As Zimbabwe prepares to celebrate 23 years of independence from Britain on Friday, deepening economic and social crises in the country are certain to cast a shadow over festivities.
The country is due to mark its independence at a time when most Zimbabweans are pre-occupied by the social and economic woes surrounding them.
Even as the country flounders in the grip of severe shortages of basic goods and triple-digit inflation, the authorities this week nearly trebled the price of gasoline.
At least 80% of the country’s 11,6 million people live well below the poverty line, and the recent fuel price increases are bound to plunge many Zimbabweans even deeper into poverty and misery.
Unemployment rates hover at more than 70% and recurring power outages have forced many industrialists to cut production time by at least half, adding to the ranks of the unemployed.
Faced with huge debts accumulated by importing electricity and threats of being cut off by South African and Mozambican suppliers, energy authorities have introduced power rationing, a move that has further disrupted manufacturing schedules.
In an independence message to his supporters, Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader said: ”This nation has been robbed of hope and the country has been reduced to wasteland.”
A privately-owned weekly, The Zimbabwe Independent said: ”Never has the country been so impoverished and isolated.”
Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) president Lovemore Matombo said there is nothing to celebrate at independence this year.
”It’s no longer independence, it is now dependence,” he said, referring to the levels of poverty he said workers had been reduced to.
President Robert Mugabe himself last year acknowledged that poverty was on the rise.
”Basic commodities are beyond the reach of many, poverty is increasing,” he said in last year’s independence day address.
Since the late 1990s the Zimbabwe economy has been on a downward spiral. Inflation that averaged 18 percent in 1997 is now reported to have reached a crippling 228%.
A severe shortage of foreign currency, desperately needed for imports of power, petroleum and food, has resulted in those commodities being in short supply or priced beyond the reach of most Zimbabweans.
The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) has been on the downward slide over the past few years, with GDP growth pegged at a record low of -11,9% last year.
The opposition says young people in the country have nothing to look forward to.
”Babies are not even allowed a chance to start in life because they are being slowly starved to death due to shortages of baby food,” said MDC leader, Tsvangirai.
Despite tough security laws in the country that the opposition and civil society say are designed to stifle protest, the MDC and the labour movement have separately announced they will be staging mass action against the government.
On Wednesday the ZCTU demanded the government reverse the fuel price increases or face mass action, which it warned could see ”a lot of blood” being spilled.
”There shall be a lot of blood sponsored by the government because the government has sponsored a terrorist structure within itself to terrorise Zimbabweans,” Matombo told reporters.
In press advertisements published on Thursday, a local rights group, the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition (CCZ) claimed that since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, Zimbabweans were now only ”free to be intimidated, to be tear-gassed … free to be beaten, free to be silenced”. – Sapa-AFP