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Posted on 02/15/2004 3:42:13 AM PST by Clive
The Sunday Times's Bonny Schoonakker spent a fortnight in Zimbabwe and found a country teetering on the edge.
- Supermarket shelves lined with every luxury - for the privileged few
- Oysters snapped up for a domestic worker's weekly wage
- Mugabe's cronies exploit US dollar as pensioners lose savings overnight
Bonny Schoonakker
Out in the Harare suburb of Borrowdale Brooke, which is among the most opulent suburbs in Southern Africa, the beneficiaries of President Robert Mugabe's 24-year rule over Zimbabwe can buy live oysters.
The delicacies are kept in a tank at the self-contained suburb's Spar supermarket. This week they were being sold for Z12,000 each. That's the equivalent of R20 at the prevailing exchange rate and equal to the average weekly wage of someone lucky enough to find work as a domestic worker in suburban Harare.
I spent two weeks in Zimbabwe and found a land of extreme contrasts. While the super-rich enjoy lives of unrivalled privilege, millions of ordinary Zimbabweans suffer unimaginable hardships.
In Mutare we met a starving woman who apologised for being too weak to rise and greet us. In another pitiful scene, a 15-month-old infant lay in an orphanage, too young to know that her parents were forced to abandon her after they were driven off their land by Mugabe's "war veterans".
These are but two of the victims of the worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, which is blamed on economic mismanagement and state repression, including the seizure of thousands of white-owned farms.
But while official inflation rose to a record 622.8% last month, back in Borrowdale Brooke, the supermarket shelves are lined with every luxury an affluent shopper could desire, including a dozen varieties of olive oil, wines imported from South Africa and ciabatta bread from the supermarket's own bakery, not to mention giant prawns in the freezer next to the oyster tank.
The suburb, a short distance from Mugabe's palatial retirement home and about 20km northeast of central Harare, is walled off from the general public and accessible only via a gate manned by guards. Visitors are allowed to enter only at the invitation of residents, unless they come to play golf at the course around which the complex has been built.
Borrowdale Brooke's fairways are ringed by four-storey mansions, some so large they could be mistaken for hotels. Instead, they are the homes of those who have flourished in Zimbabwe's bizarre economy - politicians, stockbrokers, forex traders, businessmen on friendly terms with the ruling Zanu-PF - in other words, anyone who does not depend on a salary or pension for his or her livelihood.
According to local economists, the most opulent houses in Borrowdale Brooke have been financed by Zimbabwe's bizarre foreign exchange regulations. These rules allow those politicians and businessmen closest to Mugabe to buy US dollars at the "official" rate of Z55 to one US dollar. The black market rate for ordinary Zimbabweans was Z4 800 on Friday.
The privileges that Mugabe's allies enjoy offer instant wealth to those privileged few. They have also helped to bring about what Old Mutual Zimbabwe calls "the persisting hyperinflationary environment".
In a letter circulated at the end of last year, Old Mutual advised policyholders that, "despite our best efforts", it was no longer able to protect the value of life insurance policies taken out in previous years.
Pensioners who now rely on policies entered into during their working lives have been reduced to poverty. If they want to find out where all the value of their capital has gone, they might want to take a trip out to Borrowdale Brooke, if they can afford the taxi fare.
Some voices insist that Zimbabwe is on the road to recovery, notably government mouthpiece The Herald, which last week announced the build-up to Mugabe's 80th birthday on Saturday by likening him to Mahatma Gandhi. Similarly, for The Herald, the land acquisition programme "is a triumph for the country's human rights", despite overwhelming evidence that it has beggared the country's economy.
Such optimism also flies in the face of the United Nation's World Food Programme (WFP). In its latest briefing, issued this month, the WFP warned that the country was "facing enormous food shortages".
It predicts that 4.5 million people - more than a third of all Zimbabweans - will receive emergency food aid by April. Its briefing for Zimbabwe also predicts an 18% shortfall in the US197-million "required to fund the emergency operation".
Because of its sensitive relations with the Zanu-PF regime, the WFP declines to blame publicly the land acquisition programme, which h as reduced the number of commercial farmers from 4 500 to 400. But, Justice for Agriculture, which represents displaced commercial farmers, forecasts a 75% collapse in agricultural output thanks to the land invasions, a prediction supported by the semi-official Commercial Farmers' Union.
But then Borrowdale Brooke has never relied on local producers for its oysters and prawns.
Unlike the US sanctions, the EU sanctions do not include businessmen or their families.
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I remember reading about a situation like this in history class. It ended something like this:
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