeance. They are pensioners of Malawian and Zambian descent and they talk about their families, how it has increasingly become difficult to feed them. They also talk politics and about how they voted - and some how they didn’t - and this seems to lead to the pensions they get each month.

It is not often that people talk freely and openly about their salaries, but when you hear anybody talking about it, and not because they get fat cheques thus hopeless braggarts, you know such self-deprecation is informed by unmitigated penury. One old man said he gets a monthly pension of $800, and for him to deposit the cheque in his bank account or have it changed at one of the supermarkets here, he would need $6000 to get him to town. In any case, what would he buy at the supermarket with $800? others asked wondering what has gone wrong with the country that had promised them so much when they first came here as energetic young men many years ago during the federation years.

Pensioners have become the hardest hit Zimbabweans with inflation gnawing what a few years ago was enough to sustain huge families, and afford the pensioners blissful last years. The old man who gets $800 says he has been receiving that amount since the early 1990s, and it has not changed since despite the innumerable hikes through the years of what would be basic commodities. And what makes it even worse is this occurring at a time when most of these old people, especially widowed grandmothers who would be getting pensions from institutions like the Local Authorities Pension Fund for example, are looking after whole kindergartens as AIDS continues claiming young able-bodied men and women. These pensions are virtually their sole source of income, and the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe says a family of six needs almost $2 million each month to adequately sustain itself.

The UN calculates its poverty index such that living on less than US$1 a day is considered below the poverty datum line, thus abject poverty. Zimbabwe’s pensioners, to use the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Diaspora rate of a little over $6000 against the greenback, are expected to live on ZW$800 a month. This then raises questions about who benefits from investments made by pension funds seeing the abject poverty of the folks who are supposed to be living off those multi-million dollar projects. Contributors merely know the existence of buildings for example named after their pension fund, but still ask what’s in it for them. And these real estate investments rake in millions if not billions of dollars each month, and still these old folks find themselves having to look for menial jobs in their twilight years. And listening to those old men at the funeral wake talk, the need to have those questions answered by the administrators of the pension funds without clouding the issues with technicalities becomes even more pressing.

Bulawayo has become home to an ever-growing number of security firms who have tapped the human resource base provided by desperate 60-plus year old men. After many years of sitting idle and hoping for a miracle equivalent to the Lotto millions, these men have now assumed new roles as security guards and with their stooping backs can be seen everyday carrying rubber batons, the only weapon they have in case some gun-toting 20-something year old decides to break into the premises. This as bad it gets for these pensioners. And then we hear electoral promises about how so much is being done to improve the lives of our lot here. Interestingly, these men would be from the generation of the president with some being a few years younger, thus one has to imagine he would understand the plight of his contemporaries. Imagine if he were denied the privileges he enjoys for just a week! And still these men have to live with heart-rending deprivations each waking moment. But then we recall the retort at a post-elections press conference where an inquisitive scribe was told by the president to bring the hungry people to state house so they could be fed.

Savings and pensions become the greatest casualties in an environment where galloping inflation of the economy seems to be beyond the control of policy makers and economic planners. And with the latest round of shortages of basic commodities hitting the country alongside the price hikes, pensioners can only but guess what next. For those with no other sources of income like gainfully employed sons and daughters, though far from being in their prime, the only means to a modicum of sustenance has become the now ubiquitous security firms. Whether it is within the limits of the country’s labour laws to employ these drooping and stooping geezers is another issue, but the life of pensioners appears condemned to a spiral of ineluctable hardships. And theirs seems far removed from the everyday struggles that have to be faced by other Zimbabweans.

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