The Christmas economic ecosystem is currently not kind to people from rural social backgrounds. The economy has become extremely brutal.
One painful aspect of going to our rural homes during this season is that relatives, friends, and villagers are no longer asking the “accomplished” urban “visitors” for small frivolities like money for Coca-Cola, beer, chigayo, and the like. Those luxury requests disappeared in the 1990s.
Today, they have real issues because the economy is broken. They are pinning their hopes on those of us in the urban areas for long-term, impactful life solutions. They want assistance in finding jobs for their brilliant sons and daughters, school fees for promising children who dropped out, and financial support for ailing elders. Added to this is the expectation of support for agricultural inputs.
Unfortunately, the economy is not creating jobs. Government diverted BEAM funds to finance the 2024 SADC conference and continues to fund profligate vehicle handouts at the expense of establishing new healthcare facilities.
Explaining to elders that we pay taxes on sugar, chips, chicken, burgers, tacos, airtime, and data to fund healthcare is abstract. These funds should be taking care of healthcare and the vulnerable in society. Village mates still believe in the “black tax” narrative — that we urbanites have a responsibility to look after our own, and “our own” often means the village. It is enough that they saw you grow from a goat herder to someone who now owns a battered, third-hand ex-Japanese car.
Many of us just want to relax with our rural peers and share a drink. They are the ones most likely to bury us or be with us at the end of time. Forget the urban friends — the rural stakeholders matter greatly.
The mammoth task is pleading poverty when, daily, the propaganda machine churns out unusual positive economic statistics suggesting that the country and corporate world are making huge progress. The numbers are astounding yet weird, wild, and absurd. We are told we have the fastest-growing economy in SADC; our balance of payments is positive; ZiG is stable; reserves have grown to US$900 million from a near-zero base; the economy is now middle-class; and, most remarkably, GDP has jumped to US$52 billion from US$17 billion since 2017.
If we are progressing this fast, it is hard to explain why we cannot create jobs, pay for healthcare, return drop-out children to school, and improve village life—the same villages that nurtured us out of what they believe was an economic quagmire.
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Unknown to them, Harare and many other cities have also become villages. We have no piped water or electricity. We cannot watch TV or listen to the radio because of power outages. Our own children have no jobs. We have no bank accounts, no savings, no medical aid — only funeral assurance.
Unlike the early 1980s, we no longer enjoy the luxury of bacon, liver, sausage, and eggs for breakfast. Rural people may, in fact, be suffering far less than us.
It is bravado to pretend we are travelling from urban bases to rural areas, when in reality we are going from rural to rural. We simply love living in urban areas because we want to be close to other people — people we often do not even like. Ninety percent or more of us are idle, have been so for two decades, and will likely remain so until death.
We are becoming a highly unequal society, even though we lack updated Gini coefficient data. Our people do not understand why we are not throwing money at them like others they see buying cars, distributing cash, popping champagne, building houses, travelling, and even buying private jets with reckless abandon.
We are essentially not wise in these cities.
How do we explain that if one has no access to power and refuses corruption, one is not in the same economic bracket? That the most successful people are politburo and central committee members of the ruling party and their cronies? Or that in present-day Zimbabwe, you cannot find a multi-millionaire outside ZANU-PF structures?
The state is deeply captured—so much so that the Ministry of Finance’s sole purpose appears to be supporting the cronies of those who hold power, while the rest of us do not matter. The current Minister of Finance functions more as a tax collector than a finance minister.
There will be no employment. The financial extraction schemes orchestrated by the Ministry of Finance do not promote gazelles, disruptive industrial revolutions, or inclusive growth. It is difficult to explain how such policies become an albatross to building capacity and giving back to the society that made us who we are.
As a newly reborn country, we started well. Unfortunately, the rural ecosystem anchored on growth points died. Gutsaruzhinji metamorphosed into a network of cronies. Education has become meaningless for economic outcomes. Resources are concentrated in the hands of a few. Political connections determine success. The economy is not diversifying. Leakages and corruption are tolerated because they create mbingas. The leaders are clueless and deliver negative outcomes.
I wish you, my friends, a great festive season, and I hope you are able to conquer the pain of explaining why you are considered useless to the cause of your rural peers.
- Brian Sedze is a strategy, innovation, and compliance consultant. He is the president of the Free Enterprise Initiative, a think-and-do tank on free markets.
