Farai Jongwe, 46, sits dejectedly in the driver’s seat of his taxi. It is 3.30pm and the sun is beating down mercilessly. “I have been in town since morning and I have not had a trip,” he tells the FM. “I don’t have a cent.”
Such days are common; sometimes he has to park his car in town and hitch a ride home. Today, he hopes his luck will change and he’ll get a fare. He needs just one, he says — it will be enough to buy fuel for tomorrow. If push comes to shove, he may pick up some passengers on his way back and charge them $1 each.
Jongwe, who has been a cab driver since he was 18, says business has been slow since Emmerson Mnangagwa took power six years ago in a military coup that ousted long-term dictator Robert Mugabe. In the Mugabe era, he reckons he would have pocketed more than $20 by now. “On a normal day I used to do eight trips. On average I would get $30 or more. These days there is no money. It’s terrible. People just don’t hire cabs,” he says.
“Bob [Mugabe] was better by far. If I had known, I wouldn’t have supported the coup.”
Jongwe is one of the people who thronged the streets of Harare when Mugabe was ousted after 37 years in power. There was an infectious euphoria in the air, with thousands celebrating what they believed to be the dawn of a new era.
It was hard not to be swept up in the optimism. After all, Mnangagwa promised a better life for everyone. “Today, we are witnessing the beginning of a new and unfolding democracy,” he told journalists outside the headquarters of Zanu-PF after his return from exile on November 22 2017. “The voice of the people is the voice of God. No-one is more important than the other. We are all Zimbabweans. We want to grow our economy. We want jobs.”
Martin Mukonavanhu was one of those who bought the hype. “I thought I was going to get a job in the new economy with ED [Mnangagwa] in charge,” he says. “I was hoping for a better tomorrow.”
Instead, he says the country was saddled with a leader “no better than Mugabe”.
“Food is scarce and a lot of people are struggling. Here, people eat sadza [mealie meal] and veggies for breakfast, lunch and for supper.
“I still don’t have a job,” he adds. “I may never get one.”
Tino Madziva is equally despondent. “My life is far worse now. I can’t even buy my kids corn snacks like in the past,” the unemployed father of two says. “I don’t know the last time I ate meat. We just eat green vegetable as relish with sadza, and the closest thing to meat we eat is soya chunks.”
Madziva used to work in light industries, but the company was closed after Mugabe’s disastrous land reform exercise at the turn of the millennium quickened Zimbabwe’s deindustrialisation. Today, unable to find formal employment, he ploughs fields for people who want to plant maize in the small urban plots around the capital, or cuts grass in the suburbs.
Food is scarce and a lot of people are struggling. People eat sadza [mealie meal] and veggies for breakfast, lunch and for supper
— Martin Mukonavanhu
In retrospect, says Harare-based political analyst Rejoice Ngwenya, ousting Mugabe was a hare-brained idea. “There’s really no point in having removed Mugabe,” Ngwenya tells the FM. “Things are much worse now.”
He points to worsening levels of poverty, rising unemployment, increased power outages, deteriorating infrastructure and an uptick in emigration. “The democratic space is narrower ... [There are] more political murders and detentions ... There is no change.”
Take the economy. Zimbabwe is in the throes of a crisis; only 10% of the population is in formal employment, the country is beset by foreign exchange shortages, debt levels are up from $10bn before the coup to $17.5bn and the local currency is depreciating rapidly.
From parity when Mnangagwa reintroduced the Zimbabwe dollar, it’s now trading at Z$8,000/$ on the black market, and Z$6,000/$ at the official rate — a slide that economists attribute to the sustained printing of money by the central bank.
The country’s monetary policy has been so “inconsistent that it is difficult to make five-year forecasts” on investments, Harare-based economist Victor Bhoroma tells the FM.
Then there’s inflation. While the official rate is said to be below 30% thanks to a new formula to measure CPI, leading monetary economist and Johns Hopkins professor Steve Hanke put it north of 1,200% in June — the highest in the world.
That’s led to the erosion of earnings for Zimbabweans. Amid this collapse, the number of extremely poor Zimbabweans rose from 4.5-million in December 2017 to 6.9-million in 2022 by World Bank estimates, says Bhoroma. And income inequality has increased too.
Bhoroma says Zimbabwe’s economy has barely moved from 2017 levels despite “great prospects of 2018 heralded with the improvements in the ease of doing business and new leadership”.
The country, he adds, is saddled with structural economic challenges that require free-market reforms to stimulate a private sector-led economy; governance reforms to ensure transparency, equitable resource allocation and prudent economic management; and institutional reforms to ensure checks and balances on the executive arm of government.
Instead, the state remains entrenched in economic affairs and regulations limit private sector investment, especially in mining, agriculture, the media, railway transport and water. In the mining sector, for example, there’s been only limited progress on the privatisation of government-owned mines — and that’s likely to change, as it’s said that entities related to the military are involved in lithium and diamond mining. Property rights remain tenuous, with the law allowing the state to withdraw 99-year leases as it deems fit. And in the farming sector the government still pegs grain prices and then buys most of the grain (farmers may only sell cash crops through the state marketing boards).
Zimbabwe has regressed significantly on its democracy indices after the 2017 coup
— Rashweat Mukundu
In the water sector, any infrastructure investment has to go via the ministry of agriculture — even for urban areas — where it gets bogged down in red tape.
As Bhoroma explains it: “Market-driven policies and reforms have been elusive while standards of living have deteriorated for the majority of Zimbabweans. The country has not created any quality [middle-class] jobs to improve effective demand in the economy.”
But it’s not just on the economic front that the administration is failing dismally. Though Mnangagwa committed to political reforms — revising electoral laws, promoting democratic practice and re-engaging with the rest of the world — little has been done.
To its credit, the government did repeal the Access to Information & Protection of Privacy Act, draconian legislation that limited free speech by, among other things, making it mandatory for newspapers to register at the government printers. But other oppressive legislation has taken its place — the Patriot Act, for example, which all but criminalises criticism of the government.
Democracy has regressed under Mnangagwa, says Harare political analyst Rashweat Mukundu.
“The coup plotters were after power and entrenching themselves to access national resources in a web of corruption,” he says.
“Zimbabwe has regressed significantly on its democracy indices after the 2017 coup,” he says. For a start, he says, state institutions such as parliament and the judiciary have been captured and are “now surrogates of Zanu-PF”; citizen freedoms have been threatened significantly, with the increased abductions, killings and arrest of opposition figures; and the party has ridden roughshod over human rights.
“Zimbabweans no longer have any rights to openly challenge the ruling party and rights to protest have been banned by the police under a pretext of all sorts of unconstitutional limitations and excuses,” Mukundu adds.
As a result, little meaningful protest has taken place since July 2020, when the police arrested organisers of an anti-corruption protest a few days before the demonstration was set to take place.
Mnangagwa is accused of the same heavy-handed tactics that his predecessor used. On his watch, critics and activists alike have been harassed, threatened and arbitrarily arrested. And abductions of opposition politicians, apparently by state security agents, are increasing. Just last week the body of Tapfumanei Masaya, a member of the Citizens Coalition for Change, was found on the side of a road in Harare days after he had been kidnapped.
Since Mnangagwa took over, scores of protesters have been killed in cold blood; in August 2018 six people were killed when soldiers opened fire on opposition supporters demanding the announcement of election results amid suspicions Zanu-PF was attempting to rig the poll. Seventeen others were killed the following January while protesting a 150% fuel price hike.
The severity of the state’s repression is, Mukundu recently told the FM, a response to its waning popularity. Amid a collapse of its own making, the party is desperately tightening its grip on power. It means Zimbabwe is, “to all intents and purposes, a failed state”, says Mukundu.
And so, six years on, the shine has well and truly worn off.
“There was hope for a new Zimbabwe. We wanted change so badly that I believed the changes would be for the better,” says Harare shopkeeper Moses Chisi, 31. “I think it was like pushing a car with a flat tyre and expecting it to rally.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.