Zimbabwe feels at breaking point this mid-March 2025. The whispers on the streets are ‘uprising’ and ‘revolution. The government are on the warpath against the poorest citizens and it is reaching a crescendo.
It started with tax. ‘Street vendors aren’t paying tax,’ the government said. ‘It isn’t fair’, the big retail outlets said. No one acknowledging that vendors are already paying a daily fee to the municipal council to sit on the roadside and sell their goods. But the government aren’t getting their piece of flesh and so they set the tax collectors on the poorest of the poor. Months later that war continues with tax officials now manning road blocks near border towns, seizing goods, confiscating them from people’s vehicles saying they haven’t paid import duty. Cross border traders have been decimated, their livelihoods gone too.
Next the government took its fight to the private taxi operators. Their small vehicles get stopped again and again on every journey at police roadblocks where they have to pay police to be able to proceed. Three dollars a day to use a certain section of road and after that stretch the taxi drivers drop their passengers on the outskirts of town, leaving them to walk the last part of the journey where another set of police are waiting, also wanting their three dollars. “Do you get a receipt from the police,” I asked one taxi driver and he just laughed, “a receipt! Never! I pay every day but there’s never a receipt. It goes straight into their pocket.” No one acknowledges that these taxi drivers are there because there is no functional public transport in most places.
Last week the government turned up the heat on vendors even more and gave them a 48-hour ultimatum to get off the streets. Horrible video clips emerged of police seizing vendors’ produce, throwing it into trucks and speeding away. An old lady kneeling on the ground begging for her lost goods, left crying in the dust. No way now to feed their children or pay the rent. It’s all just so cruel. And where do all those seized goods go to, we wonder.
Advocate and former MP, Fadzayi Mahere, explained the reason for this situation in a few sentences on social media: “The vending crisis is a direct result of the country’s economic implosion, the collapse of public services and grand looting by elites who steal money that’s meant to support the economy …. Why are you declaring war on the poor? You’ve looted everything so how do you expect people to survive?… You cannot forcibly drive vendors off the street when you pushed them there with your incompetence, insatiable greed and destruction of the economy and the country.”
This week things have escalated even more. Nurses at Sally Mugabe Hospital in Harare held a demonstration about the appalling conditions there. Their placards read: No Water. No Power. No Care. Our patients deserve better. “We are not just fighting for ourselves; we are fighting for our patients who are suffering the most,” the nurses said. (NewsDay) And while that was happening Health and Child Care Minister Douglas Mombeshora said that the government is planning to recruit nearly 20,000 health workers affected by funding cuts from USAID but didn’t say where they are going to get the money to pay them when our health sector is already in such a diabolical state.
A few days later the teacher’s union, ARTUZ, announced they were going on strike from the 28th March saying the government had ignored all their calls for salary adjustments. The lowest paid teachers earn less than US$300 a month. The anguish, anger and desperation of vendors, cross border traders, taxi operators, nurses and teachers is escalating.
Lastly came Mr Geza. A war veteran whose first public interview challenging Mr Mnangagwa’s presidency was broadcast by HSTV a month ago. That interview left HSTV journalist Blessed Mhlanga arrested and still in prison without trail or bail for over three weeks. Mr Geza appeared again this week, dressed in military uniform on a You Tube video. He spoke at length about the things we all whisper on the streets: government corruption at every level from the top down, corrupt law enforcement, a captured judiciary and people acquiring huge wealth under very dubious circumstances. Mr Geza called for street protests on the 31st March and said this was “not even a protest but an uprising.”
It’s a fearful time in Zimbabwe. Please keep us in your thoughts and hearts and please do not forget about journalist Blessed Mhlanga, still in prison without bail or trial for 24 days.
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Until next time, thanks for reading this Letter From Zimbabwe now in its 25th year, and my books about life in Zimbabwe, a country in waiting.
Ndini shamwari yenyu (I am your friend)
Love Cathy 20th March 2025. Copyright © Cathy Buckle https://cathybuckle.co.zw/
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