Zimbabwe: An Old Reporter’s Diary (II)

Even with money in your bank account, the convoluted process of obtaining official foreign currency from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has crippled many brave local businesses, creating serious logistic delays and sudden shortages. Mrs Ndlovu was not poor. She drove a gleaming white Mercedes Jeep and seemed from her accent to have being raised […]

Even with money in your bank account, the convoluted process of obtaining official foreign currency from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has crippled many brave local businesses, creating serious logistic delays and sudden shortages. Mrs Ndlovu was not poor. She drove a gleaming white Mercedes Jeep and seemed from her accent to have being raised and schooled in England. But she complained about the sudden disappearance of bread and cooking oil sometimes for weeks.

So large was the Ndlovu compound, that besides their fair sized mansion, which has its own entrance, it could accommodate an eleven-room guest house, set in a large and well landscaped garden. I saw only one other overnight guest at breakfast, so I had the whole place to myself and was treated rather like royalty.

Mr Ndlovu is about my age and had lived for more than twenty years in South Africa, where he owned a large security company. Now semi-retired, he spends most of his time on a farm just outside Bulawayo, where he is building a larger country hotel. The guesthouse business is run entirely by his wife, who is assisted by three or four young and efficient women led by Daisy Nkhwewa, whose ambition is to become a Nollywood actress like her heroine, the Nigerian star Mercy Johnson.

I enjoyed long walks in Hillside, which is very high above the city and very quiet, with gold and green colours in the early morning sunshine. The air was fresh and fragrant from the plants and flowers, which seem to grow in massive profusion from every garden. Some of the mansions, hanging from rocky outcrops, could be the envy of the folks in Beverly Hills! But the potholes on the road, completely rutted in places, remind you that you are in the new Zimbabwe. Still, Hillside is a serene and desirable place to live, such that you will be hard placed to find in even the best planned Nigerian city.

Perhaps because I have lived and worked in Harare, I do not remember it with the same fondness as Bulawayo. In my mind the southern people are warmer and more welcoming. The weather is cool and balmy, with the nearby mystical hills of the Motopos, where the empire builder, Cecil John Rhodes and his companions are buried, wondrous in their eerie isolation. The Hwange game reserve, the Victoria Falls and the whole vast ecosystem of the mighty Zambezi, inspire you to drop your guard and return to the embrace of pristine nature.

Harare even now, is one of the most beautiful cities in Africa. It is big and business like and the Shona elite that dominate it can be reserved and even proud. We arrived at night after a long bus trip from Bulawayo, so I had to wait until morning to walk around my old haunts. As a poor freelance reporter, I had occasionally visited but could not afford the Momomotapa Hotel, which soars 16 stories high in the city centre, overlooking the vast greenery of the Harare Gardens. From a high floor room overlooking the Park, I now happily made it my base. It is an old hotel that has seen better days, but an excellent point from which to explore Harare on foot.

The following morning, before breakfast, I set out to visit my old rented apartment in the Avenues, a row of tree-lined streets with affordable apartments just off the city centre. Keller Court where I lived on and off between 1988-90, still stood, if a little less elegantly than I remembered. Venturing upstairs to my old one-bedroom apartment No 12, I tentatively knocked on the door, half expecting that Sam my old landlord would be there. All I

got were strange stares from some kids on their way to school, so before someone sounded the alarm, I made a hurried exit and continued my walk along the familiar neighborhood.

Little has changed in the basic infrastructure of Harare. The streets were bustling with people out to face the hustle of another day. Even in the city centre, traffic was orderly around the high rise office complexes and department stores. The Sheraton, which used to be the premiere hotel in the city, has shut down, but the old downtown hotels, like the Meikles, the Holiday Inn and the Cresta Oasis, were still in business.

What has changed is not the external edifice, but the quality of life. In early morning walks, I saw long queues of people at the entrance of yet to open banks. They were there to collect that day’s ration of about 20 dollars. The government is desperately trying to keep inflation at bay, which once upon a time, made the Zimbabwean dollar meaningless. But restrictions on money supply, price control and raiding black-market traders can only accomplish so much.

In the evening an old friend, an academic who had made the transition into the real world of business, took me to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. There are many such establishments in the city, catering to the large Chinese community but also rich Zimbabweans who can afford it. My friend, who knew all who mattered in the city, pointed out to me the Ambassador of Angola and a couple of local dignitaries, tucking into multi- course meals.

I also looked up Dr Ibbo Mandaza, a leading public intellectual in the country, who took me under his wings when I washed up in Harare a penniless freelancer many years ago. A former exile like most well educated Zimbabweans, Dr Mandaza was in the Mugabe government, before he left to set up an NGO that publishes a journal and organizes policy dialogues. Age has slowed him down somewhat, but he is still much sought after by diplomats and journalists for his views on events in the country.

Sapes Trust, his NGO, occupies two adjoining buildings a ten minutes’ taxi ride from my downtown hotel. The best time to visit is at lunch, as the NGO also runs the Africana Restaurant,

where you can eat cow leg, Fufu and other African delicacies. Around the table are an assemblage of people from government, the academia and the media, who seem to know everything, not just about Zimbabwe and Southern Africa, but the whole world!

Dr Mandaza usually presided over this daily session of food for thought and for the stomach, hardly eating much himself. But there was always a newly opened bottle of vintage South African red wine within his reach, as he talked about personalities and events to many of which he was a living witness. When he says “Emmerson did this” or Emmerson said this”, he assumed you know he was referring to Emmerson Mnangagwa, alias the Crocodile, who has swallowed everyone to become the new president of Zimbabwe.

While other analysts were puzzling over why the Zimbabwe of Mnangagwa was not that much different from that of Mugabe, from his intimate knowledge of the two men, he suggested it was foolish to expect a hyena to give birth to a lion. According to him, “Mugabe himself recalls how as a teacher in Zvishavane in 1945, Emmerson’s father seconded the little boy to live and cook for him.” This father and son relationship continued throughout the career of the two men, with Mnangagwa becoming Mugabe’s Special Assistant in 1977, his first and longest serving Minister of State Security (1980-88) and ultimately vice president and heir apparent.

perhaps the only place in Harare What came between the two men was the old man’s second wife, Grace, who had other ideas about who should succeed her increasingly frail husband. It was the threatening moves by Grace and her supporters, seemingly with the support of Mugabe, that made Mnangagwa to decamp and hole up in South Africa, a week before the military top brass, sensing that Mugabe’s time was up, organised a palace coup to dethrone him and block

his ambitious wife’s bid for power.

So Mugabe is gone, but in many ways, Mugabe is still around. For one the old man is still alive well into his mid-90s, though he is spending increasing amounts of time in a hospital in Singapore. More seriously, as the economic situation remains the same, or in the opinion of many gets worse, Zimbabweans I encountered, from taxi drivers to ex- ministers, are beginning to miss Mugabe!

My visit coincided with the first anniversary of the coup that brought Mnangagwa to power in late November 2017. Many expected that since he was part of the old power structure overthrown by the army and street protests, he would form a national government with the opposition to stabilise and heal the country after 37 years of one party rule. But he secure his position in a military-backed government, in which the coup leader, now retired General Constantino Chiwenga, is his vice president, the new president threw all his energy towards holding an election that would give him a personal mandate to rule. This he achieved in July 2018, but in rather controversial circumstances, given the heated political atmosphere and the unfair advantage the governing party has over all other contenders.

Mnangagwa is now securely in power and at his very first “thank the people” rally, supposed rivals like Chiwenga have began a campaign for him to contest again, saying “there is no vacancy” in 2023! No wonder many in the country are hard placed to figure what really has changed, with Mugabe’s old party and colleagues still very much around, using the same old tactics and slogans of authoritarian rule.

As the Zimbabwean Herald (Nov 16-22) a feisty weekly puts it: “The mood of hope and expectation which engulfed the nation in 2017 has given way to an atmosphere of gloom and despair. The general elections in July did not produce a clear and legitimate winner at the presidential level. The same problems of disputed election outcomes and legitimacy crisis under Mugabe are back as main opposition leader Nelson Chamisa continues to fight to delegitimise Mnangagwa.

“The economy is far worse off compared to the same period last year. For instance salaries have been halved or reduced by a third due to exchange differentials or shift. The markets are reeling from currency volatility, price instability and shortages of basic commodities. Individuals and companies are also in distress due to foreign currency shortages.”

In an opinion piece in the same newspaper, Brian Kagoro, a local lawyer offered this damning verdict: “The actual and present condition of Zimbabwe is one of deep trouble, a deeper trouble than the worst imposed during the Mugabe years. There are several centres of power (official and unofficial) and no urgent realization of the imperative of social dialogue. The new regime says the right things and yet in essence it is a harsh government that rules by diktat with unmitigated sense of impunity and arbitrariness.”

The daily, NewsDay, on its part asked pointedly in an editorial, “Is Mnangagwa morphing into another dictator?” This followed a chaotic sense in parliament during the annual budget presentation by Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube. Given the precarious state of the economy, expectations were high that the minister, a professor of economics and former chief economic adviser of the African Development Bank (AfDB), would unveil measures that would free the economy from official strangulation.

Instead the same man, who before becoming minister had made positive remarks about liberalising the economy, now chose to ignore the elephant in the House of Parliament: What to do about the currency, which has a different value in the market from that at the central bank?

When opposition parliamentarians refused to rise up, but rather booed when Mnangagwa made a regal entrance, the speaker of parliament, Jacob Mudenda, called in the police to eject the MP’s for the offense of not showing enough respect to the president. NewsDay claimed that “female MPs were dragged and pulled at and their undergarments were exposed. During all this drama, Mnangagwa sat stony-faced like an angry King Tut. He could have stopped this nonsense, but chose not to, watching as his lackeys harassed representatives of the people for not doing obeisance to him.”

As is to be expected, President Mnangagwa, like most oga’s at the top, see things differently. Writing in the Financial Times of Britain, on the eve of a state visit, he posited that “the economy (of Zimbabwe) is quietly showing signs of improvement, with growth forecasts revised upwards. Many sectors are thriving. The country’s gold mines have already surpassed the total output of 2017 for example, while a plant for the production of lithium carbonate project in Kweke is off to a promising start. Critically, agriculture is increasingly being funded by the private sector.”

He did admit that “the process of change is not smooth. Some pain and discomfort along the way is inevitable. The arduousness of the path of reform can sometimes lead governments to stall or backtrack. But as a passionate reformer leading a reformist government, I know there is no other way. We cannot allow anything to slow us down.”

As an outsider, who once lived in Zimbabwe and still feels at home there, I am rather torn between hope and despair. In many parts, the country is abundantly blessed by nature. It’s well educated, proud and hardworking people have built a good life for themselves, which they now have to struggle to maintain. One could see that economic life is a burden for ordinary Zimbabweans and can be irksome even for the elite.

Yet Harare and Bulawayo are still some of the most livable cities in Africa. Some of their upscale suburbs can only be compared with those in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Not far from downtown Harare, a short taxi ride took me to mostly Indian suburb to attend Friday prayer in a mosque I used to frequent. The tightly knit Indian business community seemed little affected by economic troubles around them; traders after all are adept at passing on extra costs to the buyer. They still live in the same treelined neighborhood, with row upon row of huge family compounds set amidst well-trimmed gardens. Even my Zimbabwean driver was impressed with the quiet display of wealth.

So the country still has a lot going for it.

Right now Zimbabwe is caught in a grim struggle between politics and economics, but to some degree, this is the story of many countries on the continent, at some point or other. Unlike many basket cases, you are left with the feeling that if Zimbabweans can truly shake off the past and boldly embrace a new future, they can rebuild their beautiful country all over again. This time around my friends were in no mood to joke about the inadequacies of African countries like Nigeria. They have got enough of theirs to deal with.