The middle-class Avenues area on the northern peripheries of Harare’s city centre is a residential and commercial office zone with stark contradictions.
One minute the sound of gunshots fills the morning air as police exchange fire with robbers; the next, church bells are tolling and harmonic voices are heard as women sing hymns in church and well-dressed middle-aged men and women walk to their offices.
As night falls, the area assumes another character as scantily dressed young prostitutes stand on street corners flashing their bodies at passing motorists.
With black middle-class professionals and ”dealers” — Zimbabwe’s new breed of worker who does everything and anything for a quick buck — now the predominant residents in the formerly white Avenues, numerous leisure and entertainment hangouts have opened.
The exclusive restaurants and top cafeterias, high-life nightclubs and pubs, dingy shebeens, brothels and crime have given the Avenues its contradicting nature.
Paguta was established in recent years as a pub offering overnight lodgings. It quickly became a popular after-hours joint where office workers drank and barbecued, taxis lining up outside for customers. Business was brisk at Gutaz, as the pub came to be known by its growing clientele.
As shortages of basic commodities worsened, Gutaz and other pubs and restaurants would intermittently run out of beer, beef, the staple maize-meal, rice and cooking oil. However, pub owners would go to the black market to source such commodities and replenish their stocks.
But in recent months, the situation became critical and Gutaz could no longer do business as black-market prices shot sharply beyond its reach. It closed without notice. Even the prostitutes who loitered in the vicinity have disappeared, along with the pub trade.
A lone security guard now sits on an empty beer crate, gazing at passers-by as he keeps watch over the lifeless structure, a spacious old house that had been refurbished and converted into a leisure venue, now a mere shadow of its former self.
”We are closed,” the guard said. ”In fact, the pub closed during the Heroes’ Day holidays [August 13 and 14]. The owners said there wasn’t business any more, no drinks, no food, so they have gone back to the farm.”
Counting losses
Beer and beef shortages are squeezing business throughout the leisure and entertainment industry. Nightclubs, cinemas, restaurants and casinos are in limbo as they count their losses.
The Book Café and jazz club the Mannenberg are two of Harare’s leading and most cosmopolitan leisure and entertainment spots, offering food, drink and live music. Now shortages are threatening the viability of both places.
”The shortages are bad, to be honest, and we have lost customers already,” said Steve Khoza, MD of both the Book Café and the Mannenberg. He added: ”We buy beer at inflated prices from a few bottle stores who occasionally have beer and we resell it here. If we don’t buy from the black market, we will close down tomorrow.”
Once one of Africa’s most prosperous economies, Zimbabwe is in the grip of an unprecedented recession marked by the world’s highest inflation rate of more than 6 000%, rising poverty and chronic shortages of every basic survival commodity.
For example, an acute shortage of foreign currency to import water-treatment chemicals means the Harare city council regularly fails to provide enough water to residents, and on many occasions Khoza and his staff have to drive around the city in search of water to prepare meals and for clients to use flush toilets.
Josh Hozheri, MD of Jazz 105, one of the city’s premier restaurants and music spots, said: ”We are doomed. We are in this business to sell beer and food and to provide entertainment. [But] I have run out of food as we speak.”
With persistent fuel shortages, intermittent electricity and water cuts contributing to the dramatic reduction in business, the once-bustling city nightlife of Harare is now almost history. The city is testimony to the severity of Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown and its devastating effects on the once-buoyant leisure and hospitality sector.
Hundreds of other downstream industries such as the music and arts, private security firms and taxi companies have also suffered as hotels, restaurants, pubs and nightclubs downsize operations or shut down completely.
Firefighting
Hospitality Association of Zimbabwe (HAZ) president Fungai Mutseyekwa said: ”The shortages are for real … we [HAZ] are having to fire-fight daily because the situation is putting severe strain on operators.”
Mutseyekwa said the HAZ is engaging the government’s Zimbabwe Tourism Authority to try to rescue the hospitality and leisure sector. The association is also meeting suppliers, such as the moribund state-run Cold Storage Commission that supplies beef, to agree on a framework for the continued availability of products.
In the meanwhile, the ordinary worker is the biggest victim with scores of nightclubs and restaurants said to have already put staff on short working days while others now open only for limited hours, depending on available quantities of drink and food.
Some joints have closed shop, hoping to reopen when the economic situation improves. No one knows when this will be, with the International Crisis Group warning in a report released last week that Zimbabwe is ”closer than ever to complete collapse”.
The Brussels-based political think tank said four out of every five Zimbabweans live below the poverty datum line, while a military-led campaign to slash prices has produced acute food and fuel shortages, and it has become almost impossible to conduct any business in the country.
However, President Robert Mugabe — in power since the country’s 1980 independence from Britain — denies Zimbabwe will collapse, telling supporters last month: ”Zimbabwe has not collapsed and will not collapse.” — ZimOnline