There is a generation of Zimbabweans now entering old age with a peculiar kind of sorrow they rarely speak about openly. It is not the grief of bereavement, though loss sits heavily within it.

It is not simply poverty, though economic hardship sharpens its edges daily. It is something more intimate and psychologically devastating. It is the grief of a life interrupted by history.

Across Zimbabwe, many men and women between the ages of fifty-eight and seventy-eight are quietly mourning the futures they once believed were inevitable. They are grieving careers that collapsed midway, retirement payouts that never materialised, pensions that evaporated, businesses that could not survive economic instability and dreams that were repeatedly postponed until time itself became the enemy.

It is called timeline grief and this instalment unpacks the cause of the pain points being endured by this generation.

Timeline grief is the emotional burden carried by people who did everything society told them to do, only to discover that the promised rewards of discipline, education and hard work could no longer be guaranteed in a collapsing economy.

This generation grew up believing in progression. One studied hard, secured employment, built a home, raised children and eventually retired with dignity. That was the sequence. It was imperfect, certainly, but it was still imaginable. There was once a functioning belief that effort and stability were connected.

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Then Zimbabwe’s economic crises shattered that understanding. Hyperinflation did not merely destroy currency. It destroyed certainty. Savings accumulated over decades disappeared into financial absurdity. Pensioners who had spent entire careers preparing responsibly for retirement woke up to discover their life savings could no longer purchase basic groceries. Bank balances became mathematical jokes. Insurance policies became symbols of betrayal. Under the tenure of former governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Gideon Gono, the repeated removal of zeros from the currency became a metaphor for the systematic removal of value from people’s lives.

Many Zimbabweans who had imagined old age as a season of rest instead found themselves trapped in permanent economic improvisation.

Former managers became vendors and taxi drivers, something they never imagined they would do. There is nothing wrong with vending and taxi driving. They are honest professions. The issue is, pivoting to those careers was never imagined before.

Retired teachers became cross-border traders. Accountants entered the informal sector scavenging for hassles. Professionals who once occupied respectable offices suddenly discovered that decades of experience meant very little, in an economy where survival had replaced career progression as the national preoccupation.

The tragedy was not merely financial. It was existential. For many in this generation, work represented identity, structure and dignity. Employment gave people social standing and emotional grounding. When industries collapsed and institutions weakened, many did not simply lose salaries. They lost the version of themselves they had spent years becoming.

Zimbabwe’s educational system had prepared them for formal careers, not economic chaos. They had been trained to function within institutions, not to navigate permanent instability. Yet the shrinking private sector and the expansion of the informal economy forced millions into forms of survival they had never imagined for themselves.

What makes timeline grief especially painful is the shame many carry unnecessarily. There are older Zimbabweans who privately believe they somehow failed at life because they have not achieved what they expected to achieve by this stage. They compare themselves with peers who migrated abroad and rebuilt their lives elsewhere. They compare themselves with younger people who appear economically agile in the digital age. They compare themselves with their own youthful expectations and feel defeated by the distance between aspiration and reality.

But many of these people are not failures.

They are casualties of structural economic collapse. An entire generation had its timeline violently disrupted by circumstances beyond individual control.

No amount of discipline could fully protect people from hyperinflation, industrial decline, company closures, currency instability and institutional erosion. Yet structural suffering has a cruel way of becoming personalised. People internalise national failure as private inadequacy.

This silent emotional exhaustion is visible everywhere in Zimbabwe once one learns to recognise it. It is there in the retired civil servant still chasing short-term contracts at seventy-five. It is there in elderly men sitting outside small businesses discussing opportunities that never arrived. It is there in women who spent decades serving institutions only to retire into uncertainty and dependence. It is there in the quiet embarrassment many older people feel when relying financially on children who themselves are struggling.

Perhaps that is the worst humiliation of all, dependency in old age. Many in this generation imagined themselves becoming providers long after retirement, supporting children and grandchildren from a position of stability and accumulated wisdom. They saw themselves passing on decent generational wealth to future generations. Instead, many now survive through remittances from relatives abroad or assistance from family members already overwhelmed by economic pressure. For proud people raised to associate adulthood with provision, this reversal can feel emotionally catastrophic.

Even politics deepened this sense of stalled destiny. There are individuals who spent years believing loyalty, sacrifice and patience within political structures would eventually open doors to leadership and influence. Instead, many watched power recycle itself endlessly among entrenched elites unwilling to relinquish control. Some grew old waiting for opportunity in systems where succession remained permanently deferred. Former war veterans fit this bill.

And so a generation aged while waiting. Waiting for economic recovery. Waiting for recognition. Waiting for stability. Waiting for retirement. Waiting for the future, they were once promised.

The emotional consequences of this prolonged waiting are profound. Many older Zimbabweans now live with chronic stress and  disappointment hidden beneath public resilience. They smile, joke and continue surviving because Zimbabwean culture often demands stoicism, especially from older people. Vulnerability is rarely encouraged. Regret is treated almost as weakness.

Yet beneath the celebrated narrative of Zimbabwean resilience lies immense emotional fatigue. Stress is a huge cause of  dementia. Maybe that is why the incidence of dementia has spiked within this age group.

The country has become so accustomed to survival language that it sometimes mistakes endurance for healing. But surviving and recovering are not the same thing. People can remain functional while carrying enormous grief internally.

What is particularly tragic is that society rarely acknowledges unfinished lives with compassion. We celebrate success stories, visible achievement and triumphant narratives. We applaud those who “made it.” Yet little space exists for discussing those whose ambitions were derailed by historical turbulence beyond their control.

And still, this generation deserves recognition. They raised families during economic collapse. They educated children while salaries lost value overnight. They absorbed instability so younger generations could still have possibilities. In many ways, they became the shock absorbers of national dysfunction.

Zimbabwe owes much of its social continuity to the quiet sacrifices of people who never received the lives they had worked for. Their grief should therefore not be dismissed as bitterness or nostalgia. It is a legitimate emotional response to prolonged uncertainty and interrupted aspiration. A nation cannot repeatedly dismantle economic security without also damaging the psychological architecture of its people.

Because economic collapse eventually becomes emotional collapse. When pensions disappear, people lose confidence in the future. When careers collapse, identity fractures. When institutions fail repeatedly, citizens stop believing effort will be rewarded. Over time, hopelessness becomes cultural.

This is why timeline grief matters. It is not simply about aging or regret. It is about the emotional consequences of national instability over decades. Zimbabwe cannot continue speaking only about inflation figures, exchange rates and investment climates while ignoring the psychological wounds carried by its older citizens. Economic policy is not abstract. It enters homes, marriages, self-worth and mental health. It shapes how people experience aging itself.

The elderly are not merely grieving money. They are grieving abandoned possibilities. They are grieving the homes never completed, dreams never fulfilled, the retirements never enjoyed, the careers interrupted midway and the identities eroded by endless survival.

And perhaps the saddest reality is that many still feel guilty for mourning these losses at all. But grief does not disappear simply because it remains unspoken. It waits quietly in pension queues, commuter omnibuses, funeral gatherings and family conversations. It lingers in the eyes of people who once imagined a different ending for themselves.

Zimbabwe’s older generation is carrying that grief every day. The least society can do is acknowledge that it exists.

It teaches that a person is a person through other people, that your dignity is not diminished by acknowledging mine. You see it in the way strangers make space for you on a pavement. You hear it in the way conversations meander warmly before arriving at their destination. You hear it during breakfast when they explain what jack fruit is, its sweetness and how it is prepared before it is served.

There is also religion.

Uganda is deeply, visibly, practically Christian and Muslim, faith communities that, imperfect as they are everywhere, still carry teachings about the dignity of strangers, the virtue of cleanliness and the moral weight of how one treats those who cannot reward you. The prayers are real here and they seem, in some measure, to have consequences for the cleanliness of the streets.

And then there is civic governance, specifically the Kampala Capital City Authority, which has in recent years launched sustained campaigns such as Clean and Green Streets, the Weyonje Sanitation Challenge, among others to embed order in the city’s bones.

Monthly clean-ups involving residents, traders and businesses have begun to shift what was once a city with significant sanitation problems into something more like a shared project.

The lesson from cities such as  Kigali, which institutionalised community cleaning through the Umuganda programme, is that civic culture can be cultivated, but only if leadership takes it seriously and communities own it.

The complicated frame

Now comes the part that an honest account cannot skip. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, has governed this country since January 29, 1986, over four decades. He has removed presidential term limits.

He has presided over elections that independent observers have consistently found wanting.

His political opponent Kizza Besigye was abducted in Kenya in late 2024 and tried in a military court before a Supreme Court ruling intervened. Civic space is, by credible assessments, shrinking. The question of who governs Uganda after Museveni is unresolved and increasingly tense, with succession politics centred on his own son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba.

None of this should be papered over. A Zimbabwean reader, of all readers, does not need a lecture about the gap between a country’s warmth and its politics. We have lived that gap for a long time.

What is worth observing, however, is a distinction that matters, that the character of a people is not the same thing as the character of their government.

The Ugandan who gives you directions with a smile, who keeps the pavement clean, who asks after your family before telling you the taxi rank has moved, that person is not making a political statement.

They are enacting something older and deeper than any presidency. Uganda’s warmth pre-dates Museveni. It will, one may reasonably hope, outlast him.

There are also things the long Museveni era has delivered, which include, relative internal stability compared to the preceding decades of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, steady economic growth averaging above five percent in recent years, infrastructure investment, that cannot be entirely dismissed in accounting for the conditions that allow civic culture to take root.

Stability, even imperfect stability, gives communities the breathing room to develop the habits of ordinary decency. This is not an endorsement of autocracy. It is an observation about the preconditions of social trust.

The question we should ask

Zimbabwe is not Uganda. Our histories differ, our wounds differ, our political trajectories differ.

But I did not walk those Kampala streets as a tourist. I walked them as a Zimbabwean observer of the universe, a student of life, a writer and the question that formed with every clean block I covered was the same one, what would it take?

What would it take for our city streets to be genuinely, matter-of-factly clean? Not because someone is watching, not because the presidential motorcade is going to pass through, not because a campaign is running, but because residents have decided that public spaces belong to them and that belonging comes with obligation?

What would it take for the first interaction a visitor has with a Zimbabwean at the airport, in the taxi, at the hotel, to carry the warmth that I experienced here almost without exception?

These are not questions about money. Kampala is not a wealthy city. The boda boda riders are not middle-class. The market women packing up at dusk are not prosperous. This is not a country that has solved poverty and can afford the luxury of manners. It is a country where, somehow, the manners survived the poverty or perhaps, more accurately, where the manners were always part of how the poverty was endured.

Civic culture is not a product of gross domestic product. It is a product of values, of what a community decides to expect of itself, of what parents teach children about how to move through shared space. It is available to us, in Zimbabwe, without a single new dollar of investment. It requires only the decision to begin.

Breathing different air

I finished my walk back at the hotel, slightly damp from the afternoon warmth and more awake than I had any right to be. A man at the entrance, a security guard, not the concierge, nodded and said: “Welcome back, madam, how was the walk?” He had no reason to say it. There was no tip system, no manager watching. He said it because, apparently, it was the natural thing to say.

That is the thing about Uganda that stays with you. Not the gorillas (though they are extraordinary). Not the lakes (though they are magnificent). It is the almost unremarkable consistency with which people treat each other and strangers, as worthy of acknowledgement. I felt seen in Kampala. My humanity mattered, even to strangers. That, for me was epic.

We call Uganda the Pearl of Africa. Winston Churchill coined the phrase over a century ago. The landscapes justify the label. But perhaps the more durable pearl is this, a culture that has decided, in the middle of all its difficulties, to remain human towards one another.

I wondered, walking back to the hotel, what it would take for Zimbabwe to decide the same thing.

The independent practitioners who are pressing the government for this regulation are acting against their own long-term economic interests.

A thriving medical aid sector, even one that includes vertically-integrated providers, sustains a culture in which people regard formal healthcare as normal and affordable. It keeps insurance penetration rates meaningful. It ensures that a significant portion of the population continues to seek medical attention rather than delay or avoid it.

Destroy that ecosystem and the entire private healthcare economy, including independent doctors and pharmacies, will contract.

There will be fewer insured patients, not more. There will be less fee revenue, not more. The winners of this regulatory battle will find that the prize is worthless.

A far more constructive response would be for the disaffected practitioners to exercise precisely the commercial creativity that they are demanding from others.

If independent doctors and pharmacists believe that the vertically-integrated model is so advantageous, then the most logical thing to do is for them to form their own medical aid societies. Let them pool capital, attract members and compete. Zimbabwe does not lack entrepreneurial energy.

What it lacks is the policy environment that would make such ventures worthwhile, which is to say, a stable currency, predictable regulation and a government that is genuinely open for business rather than merely deploying the phrase as a slogan.

The proposed statutory instrument is not a pro-business measure. It is the opposite. It is the state intervening to suppress a successful adaptation to the state’s own policy failures.

Zimbabwe has been here before. It has watched governments reach for regulatory instruments in moments of frustration with market outcomes, only to discover that the markets they were attempting to discipline were the last ones functioning well enough to discipline. The pension sector collapse, the foreign currency crisis, the collapse of formal retail during the hyperinflationary years, in each case, the regulatory response either accelerated the deterioration or prevented the recovery.

The medical aid sector is one of the few arenas in which Zimbabwean private enterprise has demonstrated genuine resilience. It has done so by innovating in response to adversity.

To punish that innovation now and to do so in the name of competition, would be an act of institutional self-harm that future policymakers will spend years trying to reverse.

The government should withdraw this proposed statutory instrument. If genuine concerns exist about anti-competitive conduct, the appropriate response is to strengthen the regulatory framework for competition, to empower the relevant authorities to act against specific abuses and to address the currency instability that drove the vertical integration model in the first place.

one of that is simple. But simplicity is not what the moment demands. What it demands is clarity about causes and consequences and the wisdom to resist the temptation to solve a structural economic problem with a stroke of the regulatory pen.

Irrigation schemes also depend on reliable electricity supply, well-maintained canals and pumping systems and the technical capacity of farmers to use water efficiently. Without these supporting systems, the existence of dams does not automatically translate into higher agricultural productivity.

There is also a broader lesson embedded in the idea of global water bankruptcy. The warning from the United Nations is not simply about scarcity. It is about sustainability. Many of the regions now facing water crises reached that point through decades of over-extraction, inefficient irrigation practices and poor water governance. If Zimbabwe and other African countries seek to expand irrigation, they must do so carefully to avoid repeating these mistakes.

Modern agricultural technologies provide a pathway forward. Precision irrigation systems such as drip irrigation do reduce water use dramatically while increasing yields. Soil moisture monitoring, improved watershed management and drought-resistant crop varieties further improve water productivity. These approaches allow farmers to produce more food with less water, aligning agricultural expansion with environmental sustainability.

Beyond technology, governance will be critical. Transparent water allocation systems, effective management of dam infrastructure and long-term planning for climate adaptation will determine whether Zimbabwe’s water resources become a driver of prosperity or a missed opportunity.

The broader geopolitical implications should not be overlooked. As global water scarcity intensifies, the geography of food production will shift. Nations with reliable freshwater and available farmland could emerge as central pillars of global food security. Investment flows, agricultural partnerships and supply agreements may increasingly gravitate toward regions capable of sustaining large-scale food production under conditions of growing environmental stress. Africa and Zimbabwe within it, could play a crucial role in that emerging landscape.

But given the current US/Israel war against Iran, future wars might play out in Africa, as those who believe they have more rights and entitlement to world resources, start wars, so that they could occupy Africa’s farm land for cheap, whilst utilising the freshwater resources for agricultural production for export to their water-starved societies offshore.

But natural endowment alone is never enough. History shows that resources only translate into prosperity when they are matched with institutions, infrastructure and long-term vision. The United Nations’ warning about global water bankruptcy should therefore be understood not only as a crisis but a signal. It highlights the growing importance of water as a strategic resource in the global economy.

Conclusion

For Zimbabwe, the presence of many dams and substantial freshwater reserves represents more than a legacy of past engineering projects. In an increasingly water-constrained world, it may represent one of the country’s most important strategic assets.

The challenge now is to transform that asset into sustainable agricultural growth and in doing so, help feed a world that is rapidly approaching the limits of its water account.

Ndoro-Mkombachoto is a former academic and banker. As a systems transformation strategist, she helps multilateral agencies such as the UN, IFC/World Bank, DANIDA, CIDA and GIZ to future-proof operations in complex, evolving markets. She also works with private and public sector organisations in emerging economies, helping them navigate institutional complexity and turn systemic constraints into growth opportunities. She is the current chairperson of NetOne Financial Services PLC, a subsidiary of NetOne Telecomms. Follow Gloria on YouTube @HeartfeltwithGloria or contact her at [gloria@sustainwisestrategies.co.za](mailto:gloria@sustainwisestrategies.co.za).
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