Zimbabwe - Land of Contrasts

On December 7 the Minister of Information and Publicity, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu said the Zimbabwean government will invite the foreign media as part of its policy to show the world the "true Zimbabwean story". He added that the government had not banned any foreign journalists from coming into the country, but was wary of some that twisted the Zimbabwean story after "misrepresenting themselves" to the authorities, as it is not possible to get a journalist visa. At the same time there is a blacklist of websites that includes amongst others CNN and the American Embassy in Zimbabwe. I believe most news about Zimbabwe describe only part of the real situation. Nevertheless I also disagree with what the government sees as the true story. Therefore I will try paint a more holistic picture of Zimbabwe.

Collapse

This country somehow reminds me of the book Collapse by Jared Diamond.

Driving around Zimbabwe you see lots of wilderness in rural areas. Most of that used to be productive farmland owned by white families. Their ancestors probably never bought that land. But all that counts today in Zimbabwe is that lots of food had been produced on this land which is now lying idle. Instead cutting down trees has become a common habit in order to have firewood when there is no electricity as it often is the case. Those whose cannot afford firewood burn plastic to prepare their food.

Additionally huge areas get burnt down for hunting purposes. That makes the landscape look quite cheerless.

In September the police were occupied with curbing a situation of civil unrest - trying to stop a hungry crowd of desperate people from killing 'for the pot' an adult giraffe that had wandered into a township near Harare. In November poachers shot dead three black rhinoceroses - a species listed as the most highly endangered large mammal on Earth - on a private conservancy.

Zimbabwe is one oft the most isolated countries in the world. And there is more isolation still to come. In the last few month China has announced it will end its development aid to Zimbabwe by the end of the year, and Zambian Airlines and British Airways have announced to stop flying directly to Harare, Ethiopian Airlines have been trying to pull out and the US and Australia have put travel bans on more Zimbabweans.

It really feels like collapse when you know that Zimbabweans used to produce enough food for the whole country and for export while Zimbabwe is now importing the majority of basic goods. And it really feels like collapse when you see that nobody is looking after the roads, farms, fences and electricity lines anymore and instead these everything that is portable gets nicked. And it really feels like collapse when you sit at dinner in the evening with a candle on the table as the only light in the room, not because you want to but because there is no other choice.

Masters of Inventiveness

In September the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) issued a joint report on Zimbabwe’s food security, predicting that people at risk of severe food shortages will peak at 4.1 million in the first three months of 2008 – more than a third of Zimbabwe’s approximately 11.8 million inhabitants. It is estimate that since 2000 about a quarter of the population, or three million people, have left the country for neighbouring states, such as South Africa and Botswana, or further afield for Britain and Australia.

Driving through the darkened streets of Harare at night – for there is no electricity – you see hundreds of people walking purposefully at three o’clock in the morning. They are the few who need to get to work. Wages don't rise fast enough with inflation and the unemployment rate is over 80%. They take up their positions on street corners waiting for a passing car or pick-up truck. There is no petrol, and regular bus services are already a distant memory. Everyone in Zimbabwe understands life is difficult. As dawn breaks over the capital, many people – the mothers and unemployed – start forming long queues that wind around entire blocks of the city. Go to any Zimbabwean town these days and you’ll find these lines everywhere, like an invasion of giant pythons slithering into every supermarket door. There must be a rumour in Harare that there might be bread or sugar arriving in this particular supermarket. People will still be waiting many hours later. If the long awaited bread or sugar or cooking oil arrives policemen will come and jump to the top of the queue and loot the food. On the black market there is lots of sugar and cooking oil – for ten times the official price. But that is too much for the majority of Zimbabweans. A senior teacher earns about the equivalent of US$10 a month at the unofficial exchange rate.

Once one of the richest countries in Africa, Zimbabwe has become a hunter and gatherers economy. Meanwhile, other domestic and economic activities must wait. What time do they have to go to school? Learn new skills? Earn an income? Lives have gone backwards in time. You see people walking for miles, wheeling barrows, buckets on their heads, and plastic bags in hand. Like the “bag ladies” in the former Soviet Union, they are always on the ready just in case something turns up. But it seldom does. People are starving. The evidence is in the hospitals where tiny babies lie dying in their cots. Many children arrive with grandmothers. Grandmother or child-headed families are a growing social phenomenon in Zimbabwe today, often the result of the Aids epidemic. In other cases – if parents still have the energy and the means – they flee abroad to look for food and to send back money. Buses loaded with people and luggage wait for days around petrol stations. When fuel eventually arrives, they lurch off, swaying precariously under the weight of so many passengers, on the journey to the border with South Africa.

Among the refugees, there are doctors, engineers, agricultural experts, Zimbabwe’s brain draining to South Africa’s growing economy. Zimbabweans have long since given up hope that the South African leader – Thabo Mbeki – will put pressure on Robert Mugabe to reform. Thanks to the ingenuity and tolerance of people still in the country and the remittances sent back by those who have left, Zimbabwe’s death throes could last a long time yet.

I asked some rural families what they prefer - the times when there were still white farmers or now. They all preferred the old times because it was a lot easier to find work on farms, food and wages were higher. I am sure they do not want the old times back, just times when they could find jobs and food. That is how bad it has become.

Daily Struggles in Zimbabwe – for Everyone Rich and Poor

Cut off number one. You wake up in the morning on a beautiful quiet day, no sound of the radio, television or fridges running. You know the electricity is off. In some areas there are schedules to power cuts that never work out. In some aren't. Power cuts last from ten minutes to two weeks and you never know how long it takes until the power comes back on. Theatres are postponing performances due to “ridiculously long and unpredictable power cuts, with no light at the end of the tunnel”, as I recently read on the theatre notice board. At least you don't have to worry about defrosting your fridges regularly. The power cut situation also gives you days off work, because the computers will not work without ZESA, the national electricity supplier. It makes you go and search for petrol to keep the generator running and gas to keep the gas stove working or cut down trees in order to have firewood. It prevents any business from working efficiently, does awful things in hospitals, makes you happily running to the kettle to make coffee when the power comes back on or when you manage to go to the movies and watch the whole film. Besides there are not only power cuts, there are also various stages of having more or less full power with, for a spoiled European sense, various funny outcomes (no lights but the kettle works, lights but no fridges, one plate of the stove working or hours until the kettle is boiling). You develop a sense for the noise when the "ZESA is back". Roaring fuses, a distant alarm going off or the fridge starting to make noise again. And there are always lots of rumours why you do or do not have power, starting from being on the same grid as an important minister and ending with something being broken down but ZESA does not have enough foreign exchange to import the spare parts. Recently a study found out that electricity fosters development. Yes it does!

Cut-off number two is water. Almost every household has dozens of buckets, containers, pots or plastic bins - anything that can hold water. You keep storing water, just in case. Again cut-offs last anything from one day to one month. No one has that many containers.

‘Thank you Mr President for wrecking the country, because you made me rich’, says a businessman who sells borehole pumps and generators.

The Other Side of the Coin

What the Zimbabwean upper class says: Zimbabwe used to be heaven and now it is not anymore. It is not that bad, but there is no light at the end of the tunnel. They ship food, spare parts and everything else they need from overseas in big containers or go for regular shopping trips to South Africa. They are generally about 10-20 centimetres taller than people from poor areas, who suffer from malnutrition.

In this country that is screaming for decay everywhere you can still go to a fitness centre and do aerobics. The power might go off in the middle of the course, but then a powerful generator will start so that you can finish your hour of fitness.

There are Western looking Pizza Take Aways, but it is very Zimbabwean inside. The choice is usually Magherita or Hawai without pineapples and bring your own plate because they have run out of cardbox boxes, alu foil or anything to take the pizza away in.

No queuing at supermarket doors, this is how rich people get their milk. Here is one example. Imagine a rich suburb, a gate, a guard: "no through road, only for cardholders”, maximum security outside minimum security inside. Inside no fences and no walls around nice villas to make people feel free from all the “bad locals” hanging around in this country.
You go there to pick up milk that you ordered knowing a secret phone number. The inhabitants of this rich suburb are selling the milk on the black market. You struggle to convince the guard to let you in and then you see the nice ladies, dressed in expensive designer clothes, driving impressive cars and they ask in horror: "What, you don't even live here? You will have to see if we will have enough for inhabitants of this area. If not, we cannot sell it to outsiders as we might not have enough for ourselves." You join all the other housewives and gardeners waiting. You draw a number like at a European employment agency. When the milk finally arrives, everyone queues happily according to those numbers. They check if everyone is in his place and then it starts. When it is your turn you go to the first desk, say your name and the lady will check if you are on the orders list. You give her your number, get another piece of paper, go to the next desk to pay and then you finally get your milk. The only problem is it takes about two hours.

A Short Introduction Mugabenomics:

Shop owners are guilty because they did not sell food at low prices. That is why the government had to cut the prices down. But then neither the industry nor the government can fill the gap because they have no fuel. And they have no fuel because of the “smart sanctions” that Western countries are imposing on Zimbabwe.

In September the Minister of Energy and Power Development, Mike Nyambuya, said the government is encouraging all Zimbabweans to reduce the number of cars on the country’s roads and get used to being pedestrians to save the scarce fuel there is. “In most developed countries, especially in Western Countries company executives wearing expensive suits use public transport or walk to work but here in Zimbabwe one person wants to have 10 cars on the road each day,” Nyambuya said.

This logic creates some irregularities. For example in August, price control authorities banned a public livestock auction at Zimbabwe’s main agriculture show, fearing it would make a mockery of price controls on beef that have forced meat off the shelves across the country.

Smart sanctions seem to be the cause of all the bad in the world's fastest-shrinking economy and that’s what you hear every day, over and over again.

The state central bank announced measures in October that it said would help to restock empty store shelves by the end of the month. “I leave you with a promise most basic goods should and will return to the shelves in the next three weeks,” Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono said on state television. At the beginning of the next month we had to find out that fabric softener and pool acid are considered basic goods.

Recently I learned something from an interview with the president in the newspaper. When the government of Zimbabwe took away the white farmers’ land, initially they wanted to compensate the farmers, not for the land, but for the infrastructure they had built on the land. But then the British government stopped giving budget support to Zimbabwe and so the government of Zimbabwe was not able to pay for the compensations anymore. So it is in fact the fault of the British that the farmers did not receive any compensation. So the former farmers should in fact address the British government with their complaints. In fact most people believe what the state controlled media says, because there is no alternative.

There was a major outcry in October when war veterans, villagers, and Zanu PF supporters blocked the eviction of a white farmer. Three weeks later some Zanu PF leaders said they wanted farm seizures halted because food is still being produced on these farms. Meanwhile there are varying proposals about imported goods, which comprise the majority of stock in most businesses. Imported goods have been ordered off the shelves and welcomed in the past.

Zimbabwean election campaigns have a strange dimension. In some rural areas, people are denied the opportunity to get the maize for allegedly supporting opposition political parties. They are told to get food aid from Tsvangirai, the political leader of the opposition party. Food Aid is not allowed in those areas until after the next elections. Starving the population is a means to make them vote for the right party next time. And people in rural areas know exactly why and when this happens.

Zimbabwe is in the grips of a severe economic crisis and battling the highest annual inflation rate in the world at something between 8 000 and 15 000%. The Statistical Office claims that there are so few goods left in shops that it has become impossible to ensure the data's accuracy.

Hyperinflationary countries usually print huge amounts of banknotes with rapidly increasing numbers of zeroes. Zimbabwe however has created a new surprise: exponentially rising prices, a severe cash shortage, and virtually nothing to buy in the shops because price controls have destroyed the retail trade. For month and month the government is alternatively announcing a new currency soon or a million Zimbabwe dollar note. Nothing has happened so far. Rumours rate from a broken down printing machine waiting for spare parts to a Christmas surprise operation Sunrise II. (In July 2006 Zimbabwe lopped off three zeros from its currency in a programme dubbed "Sunrise).

Just when life could not become any harder for Zimbabweans, who are already having to cope with food and fuel shortages and rocketing prices, local banks have run out of notes. Long queues of people waiting outside banks to draw cash have added to the everyday queues outside supermarkets and petrol stations for the past three weeks. Again the ingenuity and tolerance of Zimbabweans has bred a new kind of dealer, providing cash for a commission.

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Dr Gideon Gono has assured the nation that the central bank will remedy the situation before Christmas, on the 13^th of December. So far nothing has happened.

A Comment on the EU-African Summit

The Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said shortly before the summit, that Mugabe might divert participants from essential issues. Why is Zimbabwe not an ‘essential issue’? In contrast Mugabe suggested his invitation to the summit amounted to the failure of an allegedly "sinister campaign led by Britain to isolate us".

The day after the EU-Africa summit ended, Zimbabwean state-controlled media branded German Chancellor Angela Merkel a "racist" and a "fascist", for her comment that the situation in Harare "damages the image of the new Africa". Minister of Information Sikhanyiso Ndlovu was quoted saying by the state-run Herald "Zimbabwe is not a colony of Germany. This is racism of the first order by the German head of state."

Mugabe is not the world's only tyrant and not even the worst. Nevertheless, he has killed more black Africans than even the apartheid regime in South Africa. His slaughter of 20,000 civilians in Matabeleland in the 1980s was the equivalent of a Sharpeville massacre every day for over nine months. Mugabe could be lawfully prosecuted for crimes he has aided and abetted in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe remains in power after 27 years, at the age of 83. It seems true that evil men live long but that is because every day an evil man lives is like eternity to the oppressed. Neither South Africa’s "quiet diplomacy" nor Western restrictions on money-laundering can influence a man who is cocooned in delusions and treated with deference by his neighbours. As the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently said: "Africans must guard against a pernicious, self-destructive form of racism that unites citizens to rise up and expel tyrannical rulers who are white, but to excuse tyrannical rulers who are black."

While most Zimbabweans continued their desperate scramble to eke out a living last week, 10000 of the country’s ruling Zanu PF party ignored the economic and political abuses of President Robert Mugabe’s 27-year reign to, once again, anoint him their presidential candidate for next year’s elections. They came in Hummers, Mercedes-Benz MLs and BMW 7- series wearing Gucci, Georgio Armani, Hugo Boss and suits from London’s exclusive Savil e Row and gorged themselves at a lavish banquet. All to honour a man who has beggared his country. Mugabe and his young wife arrived at the City Sports Centre in Harare in a newly imported, armour-plated black Mercedes-Benz S600 - sporting a number plate reading ZIM-1.

Why are we not stopping this? And how could we stop this? What can outsiders do? Any aid or support from foreigners or white Zimbabweans, no matter how small-scale it is, is watched critically by local authorities and police. They are present virtually everywhere and without their knowledge and permission it is not even possible to interview a single person, take one picture of an unspectacular suburb or give assistance to anyone. An even if you would be given plenty of rope, what could you do that really helps Zimbabweans?