The Zimbabwe Situation

Price controls trigger shortages of basic goods

A vendor sold cooking oil, sweet potatoes, and sugar in Harare, Zimbabwe, in July. Cooking oil is often not available in shops, but can easily be found at inflated prices on the black market. (DESMOND KWANDE/AFP/Getty Images)

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times | September 9, 2007

HARARE, Zimbabwe - Kuda Shumba goes at one speed: fast. He prides himself on being able to get hold of almost anything, and he's open for business day or night.

That's what it takes to be one of Zimbabwe's black market cowboys.

Shumba spends his days on a motorbike sniffing out almost-impossible-to-find items such as sugar, cooking oil, bread, margarine, or cellphone SIM cards, risking years in a dank prison if caught.

His markup: 500 percent-plus.

His cellphone is his lifeline. He gets calls from a couple dozen contacts who tip him off when a scarce commodity - which nowadays in Zimbabwe includes all basic needs - is about to appear in a store. Then he swoops in.

Store supervisors and other staff members sell most of what they have to people such as Shumba, pocketing a cut.

"I get them from the back door. You can't get them straight," he said. "I feel happy because I can get things fast and resell them quickly. That's my advantage: I'm fast. You have to be fast."

In this country suffering from hyperinflation, where the black market value of 1 million Zimbabwean dollars is $5.50, the underground dealers are the bane of the government.

But President Robert Mugabe's increasingly draconian efforts to control the lurching economy by imposing price controls was a gift to them, triggering severe shortages.

Agriculture in Zimbabwe, once Southern Africa's breadbasket with a thriving tobacco industry, has gone into decline since early 2000, when Mugabe allowed the seizure of white-owned farms, many of which ended up in the hands of ruling party cronies. Production plummeted, investors fled, and the country has been struggling with severe shortages ever since.

Price controls meant some businesses had to run at a loss, so even more goods disappeared from the shelves. Although the government recently has increased some prices, the state-run newspaper Herald reports that widespread shortages persist.

"I can make a lot of money because the government is saying people have to sell this at 50,000 [Zimbabwean dollars], so businessmen are no longer buying these things for resale," Shumba said. "I'll make a lot of money, 30 million-plus" a month.

On the black market exchange rate, that would be $166. It's a handsome salary compared with the 2 million Zimbabwean dollars a month, or $11, he would be making as a clerk, a post he abandoned several years ago because of the low pay.

Tall, wearing neat jeans and a crisp black jacket, Shumba, 34, carries a briefcase and looks like a businessman or shop owner. He's deeply religious and active in his church, but he has a motto in Zimbabwe's dog-eat-dog economy: Never give anything away.

When there is no meat in the shops, his wife and children eat meat. He has luxuries that none of his neighbors can afford: a laptop computer, satellite TV, a DVD player.

"You can only afford those things if you're a black market guy," he said. "They're not for people on salaries."

Many days, there's an air of anxiety in Zimbabwe's supermarkets. The freezer sections, once filled with meat and chicken, are empty. The shelves where cornmeal, rice, and bread used to be stacked are bare.

But on other shelves, cakes, cookies, dog food, and chocolate are piled up, at prices few people can afford.

When staples arrive, the anxiety turns to panic, and sometimes violence.

When people see a queue in Zimbabwe, they join it and ask questions later. According to local news reports, a queue to buy sugar snaking for 900 yards erupted into pandemonium in late July in the eastern town of Marondera. A security fence was toppled and a woman sustained a broken leg in the crush before police with dogs were called.

Days earlier, two people were seriously injured when a truck carrying cornmeal was mobbed in Bulawayo.

But business has never been so good for Shumba, who sells his goods secretly at night from his home or delivers to special customers. He might be one of Zimbabwe's economic winners, but he seems wired, constantly on edge, fingering his cellphone ceaselessly and shifting nervously at questions about business.

Some months, he sells half a ton of sugar, more than 300 gallons of cooking oil, and 100 dozen loaves of bread, which he gets from retailers and manufacturers.

"If you want to be a dealer, you have to know a lot of guys in different sectors. If you want something from supermarkets, you go and see the manager there," Shumba said. " You give him something so that when he gets in some sugar or cooking oil, he'll phone you."

Among his customers are white businessmen who rely on him for SIM cards, identification and memory cards for cellphones that are difficult to procure. He splits the 14 million dollars, or $77, a month in SIM card profit with a friend in a phone shop.

With shortages, black market prices are way up, reflecting the real inflation rate here. The risks have increased as well.

So Shumba has a little insurance policy. He bribes the police chief in his area 500,000 to 1 million Zimbabwean dollars - about $2.70 to $5.50 - every few weeks and offers him a gift of sugar, oil, or cornmeal from every delivery.

Zimbabweans privately curse the black marketers, but no one is ever rude to Shumba's face.

"People know what I do," he said. "They don't comment on it because they all want something from me.

Greg Marinovich / South Photographs

Two illegal Zimbabwean immigrants, both teens, scale the last of three fences to take their chances in South Africa.

Illegal immigrants flee hunger and chaos into the neighboring country, where compassion is running short.

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 9, 2007

MUSINA, SOUTH AFRICA -- The two men stared at each other for a long moment, captor and captive: a white game farmer named Andre Nienaber, with mirrored sunglasses, neatly pressed khaki clothes and an aura of military precision; and a 16-year-old Zimbabwean orphan named Peter Jell, wearing a cap marked "Jesus" and the desperate look of someone who knew he was headed back to the country he had risked his life to escape.

Moments earlier, the South African farmer had arrested Peter and four other Zimbabwean border jumpers where they sat, exhausted, hungry and demoralized, hoping to hitch a ride 300 miles south to Johannesburg.

Earlier in the journey

click to enlarge

He cuffed the five to the back of his truck with plastic ties and called the police.

"We're so frightened to go back to that hunger country, where there's nothing," Peter said as he waited.

His parents died in a bus crash two years ago, Peter said, and he has five younger siblings and no hope of feeding them. Before he left Zimbabwe last month, he and the other children, ages 2 to 12, were eating two or three times a week. In between, he said, the children scoured the bush for any wild fruit they could find.

"It's terrible. You feel sorry for them," Nienaber said before buying some bread and milk for the five illegal immigrants and handing them over to the police. Yet he sees the Zimbabweans who cross his land, cutting his fences and destroying his water pipes, as a threat to his survival.

The tide of Zimbabweans arriving in South Africa, driven by extreme shortages of food and basic goods, has grown into a flood as strong as the nearby Limpopo River in the rainy season.

Zimbabwe used to be one of Africa's most prosperous countries. Its slide into economic chaos under President Robert Mugabe's regime has forced people to make heart-wrenching decisions -- taking their children out of schools because they can't pay the fees, or even leaving them behind while they try to find work in South Africa.

The government of South Africa rejects the view of some activists that hunger and social upheaval in Zimbabwe are so severe that most border jumpers should be classified as refugees. The migrants are sent back to the chaos and poverty they fled.

The countryside around the Limpopo, which forms the border between the two nations, is a stunning canvas of red earth and green bush, but at times it is like stepping into a bygone era. Walk into some bars around here, and you're plunged into the reflexive racial hostility of apartheid.

You might hear someone express the view that there is no such thing as a good black; another says that "it just doesn't look right" when you see black people driving BMWs around Johannesburg. Not everyone puts it so bluntly, but you occasionally run into whites who, like the Leonardo DiCaprio character in the film "Blood Diamond," still refer to Zimbabwe by its colonial-era name, Rhodesia.

Some people profess pity for the Zimbabweans, but many farmers have run out of compassion. They go on regular patrols, rounding up Zimbabweans and handing them to the police, and some of the farmers say they are so angry that they sometimes feel like shooting the trespassers on their land.

Thousands arrestedPolice have stopped releasing statistics on immigrant arrests. The latest police data available indicate that here in Limpopo province, police arrested 5,000 Zimbabwean border jumpers in January.

But the army alone has arrested almost 42,000 Zimbabweans this year, and expects the total to reach 100,000 by year's end, compared with about 72,000 last year, according to figures provided at a military briefing to businessmen and farmers last month in this border town.

The majestic baobab trees that loom tall in Limpopo's scrubby acacia bush are of little scenic interest to hungry, footsore travelers from Zimbabwe, who care only for the shelter and shade they offer. The spectacular rocky outcrops are just barriers to walk around.

To landowners, the stony, dry soil is of little value except for game farming. The landscape draws hunters from all over the world to kill kudu, eland, impala -- all antelope -- and other game.

It's not hard to pick out the ragged, dirty border jumpers who venture onto Limpopo's roads looking for a lift. They radiate fear and vulnerability.

Akimu Tafire, 17, and Sheron Chimbuya, 20, had been wandering for five days without food or water after crossing the border with a group of 100 people.

"There's no food. There's no clothes. Education is poor and life is bad" in Zimbabwe, said Akimu, an orphan who supports five siblings.

Zimbabweans speak of a disintegrating society, a place so desperate that mothers of young children leave them behind to make the terrifying journey south.

Cecilia Mapani, wizened and worn down at 25, left Zimbabwe in March because there was no way to feed her young brothers and her 7-year-old son, Tanaka.

"I was afraid, but I forced myself to come," she said. "People say a lot of things about this Limpopo River. There are crocodiles in the river. The water was powerful and I don't know how to swim."

She joined a group of about 130 people, escorted by traffickers. They were told to hold hands when they waded into the river, which came almost to Mapani's neck. They walked for five hours through the bush to get to the nearest town, Musina.

Mapani found work picking tomatoes on a local farm for $40 a month. Some would call it exploitation, but to her the meager wage offered survival and hope. Mapani is now in Johannesburg, penniless and unemployed.

Ask Mapani how it felt to leave her son behind, and she gazes ahead numbly, as though seeing nothing. She left him with his father, a miner; she hopes he'll be all right.

Farmers' plight The farmers of the Limpopo say they have their own worries about making a living. Armed with two-way radios, pistols and a zeal for law and order, they launched Farm Watch patrols seven years ago to combat crime, but now focus on rounding up Zimbabweans. The patrols have been criticized by the Limpopo police commissioner and by COSATU, the trade union body.

Farmers complain that their game fences are cut daily, their water pipes are broken by thirsty Zimbabweans, pump and irrigation parts are repeatedly stolen, fires are lighted, game killed and farmworkers threatened and sometimes attacked.

When game escapes, it's impossible to recover it, said Gert Klopper, 65, who has a farm near the Zimbabwean border and lost 25 wildebeest valued at about $9,000 to a neighbor: Wild game cannot be marked or branded.

Behind Klopper's house, strips of meat hang in an ancient van, an improvised drying room for biltong, the spicy air-dried meat South Africans love to snack on.

Another game and vegetable farmer, Willem Helm, lost a herd of eland valued at about $29,000 after his fence was cut. He has to employ a man full time just to fix the holes in his fences, he says.

"These people are so hungry; sometimes they have not eaten for four or five days. They don't have a cent on them. They will steal anything," he said. "They do what they have to do to survive. I'd probably do the same.

"But compassion is running out. We are getting frustrated and sometimes getting angry, especially if something is broken or stolen. The situation is so bad that you can't let them go. If I am to survive on my land, then they must go."

As the farmers patrol a deserted dirt track, the red dust is marked with the footprints of those who passed the night before. Here and there are traces of a scuffle: some discarded trousers and an old bag, signs that someone was robbed of their few possessions. There are also the remains of several fires.

Occasionally, you pass several large rocks placed in a line to point the way. The border crossers also tie plastic bags or bottles to trees to mark the way or indicate pickup points.

There's a cold, biting wind on the back of Nienaber's truck. He stops anyone he sees hanging out by the roadside, taking them by the arm and demanding to see their ID. Some of them roar with laughter, saying, "We're from South Africa, not Zimbabwe." Others show him their TB injection scars to prove they are South African; Zimbabweans' scars are on the other shoulder.

Farmers also fear that the influx of Zimbabweans will scare away international game hunters. British hunter Richard Sloggett was surprised by the numbers of Zimbabweans rustling through bushes where he was supposed to be shooting.

On a June trip to the property of one Limpopo game farmer, Sloggett and other hunters slept each night with rifles at their sides, afraid of being attacked by Zimbabweans.

While hunting one morning in thick scrub, they found four border jumpers, and Sloggett was told to point his rifle at the men, march them back toward the main camp and force them to lie on the ground, an adventure that left a bad taste in his mouth.

"I'm English. It's not in my nature to be pointing guns at people," he said. "It was very alien.

"The problem is that these people [Zimbabweans] really have got nothing to lose. But that's what makes them so dangerous."

Another alien element, said Sloggett, was the way many local whites "talk as if the apartheid era still exists."

"I found that pretty offensive. I wish they would change the way they speak. But that doesn't mean they should be murdered. The crime is against them, not by them."

At dusk near the Beitbridge border crossing, the sun sinks in a majestic haze of red. Stray cats and beggars scrounge for food.

There's an air of expectancy: The drivers know it's time for business. Pretty soon, says one Zimbabwean driver, people will start shambling in from the bushes to jump into taxis and make their way south.

But tonight, a soldier is patrolling the area, checking passports.

Darkness settles. Slowly the area empties out. It is as if the border crossers can smell the danger. They won't be coming in from the bush tonight.

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

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