Sitting around the kitchen table in a wealthy suburb of Harare, two housewives puff cigarettes, slug on mugs of tea and cut a petrol deal. One of the women has a mate who has managed to get his hands on 5 000 litres of fuel; the other woman is going to buy it, with great bricks of the devalued Zimbabwean dollar, and sell it on for a tidy profit.
Welcome to Zimbabwe, the land of opportunity. Nearly two-thirds of the population is dependent on food aid. Bands of youth militia, under orders to kill, rape and maim and high on drugs, roam the countryside looking for opposition members.
State-sanctioned torture has become so rife that a group of NGOs and human rights organisations have argued that the country is poised for genocide. The economy is in freefall and those on monthly salaries watch their buying power dwindle with each month’s pay cheque. For many, full-time work provides just enough income to eat every other day.
But in Harare you could be forgiven for thinking all was well.
Exclusive restaurants that look more Soho than sub-Saharan Africa bend under the weight of wealth. Most are fully booked well in advance and every evening Harare’s elegant elite, of all hues, sweep into the car parks in new Mercedes Kompressors, luxury Jeeps and sporty Volkswagens.
At 6 o’ clock in the evening, the bar in the exclusive Meikles hotel fills with well-oiled members of the elite. Businessmen in dark suits mingle with Mugabe’s omnipresent intelligence agents and the bejewelled ”new money” crowd. And, inevitably, lurking in the background are the women who live in well-remunerated symbiosis with them.
One man in a black silk shirt and a gold watch tells me he’s in ”business”.
”Do you know what I mean by business in Zimbabwe? We’re all in business here.” His friend, an aviation mechanic, stopped making a living when tourism dried up and now survives by servicing private jets.
Zimbabwe is experiencing new levels of poverty, but at the same time a tiny proportion of the population is revelling in unprecedented wealth.
”I tell people they are mad to leave now. The next two years is the time the money is going to be made,” the son of a former Cabinet minister told me. ”There’s big money to be made. We’ve all become like the Mafia. I don’t know anyone who pays tax.”
President Robert Mugabe’s Stalinist economic policies have effectively emptied supermarket shelves of basic food commodities and petrol. So the entrepreneurial are buying up food and fuel from around Africa and importing them into the country for sale at a huge mark up, knowing that people will pay.
One woman, fresh out of her evening bible class, said that she hopes the chaos continues for a few more years. Her husband runs a transport business importing scarce commodities and the couple are making so much money they are almost set for life.
A one-time farmer who lost everything when his farm was taken by war veterans told me that he hopes to make back the money garnered from a lifetime in farming in just two years as a commodities trader.
Pictures of Harare’s empty supermarket shelves have been beamed across the world, but supermarkets in wealthy areas of the city look much like those anywhere else. The price tags are the only giveaway. Basic commodities are sold at rates inflated far beyond the cost of transporting them. Food shortages are for the poor. For those with the cash foodstuffs are plenty, from imported whisky and wine to Belgian chocolates and exotic fruit.
There is also a thriving black market for farm produce. I met a former soldier from the British army who had left his job to come to Zimbabwe just a few weeks previously.
As Mugabe’s assault on agriculture has all but ground food production to a halt people, he noticed, are starving. So he has leased some land from a friend and is trying his hand at being a farmer. He plans to grow maize, the staple diet in Zimbabwe, and with a few shrewd payments to party officials he can bypass mandatory sale to the state and sell his crop on the hugely profitable black market.
”I realise I’m putting my cock on the block. But it’s worth the risk. People are going hungry. There’s money to be made. And if it doesn’t work out I can go back to the army.”
But all this is small fry compared to black market currency-dealing, which is, according to one economist, the country’s largest growth industry. The canny and well-connected flit nimbly between the black market and the state-controlled markets, buying cheap and selling expensive, and making gargantuan profits.
”Anyone who doesn’t make money here is, frankly, a fool,” an American expatriate told me. ”There is no way to speculate and lose money. The stock market is doing gangbusters. With as little as US$5 000 in savings, you can make a killing.”
Crippled by a large amount of foreign debt, the Zimbabwean government pegged the exchange rate with the US dollar in order to stave off bankruptcy by making its debts appear smaller. Banks officially work at the disingenuous rate of US$1 to Z$55, but on the streets young men, with bulging rucksacks and one eye on the look-out for the police, will buy an American dollar for anything from Z$1 300 to Z$1 800. New banks are being formed all the time and the huge profits they turn have given rise to the ostentatious Kompressor class, named after the cars they drive.
Theoretically, by working between the bank rate and the street rate US$1 000 can be turned into US$1-million in just four transactions. It goes without saying that to do these kinds of deals you need to be well connected to the government to get access to bank rate American dollars. But, as a result, Harare is full of tales of shadowy characters with riches of mythic proportion.
These are the kinds of people that everyone has heard about and nobody knows: the epic wealth of the Indian man in Matabeleland who runs virtually all the street forex dealers and evades justice by taking on Cabinet minister’s deals.
Or there’s the man who was caught at the South African border with US$1-million in cash in the boot of his car. Or the Apostolics, the fervent women who hide wads of banknotes under their long white robes and wander the streets like restless ghosts doing forex deals. Apparently even the police are scared of them.
And as the wheeler-dealers rise to the top, those at the bottom sink ever further down.
I went north to Hurungwe, a Zanu-PF stronghold about 300km from Harare. In this remote area, people complained that they were unable to grow food because government handouts of seeds and fertiliser were only given to those with party cards.
One woman told me how her uncle was killed, and his body strung up in the township as a public deterrent to subversives. The grip of Mugabe’s all-pervasive henchmen is far-reaching.
But for many in Harare, the reality of Zimbabwe is remote. Wayde, a travelling salesman, seems gloriously unaware of the training camps operating across the country where school leavers are fed government propaganda and taught to hate whites. ”In Malawi and places it’s still very colonial. They’re like, ‘I say old chap’. But here we’re not so colonial. I don’t say ‘arsehole, get me a drink’, I say ‘excuse me, get me a drink’. And anyway, they enjoy it. They like us. They are very down to earth people.”
”I’m kind of ignorant,” one white farmer tells me, and sounds actually quite proud of the fact.
”I tend to just keep my eyes on my own little circle.” He pays off the local war veterans who in return let him remain on his farm.
”It’s not ideal but we have to do it,” he says.
I heard stories of many farmers paying off Zanu-PF chiefs, even those who had publicly bayed for white blood. And business owners have to be constantly vigilant that they don’t go the way of the farmers and have their livelihoods swallowed up through ”indigenisation”.
But it is survival, and the maintenance of a lifestyle that is not easy to give up.
”We’ve got friends who’ve been in Australia for 18 years and don’t have what we’ve got here. We want someone to sweep our floors and serve us,” one woman tells me.
”I’m staying here. I’ll be the last one to leave. The one to turn the lights off,” she continues.
But as Zimbabwe continues on its steady tumble downwards that idea sounds faintly optimistic. There won’t be lights to switch off. The last ones to leave will be blowing out the candles.