The poor sacrificial lambs in economic meltdown

via The poor sacrificial lambs in economic meltdown – NewsDay Zimbabwe July 22, 2014 by Rashweat Mukundu

It must be President Robert Mugabe only who is seeing an economic turn-around at a time when his government is struggling to pay its own workers with so many companies closing down daily.

I am not surprised that Mugabe made this statement while surrounded by not-so-truthful advisers who are more interested in telling him what he wants to hear and the “good news” instead of the reality of our desperate economic situation.

By saying all is well, the powerful in our country are slowly becoming numb and unfazed by the suffering of the majority.

Anyone sensitive to human suffering and survival struggles will be pained by the number of youths who sell airtime cards in the streets and the number of women who sell fruits and veggies along Fourth Street and many other street corners in Zimbabwe.

At this time of suffering, the Zanu PF leadership is not prepared to make scarifies on their good life, but ask civil servants to go without salaries.

They cannot sacrifice their own Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers, but ask civil servants to eke out a dollar daily to come to work without a salary.

I can hardly recognise my own town, Marondera, from the beautiful town with its green tree-lined streets to the now ravaged town I visit from time to time, more resembling the bombed cities of Syria than a town in a supposedly recovering economy.

The roads are impassable and one sees desperation and suffering on the faces of as many eking out a living from doing all sorts of things.

If there is any clearer demonstration of an economic meltdown, it is seen through the number of young men touting in the streets of our towns.

In Harare, these young men hang onto moving second-hand Japanese vehicles risking life for a five rand coin.

It is, therefore, disingenuous for the national leadership to pretend that all is well when the majority are suffering.

We read over the weekend that ZESA Holdings is going to retrench; the city council is doing the same, in Chitungwiza the workers have gone for more than a year without salaries and not to mention thousands retrenched as companies close down.

Last week, I met a young woman selling a few boxes of rat poison, the total goods not exceeding $10. From the look of things, she had been walking kilometres and was so desperate that she was approaching every person in a car to sell her goods.

Under normal circumstances of the grind of daily life we all face, this young woman would pass for what is now normal in Zimbabwe, that is, the insensitive and numbness we now have for the circumstances of as many others.

The disease of the rich, politically connected, and ruling class in our Zimbabwe is that of being insensitive, if not dehumanised, is slowly creeping into us the ordinary citizens.

We also are slowly becoming insensitive to the plight of the next person as long as we sense that our own needs have been met.
The zvangu zvaita mentality largely representative of the ruling elite is creeping into the mindset of the ordinary citizen.

This mindset eats into our sense of belonging, our sense of community and citizenship, pushes us into primitive competition for everything, and leaves the real issues of poor governance and corruption unresolved.

In essence, the responsibilities of those meant to run this country are put away and each one of us is made to fend for ourselves in the most degrading manner.

This de-humananisation of the citizen is also reflected in how Zimbabweans now argue and debate political or tragic events.
An example being social media debates within media and civil society actors on the Malaysia airline crash in Ukraine.

The Facebook posts I read had no iota of sadness or concern for the dead and their families but largely focused on who was to blame between the United States and Russia, which strangely also assumed an MDC versus Zanu PF tone.

Those who perceive themselves as Zanu PF stood by Russia while the pro-MDCs stood by America.

As citizens, we have lost the capacity to debate issues as informed by our own reality and lived experiences, rather templates and frames are set for us by which we must see our world.

It should, therefore, make sense that the economy is recovering when on the contrary companies are closing.

The human element, the deaths and the families suffering as a result of the loss of loved ones was lost in this debate.

The poor Zimbabwean has so much been locked into political pigeon holes, that we no longer see another fellow citizen as simply a citizen, but an MDC or a Zanu PF supporter.

It is on this basis of this thinking, drilled in us by those in power, who suffer no poverty or want of anything, that a poor villager is prepared to kill another poor villager because he or she is Zanu PF or MDC.

When we commit crimes against each other, when the municipal police chase poor vendors around the city, when touts shout obscenities at potential clients they are, in their thinking, not dealing with or talking to fellow humans who deserve respect.

We are now all clients of the ruling elite in terms of our thinking and behaviour, we pursue their taste, and we hate and kill each other on their behalf.

We are told what amounts to nonsense that the economy is recovering when the reality tells us something else.
The poor are now the sacrificial lambs at the altar of the profligacy of the rich and powerful.

Our governors are now blinded to the reality of the suffering of their own people.

Worse still they have recruited us to see the world from their own perspective, where lies are taken for truth and we are all in the rat race for survival, just daily survival.