For now, here is a glimpse of my personal day to day survival battles followed by a bit of political philosophy.
I never imagined I would ever have the occasion to live through a famine. Life in Zimbabwe today remains one great big adventure where survival is never guaranteed. Putting food on the table is a major part of the adventure partly because supermarkets in Harare are a pathetic sight now. One wonders how they ever manage to remain open. (Incidentally TM have closed their Mandela Avenue branch). Other branches are only partially closed. They have cordoned off many empty aisles
and consolidated the little stock there is on a few shelves.Even the Gwatamatic has had to downsize. All inputs that the Gwatamatic takes (particularly water, electricity and maize meal) are severely scarce and in some cases not available at all. In other words the customers are under serious pressure. So, new installations
are few and far between now. The business is limping along on maintenance revenues from existing installations. Fortunately I have not gone hungry yet. However, I have become a reluctant paleontologist. Over the last few months I have unearthed fossils from the depths of my fridge and bathroom cabinet. Long forgotten bottles of inferior toiletries won at raffles suddenly assumed new value. I soon discovered that “best before” dates are largely academic. Either that or I was just too ravenous to be a competent judge. I ate many fossils and survived. However, one flopped, in more ways than one. On 8 June 2008 I was on vestry duty at the church. One of my duties was to organize preparations for Holy Communion. Fortunately someone had recently brought back a large quantity of grape juice from South Africa. However I knew finding bread would be a major problem. So I started looking the week before, all in vain. While rummaging through my larder, I was delighted to discover a seven year old packet of dried yeast. So I decided to bake bread. After two hours’ proofing the dough still wouldn’t rise. I lost patience and baked it anyway. I produced something denser than a black hole! It lent new meaning to unleavened bread. It would have been irreverent to serve something like that in church. For my second attempt I decided to use baking powder instead. It turned out a bit better, but still quite dense. 
It took the recipients quite a while to chew just a small cube!Development of dishes based on locally plentiful commodities makes economic sense. That is why every community eats certain things that other communities would consider revolting. Fortunately the commodity that is relatively plentiful in Zimbabwe now is not revolting. The avocado season is now upon us. For the uninitiated, Zimbabwean avocadoes are glorious huge “pumpkins” a far cry from the tiny Spanish jokes that are sold in Europe. In better days I used to be hesitant to consume too many avocadoes because of their high oil content. However with the prevailing food shortages in Zimbabwe today, the high oil content has become a blessing. Furthermore, higher oil content varieties generally taste a lot better. One of my trees produced much fruit this year.
However, murombo haarove chine nguwo!. I recently discovered to my dismay that my tolerance of oily foods has declined in my old age. I used to be able to dispatch a whole avo, no matter how big, in one sitting with impunity. Now if I do that I run the risk of serious flatulence due to incomplete digestion. Fortunately I have found a perfect solution. If I sprinkle the avo with lecithin it appears to do the trick. Lecithin is a natural detergent occurring in legumes, among other foods. It emulsifies oils, thus making them more susceptible to digestive enzymes. The overall effect is to make digestion of fatty foods a great deal more efficient. Vital Health Foods of South Africa have a pleasant lecithin offering in their range.
Adversity often comes with a silver lining. Organic foods are having their day in Zimbabwe. In other countries organic and unprocessed whole foods are but niche markets. In Zimbabwe today organic is about all there is when available. There are chronic shortages of crop chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. Villagers in a certain district of Zimbabwe recently made news when they managed to spread untreated human waste in lieu of fertilizer. I bet the founders of the organic movement never imagined anyone would push it that far!
Convenience foods are now hard to come by. So most of what we eat has got to be made from first principles. Accordingly, I have now wiped the cobwebs off various bits of food processing equipment and wheeled them out of retirement. I am proud to announce that I can now make mayonnaise from first principles.
I have exceeded some lesser brands. However, it may be a while before I can emulate the better brands, particularly Kraft’s Miracle Whip which I consider the best mayo I know.Even waste disposal has got to be done DIY style these days. The dustmen have not been for around six months now, even though refuse removal charges still feature on municipal bills. I now sort my garbage into bio-degradable and others. The bio-degradables go on the compost heap.
So only the plastic and other hardies go in the dustbin. This system has worked like a dream. After six months I still have only a small mound of garbage.
The only problem is that the bin liners are deliberately designed to disintegrate spontaneously after a while. So I will have to make a trip to the rubbish dump soon or re-pack the garbage. The trip to the municipal rubbish dump is not an experience I look forward to. The last time I went to the Pomona Quarry landfill I was quite distressed by the sight of desperate scavengers foraging through the rubbish. I was in the dumps by the time I left. There is even competition among them. So at one stage it looked like they were going to rip my rubbish bags open while they were still on the truck!It is not just the households who have been forsaken by the dustmen.
Even waste that is able to be disposed of through drains can also be a nightmare. Water supplies are intermittent. So an opportunity to wash up dishes can be a treat.
Scarcity enhances value, even value of the mundane. So I have become quite efficient with just about everything. If I could maintain the same efficiency after we come out of this, I could end up very successful. There is a precedent to this assumption. The Japanese response to the 1973 oil crisis was admirable energy efficiency. They managed to retain much of that efficiency even after normalcy was restored. That is believed to be one reason why their exports became so competitive.
We have come full circle and we now have to grapple with the same logistical challenges that the Pioneer Column had to deal with 118 years ago. Supply lines from South Africa were crucial for their survival. So it is with us today.
Not only at individual level but even companies now rely on South Africa for some trappings of civilization. In my auditing days I remember browsing through archives relating to some pension funds and discovering that in the first half of the twentieth century they had to rely on Johannesburg firms for actuarial valuations. Then a fine crop of actuaries blossomed in Harare. Today there are only a handful left. In fact the very survival of the financial services industry currently hangs in the balance.
It is not a total surprise because for practical purposes the Zimbabwe dollar has all but collapsed. When I was paying my University of South Africa fees in the late eighties, the Zimbabwe dollar was stronger than the South African rand. When I paid for a loaf of bread from South Africa last month, the Zimbabwe dollar was quoted as worth one billionth of a South African rand. In practice that means that if one had to count Z$1 notes at the rate of one note per second, it would take 32years’ continuous work to count the equivalent of one South African rand.
In June 2008 I drove 1200km to go to buy soap and other groceries in South Africa. It sounds like a joke but that is what we have been reduced to in Zimbabwe. As I loaded toilet paper on my truck in Johannesburg
I secretly hoped against hope that that would be the last time I had to go that far for basics. However my hopes were soon dashed as events unfolded in the run-up to the presidential run-off of 27 June 2008.It is hard to believe Zimbabwe had her honeymoon not long ago. So what went wrong? Opinions vary especially according to political persuasion as well as porosity to political froth. Here is my personal opinion, for what it’s worth: We have drifted for twenty eight years without a substantive national economic policy. There still isn’t one, as far as I know. Instead we have an incessant stream of piecemeal “priority” programmes that are really transient firefighting tokens. There is always the inevitable conspiracy theory to explain why each programme does not work. There doesn’t seem to be any solid backbone direction. We have an essentially invertebrate economy. So without a destination we were bound to end up nowhere, and that is exactly where we are now. Independent economists sounded ample warning virtually all the way along the collision course. They were ignored or even declared enemies of the people in a manner reminiscent of Biblical prophets. I never forget the dramatic about-turn of this gentleman who recently declared, “John Robertson is about the only economist the market believes now.” John Robertson has probably been the most vilified of the independent economists. Now he is the most vindicated.
In common with many other African countries, Zimbabwe’s leadership primarily concentrated on politics, black versus white politics, and has continued to do so long after the demise of apartheid. One wonders why! One theory is that there are influential individuals who still harbour massive chips on their shoulders from the apartheid era.
Another theory is that if all you have got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The bulk of today’s African states were born out of revolutionary liberation movements. So, to salve self-confidence there is a tendency to choose agendas for their compatibility with a revolutionary’s toolkit than for their importance.
The opportunity cost of it all has been heavy. The economy of Zimbabwe was largely left to fend for itself. There even appears to be an assumption that recovery and growth of the economy comes naturally. As if that was not enough, the remnant of formal business continues to be persecuted to the brink of extinction. Vestiges of the Marxist era, particularly paranoia towards the business community, still rule the day among the sections of the ruling elite. This combined with an apparent weak grasp of economic cause and effect relationships has decimated formal business.
Against this backdrop, it comes as no surprise that the powers that be are barking up the wrong tree by regarding opposition politicians as their prime enemy. A crumbling national economy has always been and remains their biggest threat. In the words of political analyst John Makumbe, “Mugabe can rig as many elections as he wants but cannot rig the economy.” However, even wrong perceptions can have profound effects, as we have witnessed in the last few months. The environment is now certainly more hostile to the growth of opposition parties. It is likely to remain hard but there is still enough in the circumstances to commend opposition activism. So I am not about to give up the fight. Opportunities to make a difference continue to increase with deepening decline. The main hurdle is the inherent gestation period of a new political party. We have discovered that nursing a new political party is like growing a beard. It does not happen in a day and you have to pass through an awkward stage.
Sure, there were some well meaning objectives along the way. Remember the “education for all” and “health for all” rhetoric? While the sentiment was right, those things remained elusive because they are attainable only as fruits of sound economic progress. Talk about putting the cart before the horse! In the words of Baroness Thatcher, “….you can’t enjoy the fruits of effort without first making the effort.” I suspect international aid donors have inadvertently conditioned Africa (Zimbabwe included) to believe otherwise.
The lack of economic progress in Zimbabwe has spawned most of the debilitating ramifications we are saddled with today including famine, unemployment(>80%), financial indiscipline(printing money), hyperinflation(>2million%), corruption, vandalism and flight of capital (including human capital). The country is not working, in more ways than one. Even street vendors are now reluctant to accept Zimbabwe dollars. Useless as it is, the Zim dollar is still very difficult to get hold of, at least for me anyway. Government spending is believed to be the main accelerator of the hyperinflation. It started off as a budget deficit but whether there is still a budget to speak of is now debatable. The national budget for the year 2008 announced on 29 November 2007 came to a grand total of Z$7.9trillion. Now Z$7.9 trillion does not buy a tank-full of diesel for my car. Mari inenge yangove yekunokora manje (We are probably now into a wanton squandering frenzy).The theory is that while the “printed” mass of money dilutes the value of everybody’s modest holding, it substantially remains out of the reach of the general populace. Mere mortals have to continue tightening their belts indefinitely.
Even the raging political crisis has its roots in an ailing economy. When the economy is going well people generally do not care who is in power. When the wheels started coming off the economy, someone felt threatened and launched an aggressive personal survival agenda. The methods used have made it into a self compounding survival imperative. He must throw the proverbial scabbard away now!
For sustainable recovery, we need to rebuild a sound economy that respects market rules and property rights. Talks, subsidies and aid are not competent substitutes, though they may play limited roles along the way. Personally I think people are pinning too much hope on the proposed Zanu PF/MDC talks. For a start the protagonists have been known to negotiate by attrition. We may well be in for a long marathon here. It will be long, it will be hard and hopefully there will be no further bloodshed.
Note: This update together with photos is also available at http://gwataboy.blogspot.com/ as well as on Facebook.
Bye for now,
Will.
