Boiled dry
Thanks to the past few weeks of price controls, shop raids and shortages, things in Zimbabwe are finally looking the way maybe they “should” have been looking for the past several years. Surely, with inflation in the treble and quadruple digits, unemployment at over 80%, a life expectancy that crashed from over 60 years to around 35 years, the veneer of normalcy that a tour through selected parts of Harare can yield needs to be smashed.
But Zimbabweans have shown an incredible resiliency through farm invasions, Operation Murambatsvina, currency reforms, and a host of other plagues the past seven years. Thanks to creativity, initiative, remittances, foreign aid, cross border trading and the black market, people have managed to get by.
And in a way, I suspect its this very make-a-planness that is driving this government crazy. Zanu PF might be the country’s liberation party, but it doesn’t want to govern a liberated people. It wants to govern a people dependent on it, reliant on its patronage, its good will, its whims for its survival. Urban residents and vendors exercising a bit too much initiative? Then launch Operation Murambatsvina to destroy their homes and take away their livelihoods. Hungry Zimbabweans thinking for themselves and going to Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique or South Africa to do a bit of grocery shopping in the face of price controls and shortages? Then ban the importation of foodstuffs and household items without a permit, compromising the futures of cross border traders, their families, and the families that depend on their imports.
The frog in a boiling pot metaphor is beyond cliched in Zimbabwe. But this government doesn’t seem content with merely turning up the heat. It wants Zimbabweans boiled dry. Even if that means there’s no juicy bits left for us, or them.