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The land of plenty of nothing
Michael Valpy, Globe & Mail (Canada)
March 08, 2008

View story on The Globe and Mail website

Michael Valpy does not recognize Zimbabwe today. The country he once called home is a place of derelict shops, 80-per-cent unemployment, defunct hospitals, and stench-filled streets. This month's election shows no hope for change.

It's a shock, entering Robert Mugabe's decaying, crumbling capital. The former urban gem of Africa, once prissy in its orderly efficiency, now sinking into a rank detritus of uncollected garbage, potholes, broken traffic lights, collapsing public services, paint-flaked, gloomy, empty stores and abandoned factories.

Harare, the Sunshine City of the tourist brochures, sparkled as recently as a decade ago. A bracing, healthy 1,500 metres above sea level on the stunning highveld, it was an intentional, sturdy metropolis of commerce and finance, trade, manufacturing, government, upmarket shops and professional services.

The sun remains but the shine is gone. Harare stinks. Sunshine City turned sewage farm, as Zimbabwe's Financial Times, one of the country's very few independent news media voices, put it. Although sewage farming is just not the right wording.

There's a theft pandemic of sewer, telephone, electrical and water-supply equipment. The public nuts and bolts, the cables and pipes, of this city of nearly three million people are literally vanishing alongside the flawed management of what infrastructure remains. Think about this: People selling phone wires for food.

Electrical and water supply is erratic (although the reservoirs are full). Elevators in downtown buildings and gas stations are becoming artifacts of a past existence. Public servants in the city parked their cars years ago: no fuel affordable; no fuel to be found.

Officially inflation is 100,580 per cent. Unofficially (and probably more accurately) it is more than 150,000 per cent. In any event, there are too few retail commodities to make any kind of measurement accurate.

All surgery at Harare's Parirenyatwa Hospital, the biggest in the country, has ceased because of a shortage of anesthetic, functioning equipment and medical specialists. Nurses and other workers refuse to come to work because their bus transportation costs are greater than their salaries. With the Zimbabwean currency this week falling to a record low of $25-million for a single U.S. dollar, bus fares can change on a single trip.

The University of Zimbabwe's faculty is melting away across the country's borders, joining an estimated 3.5 million of their fellow citizens who have emigrated or fled. Industry - what industry that still exists - is operating at 20 per cent capacity.

The orderly market has simply dematerialized. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe borrows hard currency from shadowy traders in the black market to pay for food and drug imports, essential vehicle fuel and electricity from Zimbabwe's neighbors, further contributing to inflation.

Two professionals, a husband and wife, tell me their combined monthly income is $57-million ZWD. "That buys four loaves of bread," says the wife. When bread can be found.

Life in Harare has been described as an existential struggle.

I lived here two decades ago as The Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent. I have come back for a look at the country as its March 29 election campaign gets under way. Because foreign journalists at the moment are unwelcome - it's been four years since the government last gave The Globe permission to report in the country - I have entered as a teacher of religion.

My driver, John, who meets me at the airport, says he needs to buy cooking oil. (I have omitted his last name to protect him from any repercussions for ferrying me around.)

When we get into the city, he passes a shop I remember as a fashionable outlet for women's clothes. One rack with three dated and ugly dresses sits in the window. The rest of the store is bare and dark. Its neighbours are barred and padlocked, as are many shops on adjacent streets.

Only in Harare's opulent suburb of Borrowdale - home to diplomats, business and political elites, staff of international NGOs paid in foreign currency - are the Van Heusen dress shirts surreally advertised along the road from the airport likely to be found in Chinese- and South African-owned private shops located alongside new-car dealerships, nightclubs, international fast-food outlets and grocery stores filled with goods deliberately displayed without price tags in testament to Zimbabwe's inflation.

"Borrowdale," says the wife with the $57-million family income, as if she's mentioning a dirty word. "Two different countries inside one country."

A few kilometres but an economic light year from Borrowdale, John drives into a derelict, rusted-out factory yard and stops the car. He immediately is surrounded by black-market hawkers selling goods from bakkies - pick-up trucks - parked just out of sight in alleyways.

He negotiates a price of $61-million for a litre of cooking oil, paying for it with the country's newly issued $10-million notes.

"It's the sanctions," John says.

When he refuses to pay $70-million for a three-kilo bag of potatoes, he says again: "It's the sanctions." And when his new, four-wheel drive Isuzu repeatedly stalls because of water in the fuel line, and he says he can't get filters to remedy the problem, he repeats: "It's the sanctions." The sanctions.

Eighty-four-year-old President Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front government, the country's rulers since independence in 1980, say it is sanctions imposed by Western countries that are to blame for Zimbabwe's economic chaos. Sanctions, and not the destruction of the agriculture industry - the country's economic backbone - brought about by the government's decision to seize commercial (mostly white) farmers' properties beginning in 2000 and redistribute them to black farmers lacking the technical knowledge to operate them.

Economic mismanagement along with flagrant human-rights abuses and past election fraud are the issues in the election manifestos of Mr. Mugabe's presidential opponents - former finance minister Simba Makoni and Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

But the prime victims here are truth and this ruined country's 12 million ordinary people.

Sanctions, such as they are, target arms imports and the international travels of Zimbabwe's rulers, not its economy. And the commercial farmers lost their land largely as a result of their own doing, their refusal to share holdings - 70 per cent of arable land held by 1 per cent of the population - conferred on them by Zimbabwe's before-independence, racist colonial legislators.

How people are surviving in this city, in this country, is simply baffling.

The inflation. The 80 per cent unemployment. The 21 per cent HIV infection rate (with the country now virtually bereft of anti-retroviral drugs). The exodus of Zimbabwe's best and brightest (I had a long conversation with a student trying to figure out how to complete his bachelor of science degree in nursing with all his instructors suddenly having emigrated). And now a cataclysmic looming food shortage as a result of horrendous rains that devastated the planting of maize, Zimbabwe's staple food crop.

A health-care official told me that, without massive food aid, there will be an explosion in the coming months of young women working as prostitutes, leading to more HIV infections and more AIDS orphans, and more children dying of malnutrition - already a commonplace diagnosis in the country's hospitals and clinics along with widespread diarrhea and typhoid from contaminated urban water supplies.

The news is not all bad.

Some commercial farmers have been invited to reapply to the government for land. Others are working as behind-the-scenes managers of farms redistributed to blacks. I saw a number of productive, well-run farms and drove past an agricultural estate owned by a Zimbabwean cabinet minister with a sign at the gate advertising eggs for sale.

A substantial portion of the population is being supported by remittances from about one million Zimbabweans abroad - estimated to be as much as $1-billion (U.S.) a year, by far the largest inflow of cash into the country. And the rains that ruined maize planting created lush grazing pastures: In a few months there will be meat from now-skinny cows and goats (if anyone can afford it).

But in a village two hours north of Harare one sunny afternoon, I watched laughing, joy-filled children race each other home from school along a dirt-track road.

I wondered how many short years were left to them before their joy was lost forever in the face of the realities of Zimbabwean life.

That afternoon, I sat with women with AIDS and HIV-related tuberculosis in thatched-roof rondavels. They were too ill to walk, and too poor to afford bus fare - $5-million - to the nearest clinic to get what drugs and treatment remain available.

I met Shelly Muzhira, 43, lying on the floor. Her husband died two years ago of TB. All but one of her brothers and all the husbands of her sisters died of AIDS or TB. She was diagnosed with AIDS and congestive heart disease. She barely has breath to talk. She's too ill to work. Her two children, Perpetua and Elvis, tend a tiny vegetable garden, the family's only source of food. She could go live with her surviving brother but would not be welcomed by her sister-in-law because she is unproductive. The family's sole source of income is through the generosity of an aunt who raises chickens for sale.

"Does she feel sad?" I asked the young man acting as my interpreter. He smiled, and put my question in ChiShona to Ms. Muzhira, who also smiled before speaking a single sentence to a silly question from an alien murungu (white person). What is the notion of sad when there is only living? And dying. Average life expectancy in Zimbabwe in the past 30 years has dropped from 56 to 37. A Zimbabwean woman's life expectancy is the lowest in the world.

"She says she feels okay," said the young man.

I met the three Nyakudya sisters, Kezai, 46, Sekai, 39, and Harugumi, 37. Sekai has AIDS, Harugumi has advanced cerebral palsy and cannot talk or move beyond lifting a claw of a hand to take a visitor's. The men in the family, the brothers and husbands, are all dead of AIDS-related illness. A nearby hospital some months back gave the women a few chickens so they could sell eggs to earn cash. There is no sign of the chickens.

Child malnutrition in the village is rife.

I met a British NGO nurse running an AIDS orphanage who said all the workers in her local government child welfare office had quit that day because their salaries hadn't been paid.

I met an AIDS orphan who was a nuisance at a rural medical clinic, a girl eight or nine years old, following the staff around, pestering them for clothes, food, attention. No one knew where she slept at night, somewhere in the clinic compound. There were shiny new cars in the clinic's parking lot, owned by people from Harare who had come for AIDS and TB drugs and ambulatory surgery they couldn't get in city hospitals.

In conversations with Zimbabweans in both rural and urban parts of the country, I was told repeatedly how much people want Mr. Mugabe to go, how corrupt, oppressive and incompetent his government is. At a big birthday party thrown for him last month in the town of Beitbridge near the South African border, protesters daringly hoisted a helium balloon bearing the message, "You've had your cake. Now beat it." But I found no optimism that the election would result in Mr. Mugabe's defeat.

The nursing student whose studies have been halted by the exodus of his instructors lamented that Mr. Makoni's 11th-hour entry into the campaign would only split the opposition vote.

A recently retired air force officer said he had no doubt the election outcome would be rigged (as the last outcome is widely believed to have been), citing the army generals who are close to Mr. Mugabe and sit on the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, and the opportunities to tamper with ballot boxes that will be flown by armed forces helicopters to central locations for counting.

And the reality is, whether fraudulently holding office or not, Mr. Mugabe maintains a genuine popularity.

His re-election posters - he is running for a sixth term - say, "Vote Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Defending our land and sovereignty." A clever slogan, pushing hot buttons. Mr. Mugabe has branded his political opponents as Western agents who would reduce Zimbabwe to colonial status and return it to a fief of white-settler farmers who treated their black workers worse than animals and committed unspeakable atrocities during the liberation war in what was then Rhodesia.

A health-care professional in her 40s, buying three onions for $10-million at a roadside market and two pints of oil for her car from a man who magically appeared from behind a butcher shop, explained it like this: "I saw my grandfather shot dead in front of me [by Rhodesian troops]. I saw seven men in my village ordered to put on poisoned clothes and run around a house until they worked up a sweat that triggered the poison which entered their pores. I saw all the pregnant women in my village gagged and told to lie on the ground while water was forced up their nostrils to make them talk about where the guerrillas were.

"Most whites were very cruel. People know Mugabe rescued them from this. Every adult Zimbabwean knows he rescued them from this, and many, many believe that to vote for the opposition is to vote to go back to what Mugabe rescued them from." On the road from the village back to Harare, I passed broken-down trucks and a magnificent gleaming-white mansion on a hill overlooking a posh roadhouse called the Sweet Valley Restaurant.

The mansion, said my driver, had been built for a Rhodesian general. The restaurant, now closed, had been owned by a businessman rumoured to have wisely fled after he was discovered being too chummy with President Mugabe's young wife.

On my South African Airways flight back to Johannesburg, the captain began his chat with the passengers by saying, "As we taxi toward takeoff, trying to avoid the worst of the potholes..."

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