Tafadzwa Gomo rummages through a heap of clothes on the side of the street and chooses a second-hand pair of brown corduroy trousers and a worn-out T-shirt.
She immediately stuffs them into her tattered bag where her “new” clothes find their place between a bottle of cooking oil and a bar of soap she bought earlier on from another vendor along Harare Street, on the outskirts of the Zimbabwean capital’s central business district.
Gomo trudges on to the next “shop”, hoping to find an old acquaintance still at her usual vending spot at Mbare Musika, a sprawling marketplace and bus terminus. It’s very filthy, but it is also a source of low-priced goods — especially green vegetables and other foodstuffs.
At Mbare Musika, Gomo will be able to buy matemba, a cheap dried fish of the type of that relief agencies usually distribute to refugees or other distressed communities. She will also be able to catch a bus at the terminus back to her base in Domboshava, a farming area to the north, just outside Harare.
A university-trained teacher, Gomo says she has resigned herself to a life on the margin, scrounging for every morsel of food because her salary — even after an almost 600% hike two weeks ago — is just not enough to ensure a decent living in a country where inflation is nearly 1Â 600%.
The government increased teachers’ salaries from Z$84Â 000 to Z$548Â 000, bowing to pressure after teachers abandoned classes to press for more pay. However, teachers still earn below the Z$686Â 000 per month that the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe says a standard family of five requires for basic goods and services.
“I have to buy these second-hand clothes because I cannot afford buying from the expensive boutiques in town,” says Gomo (36), a mother of four children. “Sometimes I wonder about the fate of fellow Zimbabwean workers when a university graduate like me struggles to make ends meet.”
Additional income
Fianos Kawara, a guard with a Harare private security firm, appears to have the answer to how those at the bottom of the food chain are surviving as Zimbabwe grapples with its worst economic crisis to date.
Security firms are traditionally the lowest paying in the country, and Kawara says his Z$90Â 000-per-month salary is only enough to pay for his bus fare to and from work for 15 days. “God knows where I get the rest of the money for food, rent, school fees, clothes and other basics,” he says.
“To raise additional cash, I sometimes hawk old clothes by the roadside or till people’s gardens and fields on days when I am off duty at work. It is a tough life for us ordinary folks,” he adds.
Indeed it is a tough existence for Zimbabwe’s workers, who have to endure the sharpest edge of an economic meltdown described by the World Bank as the worst in the world outside a war zone.
For example, the average worker earns Z$100Â 000 per month, but following last week’s pay hike for teachers and the bulk of the civil servants, prices of basic commodities rose significantly, effectively putting a strain on the newly introduced salaries while those in other sectors were virtually plunged into a hopeless abyss of poverty and deprivation.
Last week, the price of fuel went up by 50% from Z$4Â 000 per litre to Z$6Â 000, igniting a fare increase that means that a worker from Chitungwiza will need Z$120Â 000 for transport fare every month, far above the country’s average salary of Z$100Â 000.
Domino effect
Considering that fuel-price increases have a domino effect on prices across the board, the future looks bleak for the country’s hard-pressed workers. “The ordinary worker continues to carry this crisis on his or her shoulders,” Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) secretary general Wellington Chibebe says.
The union has promised to organise worker protests next month to demand better salaries and living conditions for workers, but the government, which has banned political rallies and public demonstrations in major cities, has vowed to crush such protests.
President Robert Mugabe’s government admits workers are facing difficulties, but claims the ZCTU is pushing a political agenda, using genuine worker grievance to incite Zimbabweans to revolt and remove it from power. The union denies the charge.
Chibebe says: “As a trade union, we have decided to roll out protests in April to force the government to arrest the declining political and economic crisis and to restore the dignity of the few workers who are still in formal employment.”
The union leader says only about 2% of workers still in formal employment earn above the breadline salary of Z$600Â 000, while multitudes of workers made redundant following company closures over the past years are having to eke out a living as petty traders in the informal sector.
Zimbabwe is in its eighth straight year of economic recession, marked by record inflation, burgeoning unemployment and poverty.
Western governments, the ZCTU and the local opposition Movement for Democratic Change blame repression and wrong policies by Mugabe for ruining what was once one of Africa’s most vibrant economies.
The 83-year-old Mugabe, in power since Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence from Britain, denies mismanaging the economy and instead claims the country’s problems are due to sabotage by Western governments opposed to his controversial seizure of land from white farmers for redistribution to landless blacks. — ZimOnline