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Zimbabweans stand watch as the hard times roll
Marko Phiri
June 07, 2005

Two 60-something year old women exchange poignant stories about how it has increasingly become difficult for them to go about their everyday business. "Today I paid $10,000 for a trip to town," one of them says. "I walked to town in the morning after waiting for transport for more than an hour," the other responds with her own ordeal on how is has increasingly become difficult to get transport into town.

In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, public transport to town under the government-gazetted fares is $2,500, but operators here, citing scarce fuel which is still found in abundance in the flourishing black market, have quadrupled their fares. The two old women survive on selling vegetables, and for the past two decades they say, they have been selling vegetables which have helped them send their children to school. They wake up in the wee hours of the morning and have become part of the melee alongside formally employed men and women jostling to catch transport to the market about 5 kilometres away where they buy farm produce for resale in their neighbourhood.

MaSibanda, a woman approaching her fifties, also sells vegetables outside a local beer hall alongside the two other women. She said she walked from town on Monday this week after failing to get transport to ferry her wares home. "I had to hire a man with a pushcart to get my goods home," she said. She paid him $20,000.

These women have become victims of fuel shortages that have grounded whole fleets of public transport. At a fuel filling station this week, I counted at least 150 public transport vehicles popularly known here as kombis. The queue turned the street into gridlock blocking traffic, creating the ideal conditions for road rage.

And tempers have indeed flared. At a fuel queue in Tshabalala, one of the many poor working class townships which litter Bulawayo’s western areas, a lone cop was reportedly beaten up recently for attempting to maintain order where some motorists said they had been waiting for deliveries for three days.

The fuel shortages have become part of everyday hardships here with the government launching what it says is a campaign to restore sanity across the country. The Zimbabwean government launched a blitz more than two weeks ago across in Harare the capital city which quickly spread across the country in what the police code-named Operation Restore Order. Police and government officials say growing lawlessness which has seen people hoarding goods and foreign currency necessitated the clean up operation which has left thousands across the country either homeless or in prison.

A Jesuit priest working in Mbare, a congested township in Harare said it was as the "ancient Romans said ironically about people applying the law blindly, fanatically, even with disastrous effects. ‘Fiat justitia, pereat mundus’ - Let justice be done, even if the world goes under," he said.

"A Mbare woman said, "Murambatsvina? Tsvina yacho ndisu!" the priest told me. The woman spoke in Shona, the major indigenous language here which loosely translates - "Reject dirt? We are the dirt!"

"Women and children sit on their furniture out in the open while the men remove the rubble. It looks as if Mbare has been hit by a bomb," the priest said. Locals are already calling Operation Restore Order the Zimbabwean Tsunami.

Vending malls and homes have been turned into eyesores after police turned over and burned what has sustained and housed the people here since independence in 1980.

A press statement issued by the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference condemned the operation for "being carried out without government offering any alternative accommodation and sources of income to the affected huge number of people."

"We find it difficult to understand how the government could unleash such violence on the population," the bishops said.

In a press statement released last week, Miloon Kothari, Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on the right to adequate housing, lended his voice to the criticism of the demolitions and arrests and called on the Zimbabwean government to "immediately halt the mass forced evictions reportedly taking place in the country."

The operation has left empty shells in what only a few days ago were hives of activity. A few old women can still be seen with their boxes full of oranges, tomatoes, onions and other greens in apparent defiance of the clean-up exercise. It is the only job they have known all their lives.

A clinic run by Dominican nuns was razed in Hatcliffe Extension, a shantytown just outside Harare. It was not the only structure that was brought down, and some Dominican nuns report that they openly wept when they visited the area, only to be comforted by the affected people themselves.

The Zimbabwe National Pastors’ Conference, a coalition of clergy from various churches here, rapped the operation in a press statement issued here last week. "Our members who are doing pastoral work in areas targeted by this operation have reported that the action of the police was very provocative, offensive and unsympathetic to the feelings of the people," the statement said.

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