Among the many signs of a country sliding into chaos, one has gone largely unnoticed: Zimbabwe’s morgues are filling up. It’s not only that more people are dying, but also that the families of those who are cannot afford to pay their medical bills any longer. To escape them, relatives are registering the sick under false names. When they die, the bodies cannot be claimed.
The practice is just one of the increasingly desperate measures Zimbabweans are taking to survive in a collapsing economy where inflation runs at more than 1 700% a year and the value of local currency can plummet in a few hours.
Most of those who can have left the country in search of a means of survival, or at least made plans to do so. Typical of the estimated three million Zimbabweans who have left — two-thirds of the country’s working-age population, from doctors and teachers to farm labourers and soldiers — are Mbongani Ntzombane’s sons.
They headed south across the Limpopo River, bribing their way into South Africa, and then sent word to their siblings that Johannesburg might not be the promised land but it at least offered hope.
Soon the able-bodied began to empty out of Mandluntsha in southern Zimbabwe. Today, 13 of the 25-strong Ntzombane family have decamped from the village to Johannesburg in an effort to help the very young and old left struggling at home.
”My children send R50 or R100 a time, or sugar or rice,” said Ntzombane in his three-roomed home set among the parched maize fields of Matabeleland. A pile of car batteries in the living room provides the only electricity.
”It is hard for them to find work when they get there, so they do not have a lot to give. But it is better than staying here with no food and no job and Robert Mugabe.”
Travelling for a job
The bulk of those who leave slip into South Africa, posing as tourists and traders if they have passports and jumping the border if they do not. But anywhere that holds out the prospect of a job is a destination: Namibia, Botswana, London.
What these exiles send back in remittances to their families in Zimbabwe is staving off the total collapse of an economy subjected to the world’s highest inflation rate and starved of hard currency to keep basic services afloat.
Even some of Mugabe’s most trusted allies are warning that his attempts to paint Zimbabwe as thriving and flush with food is a delusion as inflation wipes out the middle class and malnutrition claims the lives of children in what were once some of the country’s wealthiest cities.
The brutal reality of what the exiles have left behind was laid bare this week as opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and others were severely beaten by the police and arrested on their way to a mass protest against the government. The United States and South Africa condemned the assaults as pictures of Tsvangirai’s smashed and swollen head prompted outrage overseas. The opposition described the beatings as a turning point in the struggle to force Mugabe from power.
Many ordinary Zimbabweans are not so sure. Their president still looks firmly entrenched to them and popular confidence in the opposition has been sapped over the years since it failed to capitalise on widespread anger when Mugabe stole the 2002 presidential election.
Today, in villages such as Mandluntsha, daily life is instead consumed by the struggle to eat and finding the money for medicines and to keep children in school. With it there is a growing fear that diminishing food supplies will soon again be used as a political weapon by Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party against his most vulnerable opponents.
It is not only the poor who rely on money from abroad. Even in some of Zimbabwe’s larger cities, such as Bulawayo, a once-prosperous middle class has largely been eradicated by the fastest-shrinking economy in the world.
A couple of years ago, the supermarket shelves were bare, but the problem today is not so much supply as the cash to afford what is available.
Vulnerable opponents
Felix Mafa, a 60-year-old former college lecturer in Bulawayo, has sold his cars and relies on a son who is a doctor in the US and another who is a shop manager in Namibia to send money to feed the rest of the family. ”Instead of being independent, I am sustained by my children. It’s deplorable. It lowers my esteem as a father. I feel sorry that they have to look after me and my wife,” he said.
”I’m a professional. I had cars and two houses. I sold my cars to pay for my other children to go to school. I gave one of my houses to my eldest son. He married and cannot afford a bed, let alone a house.
”No matter how educated we are, there’s no middle class. I cannot invite people to my house because what will they eat? There’s the rich and the poor, and the rich are a few people connected to Zanu-PF who got it through corruption.”
Many people are afraid to accuse Mugabe directly, fearing retaliation. Among the recent curbs on freedom of speech is a law effectively barring criticism of the president, and it is used by the police. But people make it clear who they hold responsible.
Mafa has a particular grievance. His son was among about 20 000 people killed when Mugabe unleashed the army on Matabeleland in the 1980s to suppress opposition. ”I think things have to be done non-violently, through negotiation between Zanu-PF and the opposition. If not, then sooner or later things will go to a civil war which will be terrible. But sometimes I wonder if that’s what some of our leaders want,” he said.
Mugabe has hailed the violent seizure of white-owned farms that were once crucial to feeding the country, and their redistribution to small-scale black farmers and the ruling-party elite, as ”completed successfully”. He declared that the farmers have produced a ”bumper harvest”. Zimbabwe’s president has also boasted that the economy is being wrestled from foreign control and his finance minister predicted economic growth this year.
Reality check
But the reality was described by Mugabe’s ally, Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono, who told Parliament he is struggling to keep electricity on. He said there is no money to keep air-force planes in the air, or to put unserviceable police cars back on the road. And 300 000 people are waiting for passports because there is no paper or ink to issue them.
Gono warned that inflation could drive Zimbabwe’s economy down ”to levels never dreamt before”. The International Monetary Fund predicts that prices could rise by 4 000% this year.
The Reserve Bank governor said he received constant pleas from food and petrol distributors, the national airline and the railways for foreign currency that has all but dried up because tobacco exports, once Zimbabwe’s biggest source of US dollars, have fallen to one-fifth of what they were before the land seizures. The other big earner, tourism, has also collapsed.
Gono said the power company warned him: ”If you don’t give us money, the nation will be in darkness.”
But the money is not there and the bank’s first priority is to use hard currency to buy maize because famine is looming. Drought and mismanagement has left Zimbabwe with less than half of the maize it needs to feed the country.
”If we were talking about local currency, I would say, ‘Don’t worry, in the next 30 minutes we will print money,”’ said Gono. But he said he is not in a position to print American dollars or British pounds.
Officially the Zimbabwe dollar is pegged at a steady Z$250 to the US dollar. But on the black market it is in freefall, diving from Z$3 000 to $1 in early February to about Z$12 000 on Friday.
Savings were long ago wiped out, but now even salaries are frequently worthless. It often costs more to pay the bus fare to work than people earn.
Zimbabwe’s doctors went on strike for weeks because their salaries eroded to the value of seven cans of baked beans a month. They returned to work only after their pay was increased slightly. Many hospitals have lost more than half their doctors, and nurses often report to work no more than twice a week because they cannot afford the bus fares.
Bulawayo’s main hospital, the UBH, has such a shortage of medicines that patients are required to bring their own. ”There are patients dying of dehydration for want of a drip,” said a doctor. ”We can’t treat diabetes any more. The nurses are unhappy because there are no gloves when they are handling patients with Aids.”
Doctors say that all that is keeping the hospitals going are the junior doctors who need to stay to complete their qualifications and a few senior staff who remain out of humanitarian considerations.
Salaries worthless
Many have made their way to South Africa or Britain where their qualifications are valued. It is the same with teachers. One school near Bulawayo reported that 10 teachers left in a single week. All are assumed to have gone to South Africa where there is a teacher shortage.
The poorly educated are not so lucky. Nobuhle Mpala’s two-roomed house in Makokoba township on the edge of Bulawayo is shared by 12 people, three generations, all living off the meagre earnings of the street trader. They include her sister’s two children after their mother died of Aids last year. Mpala has a four-year-old whose father left before he was born.
Where the family used to eat meat a few times a week, it now survives almost entirely on one main meal of vegetables a day. ”I sell maize when I can get it, and tomatoes. It makes me about Z$80 000 a month. Maybe Z$300 000 dollars a month would be enough to live. There are loan clubs, so I borrow from them. At the end of the month you have to pay them back with 50%. If we can’t, then they charge more interest.
”We are not living softly because of the party that is ruling us. It is not a fair government. They get rich while we get poor. They should go. People want them to go,” said Mpala.
The governors of Matabeleland’s two provinces have appealed to the government to declare them disaster areas because the crop has failed.
Drought has wiped out almost all the maize in the southern province and badly hit the crop in the north. But Gono also blames those who took over formerly white-owned farms for a broader national food crisis that is expected to leave Zimbabwe with less than half of the maize it needs for this year. Already 1,4-million people are dependent on food aid.
Food shortage
In Mandluntsha village, there is no crop at all this year. The headman, Ludidi Ntzombane, an 88-year-old who seeks protection from the relentless sun under a white pith helmet, endured 11 years in Ian Smith’s prison for political agitation against white rule. Mugabe jailed him for another four during the 1980s assault on Matabeleland.
None of that has broken Ntzombane’s defiance, but he knows that the coming year will be difficult. Without food, the village will have to sell its only asset, the precious livestock.
Theoretically, maize donated by the World Food Programme is distributed without political favour, but in Mandluntsha they have a different experience. A Zimbabwean state organisation hands out the food.
”The lorry comes and it doesn’t have enough, so they say they are giving it to the people with Aids,” said Ntzombane. ”But we look at who gets it and we know it is political. They want to punish us for not supporting Mugabe.”
The Zanu-PF party has tried to pressure the headmen and chiefs in the area into backing the party and getting their villagers to vote for it.
”The party is trying to force the chiefs and the headmen to work with the government. They are forcing us to go to meetings where they tell the chiefs and the headmen what to tell the people. They tell us to tell people to back the party or they will have problems,” he said.
”The threats are tied to food. They threaten not to give food to anyone who doesn’t support Zanu-PF. That’s the pressure; somebody who is not a member of Zanu-PF is regarded as an enemy of the government.”
The headman says that the local Zanu-PF councillor, Thomas Nyilika, arrives periodically to pile on the pressure. Sometimes the party youth militia, the ”green bombers”, turn up in an attempt to intimidate the villagers, particularly when there is an election in the offing.
”People here are afraid to say what they think. They are beaten up for criticising the government. They are not free,” said Ntzombane.
Facts of life
37: Life expectancy at birth in Zimbabwe
60: Average life expectancy in 1990
81: The infant mortality rate (deaths per 1 000 live births), compared with 53 in 1990
$340: The national income, per person, compared with $4,960 in South Africa
5,5-million: Zimbabweans live with HIV
1,1-million: Children have been orphaned by Aids
6: People out of every 100 have a phone, compared with 47 in South Africa
56%: Of the population earn less than $1 a day, compared with 11% of South Africans
Source: United Nations Children’s Fund
— Guardian Unlimited Â