Christmas lights on Harare’s First Street provide splendour to an otherwise dull festive season. Shops are decorated with interchanging colours beaming across supermarkets, luring the attention of children who are reminded it’s a time for Father Christmas, presents, sweets and new clothes.
There is little traffic and few people walk past the glittering Christmas lights. Only the homeless kids, thrown off the streets during the height of President Robert Mugabe’s clean-up operation, hang around.
Jethro, a street kid, laments that people are not as generous this festive season. Savieri, another teenage street kid dressed in khaki clothes, soaked by rain that had just pounded the streets, complains that he doesn’t make much from guarding cars along Harare’s Nelson Mandela Avenue. “It’s a different Christmas, we used to get a lot of money, but people are not parting with money these days, dhara [my senior].”
But life is different for Carol, the daughter of a Harare business executive. She has just completed her advanced levels and plans to study at a university in South Africa next year. She’ll be spending Christmas in picturesque Cape Town. Beaming with confidence and talking with a British accent, I caught up with her at the Sheraton hotel where she was “meeting friends for dinner”.
The glitzy Sheraton is resplendent with green, yellow and red trimmings and lights on its roof and entrance. The prices of its bread, cake and drinks are beyond the reach of average citizens. The bread costs $1 (Z$90 000) and that’s where Mugabe buys his supplies. Three times a week his security guys procure 18 loaves for his family wrapped in plastic and placed in a huge envelope marked for “His Excellency”.
At Newlands shopping centre, the police, army and ordinary citizens jostle in a 100m queue at the supermarket. “Very few will get maize meal and sugar,” said Miriam Chindamba, a domestic worker. “The queue is orderly, but if we don’t get sugar, we can’t bake any cakes for Christmas. Rice is expensive these days and we can’t afford it. We just buy essentials like sugar and maize meal,” she said.
Inflation has surged to 502%. The prices of basic food commodities have shot up 400% over the past five months, eroding disposable incomes. Unemployment stands at about 80% and, according to the World Food Programme, a third of Zimbabweans will need food aid early next year.
The merriment that comes with Christmas is no more. It’s now a time of misery that provokes nostalgia of a better past. “The old Christmas days were times for bonus, new clothes and partying,” said security guard Tonderai Chirikure of Mabvuku Township. “You can’t buy anything with a 13th cheque now,” he said despondently. “The situation is going from bad to worse.”
Chirikure lives on just one meal a day. He can’t afford to go to his rural home. “There is drought. There isn’t any food. It’s worse than here. I would rather work in town earning these peanuts.”
George Phiri too is feeling the pinch. He works at a music store in Harare.
“Cassettes are selling more than CDs because they are cheaper. But three days can pass without having sold a single cassette despite Christmas being around the corner.
“This is the time of the year when you should be expecting the sales to go up, but they have gone down drastically.”
Phiri finished school five years ago and has been selling music ever since. But he fears that the worst sales returns in many years could force his company to retrench.
This Christmas looks like it will be the bleakest ever for struggling Zimbabweans.