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A fractured nation: Operation Murambatsvina - five years on
Solidarity Peace Trust (SPT)
July 30, 2010

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Part One: Introduction and Overview

A. Main outcomes: 2005

In May 2005, the Zimbabwean government embarked on a massive, highly systematic programme of demolitions of all informal housing in urban and peri-urban areas across Zimbabwe. Combined with a total clampdown on the informal trading sector, including the destruction of official vending areas and confiscation of all wares, Operation Murambatsvina (OM), or "Drive out the Filth" caused direct havoc in the lives of millions. The sheer scale and thoroughness of OM set it apart from previous demolitions, not just in Zimbabwe, but in Africa.

These "indiscriminate and unjustified" demolitions caused sufficient outrage across the world to precipitate a UN investigation in July 2005 - although none of the recommendations have been acted on, five years later, and the government continues to contest the findings.

1. 2005: immediate losses of dwellings and livelihoods

Three million people countrywide directly and indirectly suffered, as a result of the demolitions; an estimated 100,000 vendors were arrested - many of them legally licensed and selling from legal vendors' markets; 560,000 people lost their shelter countrywide, with some small centres losing as much as 60% of their housing. A further 2,4 million lost markets for their goods, and/or remittances from the urban areas. Most of the demolished shelters were
of good quality with access to electricity, water and sewerage, and many had been legitimated by virtue of standing for decades. The illegality of the government's actions, which were in violation of the nation's own laws with respect to evictions, as well as in violation of international statutes and protocols, has been noted in our previous reports on OM, as well as by other commentators.

2. 2010: impact of OM

Five years on, what observations can be made regarding the causes and impact of OM, bearing in mind its context in the multi-layered, cataclysmic decline of Zimbabwe, which began in the 1990s? There have been several statements from concerned human rights organisations in the last few months acknowledging the five-year anniversary of OM, and some anecdotal information in the media that many still live in shocking conditions, but there appears to have been no systematic attempt to trace outcomes on particular families and communities in any detail.

The massive internal displacement of people that resulted from OM in 2005, has been followed by further economic, humanitarian and political crises that have created seemingly impossible conditions for Zimbabwe's citizens. In 2008, a combination of political violence on a scale unseen since the 1980s, the total economic implosion of the nation with inflation running into the millions of percent, the almost total closure of schools and hospitals and the resulting cholera epidemic, all led to another exponential movement of people, this time out of the country in search of work, basic services and safe haven. In a previous report, we documented that in 2008-9, the rate of diasporisation increased onehundredfold from that of the 1990s, in rural Matabeleland at least.

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