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Sinking into the past: a desperate nation living on the scrap heap
Xan Rice and Jan Raath, Times (UK)
December 03, 2005

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=13327

The ruination of Zimbabwe seems to have broken the spirit of its people

IN CHITUNGWIZA, a dormitory town home to more than one million black Zimbabweans, a breeze is a curse. It shifts the rotting rubbish in front of the tiny houses. And it laces the air with the stench of human waste, which drifts in thin dark rivers in the streets. "We are sitting on a time bomb," Misheck Shoko, the Mayor of Chitungwiza, said as he gestured towards a concrete pipe spewing thick brown effluent into a stream outside the town’s main sewerage treatment plant. The stream feeds the Manyame Dam, which supplies the capital, Harare, with its water. "It’s a miracle there have not been more outbreaks of disease."

Across Zimbabwe the scene is the same: townships that were once models for Africa have become stinking health hazards. The big cities are not much better. Some parts of Bulawayo have not had water for seven weeks. Refuse collection in Harare is sporadic. Power failures are routine.

In small towns such as Bindura and Shamva to the north, rubbish is collected by ox wagon. Zimbabwe is fast sinking into the past.

The meltdown of one of the continent’s best infrastructures has been years in the making, the result of underinvestment and mismanagement. But the speed of the decline over the past few months has been astonishing. Zimbabweans long accustomed to hardship cannot remember a worse time.

It has been driven by a crippling shortage of foreign currency. Since the seizure of white-owned commercial farms began in earnest nearly six years ago, agricultural output — the mainstay of the economy — has dropped 80 per cent. Without dollars the Government cannot buy the £70,000 worth of parts it needs to fix the sewerage plant in Chitungwiza, where dozens of people have already contracted dysentery. It also cannot buy fuel.

Service stations have not had petrol or diesel for months. Fuel can only be bought on the black market — at more than four times the official pump price. Air Zimbabwe cancelled all its flights for a day last week because of a lack of jet fuel.

Prices have doubled in the past month. Annual inflation reached 411 per cent in October, according to official numbers. But TM, a supermarket chain, estimated that it was closer to 700 per cent, based on a typical shopping basket. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the economy will decline by 7.2 per cent this year; GDP is $4.3 billion (£2.5 billion), barely half of what it was seven years ago. A US dollar now costs Z$61,000 at official rates; Z$85,000 on the black market.

The effects of the economic crisis are visible everywhere. People queue for hours just to buy maize meal, sugar and bread, and pay for a trolley-full of goods with briefcases full of cash. Supermarkets, which change their prices every week, have started installing note-counting machines at their tills.

Only 15 of the country’s 175 railway locomotives are in running order. The state-owned Zimbabwe United Passenger Company, which runs Harare’s bus services, is broke with debts of £410,000. Hospitals, receiving an increasing number of patients suffering from malnutrition, are creaking under the strain. In a recent parliamentary report Harare Central Hospital said that it may have to close because so many nurses were leaving — 30 over the past two weeks — because of poor wages and a lack of medical equipment. No more Aids patients are being accepted for treatment because of a shortage of drugs. Thousands of soldiers have been sent on compulsory leave because there is not enough food and money.

Across the country commuters have turned into hitch-hikers. Demand for bicycles has soared. At Zacks Cycles, opposite the railway station in downtown Harare, Yossi Tal, the manager, said that he had sold thousands of heavy, single-speed bicycles this year to companies such as British American Tobacco. "Considering the situation here, it’s been a good year," said Mr Tal, one of the few businessmen who can afford to smile.

The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe said recently that a typical family of six needed Z$11.6 million a month to survive. But with wages unable to match inflation, the 20 per cent of adults with formal jobs usually earn about Z$3 million a month. Those with access to foreign currency, or who have relatives abroad, are coping. But many others are not.

"I eat one meal a day, for lunch," Chamunorwa Makarawu, a resident of Mabvuku township on Harare’s eastern outskirts, said. "Air pie for breakfast and supper."

In the rural areas, which have been badly affected by drought, the suffering is even more acute. Near Chivi, in the southern Masvingo province, a bumpy dirt road cut through parched countryside. Cows, their ribs pressing through skin pulled taut, chew leaves off trees; there is no grass. Many cattle have perished. Their owners may not be far behind. "People are not starving yet," said Alfred Matewe, 39, a short, barefoot man with a grey-flecked beard and heavily patched trousers. "But they will be if the rains don’t come soon."

But rain will not solve the food crisis. A shortage of seed and fertiliser — and money to buy them — mean next year’s harvest could be one of the worst. Aid agencies believe that more than three million people will need feeding by March. The Government, in denial over the scale of the problem, is reluctant to let food relief in.

The hardship is tearing at the social fabric of a country where the life expectancy is now just 37. Everisto, an unemployed man in Mashonaland East who asked for his surname not to be used, said: "People don’t communicate anymore. When you try to talk to your neighbour they say, ‘What do you want? We have our own problems’."

Such as finding money for school fees. Public boarding schools have said that they will increase their fees by 500 per cent next year, and parents organisations have given warning of a new surge of dropouts. Many children already rush from school to help their unemployed parents to earn money — something that has become much harder since government action against illegal trading and dwellings.

The brutal police operation, known as Operation Murambatsvina (Sweep out the rubbish), left 700,000 without homes or work. Operation Hlalani Kuhle (Live well), meant to provide legal homes and formal markets, has barely begun, and the ban on vending is still being ruthlessly enforced.

Newspaper boys selling mobile telephone charge cards are frisked and their stock is confiscated; women selling a few tomatoes and eggs are hauled off to police stations.

Esnat Marowa, who tries to make a living as a seamstress in the Mabvuku township, said: "If they hear your sewing machine going grrrr grrrr in your house, they come inside and say, ‘What are you doing?’. If they see a pile of things, they take it." Another resident said: "When you see police come, you know in their homes they are hungry."

In the state media — which now include the Daily Mirror, furtively purchased with public money by the Central Intelligence Organisation — the ruling Zanu (PF) party leaks stories of hope: that recent uranium finds will help to boost the rural electrification programme, that Zimbabwe can host the 2010 African Nations Cup, that a Stalin-type command agriculture will help to utilise idle land, that petrol will arrive "within days". Most ordinary Zimbabweans, beaten down, despondent and dismayed by the infighting in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, seem to have accepted their miserable fate.

The IMF has refused credit unless urgent economic reform takes place. Donor countries have long closed their wallets. Even China, to whom President Mugabe has turned with his Look East policy, has refused to bail Zimbabwe out. South Africa, which does not want its neighbour to collapse, will only loan money if there is political reform.

Near Chivhu, a government stronghold in central Zimbabwe, Nicodimus Joni, 43, a farmworker in tattered blue overalls and sandals made of old car tyres, waited for a lift to work. Closing his eyes, and slowly moving his head from side to side, he tried to find words to describe what was happening in his country.

"Ah, Zimbabwe," he eventually sighed. "Zimbabwe is dead."

The figures

• GDP has declined by 7.2 per cent this year, after a 4.2 per cent fall in 2004 and a 10.7 per cent fall in 2003
• Rocketing inflation, shortages of foreign exchange and a decline in farm output have led to shortages of basic goods, including diesel
• The economy has shrunk by 50 per cent since 1997, exports have fallen by two thirds and living standards have retreated to levels last seen in the mid-Fifties, according to estimates
• The IMF has forecast the fiscal deficit to GDP ratio will double to 14.2 per cent this year, from 7.1 per cent last year and 0.4 per cent in 2003
• Import volumes expected to drop by 11.9 per cent this year, from 5.8 per cent in 2004 and 19.9 per cent in 2003
• In 2000 primary crop production was estimated at 2.5 million tonnes of cereals in total compared with 1 million tonnes in 2003
• The IMF forecasts that inflation will reach 400 per cent by the end of the year. However, the Mugabe Government predicts that the economy will grow by 2 per cent this year

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