Noriah Masukume weaves her way through the crowded hall at Harare’s international bus terminus as she notes orders from a customer on the cellphone before boarding a bus to South Africa.
On the bus she exchanges pleasantries with fellow travellers engaged in small talk around escalating prices in the local stores, their families and how difficult it is becoming for traders who go on shopping sprees in South Africa.
”It’s not easy,” Masukume, a nurse at a private hospital in the capital who doubles as a cross-border trader, told an Agence France-Presse correspondent when the coach stopped in the town of Masvingo for a brief recess during the 16-hour-plus journey to Johannesburg.
”From the long hours on the bus, the hostility we sometimes encounter and tugging the luggage along at the border when we head home. This is supposed to be my time off from work but I can’t afford the luxury to relax.
”I cannot afford to feed and clothe my family on my salary alone so I have to do an extra job. There are many professionals in similar circumstances.”
Masukume is among thousands of Zimbabweans who earn a living by buying goods from neighbouring Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia but mostly South Africa for resale back home.
”This is the only job I have known,” said 23-year-old college leaver Ngoni Chimhowa, who travels to the northern South African town of Musina to buy cooking oil and soap for resale.
Zimbabwe’s economy has been on a downturn spiral over the past seven years characterised by four-digit inflation which stood at 1 730% in February and an unemployment rate which has left four in every five people jobless.
At least 80% of the population is living below the poverty threshold with the average worker earning Z$90 000 (about R2 500), according to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, while an average family of five needs at least one million dollars for basic foodstuffs and toiletries.
While in the past cross-border traders were mainly elderly women with little formal education, professionals struggling to stretch their salaries to the next pay day have taken to moonlighting to supplement their pay.
Among familiar faces on the bus, Masukume points at three schoolteachers, a fellow nurse and several government employees.
The transfrontier shoppers spend hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars buying anything from cartons of cooking oil and laundry soap, perennially in short supply in Zimbabwe to gadgets like top-of-the range television sets, computers, fridges, solar panels and car spares.
”Zimbabweans are in the majority of our customers,” says Abel Tsikwa, a Zimbabwean immigrant working as a sales assistant in a wholesaler’s shop in Johannesburg’s Crown Mines district.
”They are known for spending huge amounts of money — up to thousands of rand on grocery. One is left wondering whether these people are coming from a country with an ailing economy.”
Zimbabwe is facing an acute shortage of basic goods like sugar, cooking oil and milk as factories reeling under ever-rising operation costs have either pulled down the shutters or have scaled down their operations.
The chronic shortages have spawned a burgeoning black market where cross-border traders supply goods quoting prices at the parallel market currency rates — in some cases up to 10 times the official price.
So lucrative is the trade that some traders shuttle between Harare and South Africa up to four times a month and supply scarce goods to leading chain stores back home.
At Johannesburg’s Park Station, Zimbabwean cross-border shoppers stand out as they bring in carts full of groceries and gadgets with help from pushcart operators who shuttle between nearby lodges and the bus station.
On the buses returning to Harare or the second city of Bulawayo boxes, bags of groceries which cannot fit the side compartments occupy seats on the bus.
”There is usually more luggage than passengers on the buses to Harare and Bulawayo,” a bus driver who regularly plies the Harare — Johannesburg route said while helping travellers load their goods onto the bus at Park Station.
Economists have bundled the importation of basics together withother factors such as depleted exports, among the propellers of the country’s run-away inflation.
Victor Zirebgwa, an economist with the financial think tank Techfin Financial Research, said: ”The importation of goods has a negative bearing because most of the money used to buy these goods is sourced from the black market.” – Sapa-AFP