As I drove from the border with South Africa to my home town I recalled the refrain Zimbabweans use when pondering the economic meltdown in their country: ”surely things cannot get any worse than they are”.
That mantra has helped them soldier on during the last eight years as they grappled with an ever-growing list of shortages, which now include water and electricity.
But on my journey home to Bulawayo, which should have taken three hours but lasted double that as I dodged gaping potholes in the pitch black night, I realised things had gotten worse.
After 14 months living in Johannesburg, with its tarred highways and bustling, well-stocked shopping malls, getting reacquainted with the hardships back home took the joy out of reuniting with family and friends for Christmas.
When I went to the bathroom in my parents’ house, my mother handed me a bucket of rain water to flush the toilet and wash my hands, because there was nothing in the cistern or the tap.
Although drought-prone Bulawayo was enjoying its wettest summer in recent history, running water from the city council had been erratic for months; there was no money to import treatment chemicals.
I got used to seeing women and children balancing containers on their heads along dusty township roads, begging water from residents lucky enough to have some.
Bulawayo long enjoyed a reputation as Zimbabwe’s cleanest city, with charming, colonial-style buildings, but the walls were now peeling and gone too were the street cleaners who used to keep the central business district pristine.
Stinking litter lay rotting in makeshift dumps close to houses. The rubbish disposal company stopped its weekly collections three months ago because of a fuel shortage.
”We try and burn some of the trash, and dig the rest into the ground,” my mother said, pointing at mounds of soil in what used to be her tiny but lush vegetable garden.
Despair prevails
A sense of despair hung over the city, with none of the spontaneous parties, complete with loud music, that had heralded Christmas Day on my previous visits home.
This is partly because electricity is now a rare commodity. The pile of firewood in my parents’ backyard and the candles in every room said it all.
The power disruptions, already in evidence before I left the country, had worsened as state utility Zesa struggled to import energy in the face of a foreign currency crunch.
The goodwill that had kept Zimbabwe lit despite mounting debts to her neighbours was drying up.
Watching the billowing smoke in our neighbourhood as people cooked evening meals, I mused that I could be in a rural village, and not the second-largest city in what used to be one of Africa’s most thriving economies.
A trip to the supermarket a few days later left me gaping at empty freezers and shelves which only a year ago were stuffed with meat, milk, bread, cooking oil, maize meal and toiletries.
Retailers had stopped stocking basic goods to protest government price controls imposed to stem inflation, the highest in the world at over 8 000%.
Although a few commodities were finding their way back to the shelves, after the government backtracked on the controls, shoppers were not exactly snapping them up.
They were busy waiting in long queues at commercial banks, trying to withdraw money — now also in short supply.
”It’s exhausting just getting from one day to the next,” a childhood friend still living in Bulawayo told me. ”If it’s not water cuts, then it’s the electricity, or banknote shortages, or the empty shelves.”
The only money in abundance were Z$1 000 notes which had long lost their value and littered street corners.
”You offer one of those to a three-year-old and they will laugh in your face,” my brother said. He was right. A piece of candy, the cheapest item in stores, cost Z$100 000.
I tried to squelch the familiar sense of guilt at having ”bailed out” like thousands of other Zimbabweans who have left the country as the economy sunk deeper into a meltdown critics blame on government mismanagement.
Of about 13-million Zimbabweans, around 3,5-million are estimated to have fled the country’s political and economic crisis. About 2,5-million are in South Africa.
Critics say veteran President Robert Mugabe, in power since the end of white rule in 1980, has pursued skewed policies, including the seizure of white-owned commercial farms for blacks ill-prepared to fully utilise the land.
Mugabe points a finger at Western economic sanctions he says were imposed in retaliation for land reforms meant to correct colonial ownership imbalances.
Watching the despair etched on many faces, I saw that the optimism for which my compatriots have long prided themselves has started to wane, in the face of the likelihood things will probably get much worse before getting better. – Reuters