Dear President,
In 1992, my ambitions were being shaped in a remote district. It was a place where newspapers were scarce, television sets were unheard of, and supermarkets existed only in imagination.
A decade later, fate placed me at the centre of Zimbabwe’s collapse.
I entered financial journalism just as the economy plunged into catastrophe. It was a moment when business journalism ceased to be optional but became essential. We were not merely reporting, but we were decoding destruction. We were tasked with helping markets, companies, and ordinary citizens make sense of an economy that was devouring wealth at terrifying speed.
The roots of this crisis stretched back further. The Economic Structural Adjustment Programme of the 1990s, imposed under the guidance of the World Bank, had already shaken the foundations. I had first encountered economic collapse as a history student in 1992, reading about Germany’s post-World War I hyperinflation — a crisis so extreme it felt almost fictional. It was a country where money became worthless, where economic order dissolved.
Nothing in those textbooks prepared me for what I would witness in my beloved motherland Zimbabwe some 85 years later.
The Zimbabwe I walked into as a financial journalist was not a case study, but a live disaster — a system in freefall, a nation unravelling in real time.
To understand the scale of our collapse, comparisons with post-war Germany are unavoidable. On October 15, 1923, as Germany’s inflation surged to 30 000%, a Berlin resident wrote to her son: “This letter cost 15 million marks to send. It will cost 30 million the day after tomorrow.”
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In Zimbabwe, inflation did not just rise but exploded before our eyes. By December 2008, it had reached an almost incomprehensible 500 billion percent, according to IMF estimates.
Even Germany’s nightmare pales in comparison.
While Germans pushed wheelbarrows of cash to buy bread, Zimbabweans descended into something far more primitive, as survival was stripped of dignity. The currency lost all meaning, and prices ran ahead of logic. People counted money in quintillions, yet could not afford basics. It was the complete breakdown of economic order.
According to the Centre for Peace Initiatives in Africa, Zimbabwe endured Africa’s worst inflation crisis — a devastating currency collapse and one of the most brutal episodes of wealth destruction in modern history.
And in the middle of it all, we reported.
A small group of business journalists, myself included, were left to interrogate a collapsing system. We questioned policymakers, economists, and institutions as we searched for answers that often did not exist. We told the story of a nation sinking, day by day, into despair.
Very few financial journalists (worldwide) have had to document collapse at this scale, from the inside.
On January 6, 2003, I stepped onto Coventry Road in Workington, Harare, to begin my career at the Daily Mirror. The signs of decay were already everywhere. Industry was shrinking, and companies were closing at breakneck speed. The IMF had recorded a 10,5% GDP contraction in 2002, followed by consecutive declines in the years that followed, culminating in a 14,8% collapse in 2008.
This was not a downturn, but an economic wipeout.
Factories fell silent, and breadwinners were discarded, while foreign currency vanished. Fuel shortages intensified. Across industries, machinery gathered dust for lack of spares, while hyperinflation accelerated with frightening precision. And as the economy disintegrated, Zimbabweans fled. By 2008, nearly three million had abandoned our motherland.
Five months after I joined the Daily Mirror, it shut down.
But the newspaper was only part of a broader collapse. Banks followed, and many financial institutions crumbled as confidence evaporated.
Mr President, I am not speaking out of turn.
I am reminding you that twenty-three years after that morning in 2003, my notebook still reads like that of a war correspondent.
Companies continue to fail, increasingly surviving on rescue arrangements. Foreign currency shortages persist, and the banking sector remains fragile. I am still living under the same template of 2003.
Infrastructure is collapsing — even as I acknowledge your current efforts. Harare’s roads now resemble those of a neglected rural outpost.
Yet we are told the economy is growing, and we are told things are improving.
But lived reality says otherwise.
There is something fundamental that both the First and Second Republics have failed to confront — or have chosen to ignore.
And time is no longer a luxury.
I rest my case, Mr President.
