Fanuel JONGWE -
Two years ago, Linos Mutepera was among hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans who celebrated the toppling of long-time ruler Robert Mugabe with tears of joy. Today, he looks back at that time with bitterness, his hope of a better life dashed on the rocks of poverty and joblessness.
“We were all there — the young, the old, the rich, the poor, blacks, whites and mixed race — waving the Zimbabwean flag, holding banners, hoisting placards, singing, dancing, praying together, holding each other’s arms and hugging,” he reminisced.
“We thought it was an end at last of an era that had been marked by poverty, joblessness, shortages, army and police brutality,” the 33-year-old unemployed engineering graduate said. “How wrong we were.”
Mutepera, sitting beside a friend hawking clothes at a Harare flea market, pointed bleakly to the promises made by Mugabe’s successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, to rebuild Zimbabwe’s shattered economy.
“We were used,” he said. “I feel so let down, so betrayed. But at least I am wiser.”
Mnangagwa won disputed elections on pledges to lure foreign investment, create jobs and turn the country into a middle-income economy by 2030. But Zimbabwe’s nightmares returned within months, as shoppers battled daily shortages of basics such as fuel, cooking oil, sugar and bread.
Unemployment today is over 90 per cent while the size of the economy has more than halved since 2000, when Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned farms crippled Zimbabwean agriculture.
Inflation runs into triple digits, electricity is available for just six hours a day and in many urban areas, the taps are dry.
“Things have basically got worse,” Professor Tony Hawkins of the University of Zimbabwe’s School of Economics said.
“People are getting poorer and thousands are losing jobs,” he said.
“The economy has got worse and politically, nothing has changed except that the military are much more visible and much more powerful. “Basically, it’s back to square one, with a change of driver but the same bus or taxi.”
A spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Daniel Molokele, said Zimbabweans had mistakenly believed Mugabe’s removal would end the country’s woes.
“The euphoria that we saw in 2017 was not for the ascendancy of Mnangagwa but for the fall of Mugabe — and people also thought it meant the fall of the entire system created by Mugabe,” he said.
“Two years later there is hopelessness, there is despondency, there is disappointment.” — AFP
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