ZIMBABWE - LETTER FROM THE DIASPORA

20th March 2009

Dear Friends,

The British media went into a tailspin this week when the unemployment figures for the UK were announced: over 2 million people are now without jobs. Most of the job losses have been in the retail sector and boarded-up shop fronts are now a common sight in towns and cities around the country. Hardly a day goes past without companies closing down or announcing layoffs. Car manufacturing has been massively affected and towns whose economies depended on the car industry are badly hit. Is it recession or is it depression, the economists ask, but it hardly matters to the two million people without jobs, unable to pay their mortgages; house repossessions have become another painful feature of the recession. The Bank of England has resorted to printing money - you can imagine how Zimbabweans in the diaspora chuckled when we heard that! Here it's called 'Quantitative easing' and is intended, so the economists tell us, to ease the economy by using the newly created money to buy assets from banks and other financial institutions; in effect, to inject more cash into the economy so that the sellers of assets have cash to spend on goods and services. That's the theory anyway but for ordinary folk it means very little.

But the truth is that no one in the UK will starve in this recession/depression. The state pays Job Allowances and sends you on courses to retrain for a new job, if you can find one; if you get sick there is free medical treatment and your children can still go to school - no school fees, of course, and eligible children can still get free school meals.

It's a world away from the poverty we know in Africa and Zimbabwe in particular but the recession that is being experienced in the developed world has direct relevance to Africa and the developing world. African leaders met with Gordon Brown in London this week ahead of the G20 summit next month. The BBC's International Development correspondent reports that Brown was warned that the possibility of conflict and unrest breaking out all over the continent was a very real one if the African economic downturn continues. (No one mentioned Zimbabwe of course, that's a basket case in a class of its own.) In Zambia half a million have lost their jobs in the copper mines; the halving of the cotton prices have resulted in farmers losing their livelihoods in Tanzania and the drastic reduction of receipts from tourism has led to a severe drop in foreign revenues across Africa. As the recession bites in the west, African migrants have less disposable income to remit to their families at home. The point was repeatedly made by the African leaders that it is in the west's own interest to ensure that Africa does not descend into conflict; as Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said, it makes sense for the richer countries in the world to fund the poorest since it would cost much less now than paying for peacekeeping operations later. It is not going to be easy to persuade the west of the force of President Johnson Sirleaf's argument. The commitments made to Africa at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 have still not been fulfilled so it seems unlikely that western financial institutions and banks will be willing to honour their pledges now.

All of this makes very dismal reading for Zimbabwe; the Inclusive Government is hardly likely to attract any substantial investment even from sympathetic countries while the old regime still holds the reigns of power. The picture painted by Tendai Biti in his 'Reality Budget' this week is truly grim. It seems that Government revenue is sustained by the excise duty on cigarettes and beer; there is no production going on in the country and 94% of the population is unemployed. Even as Biti spoke the devastation of the agricultural sector continued unabated, often with the direct collusion of the ZRP and the army. Biti calculated that government revenue would be 1 billion but expenditure would top 1.9 billion. It doesn't need an economist to work out what every householder knows; we must live within our means. The greed and profligacy that led to the west's economic collapse is, sadly, already a feature of the new Inclusive Government in Zimbabwe. With a hugely bloated cabinet and ministers and deputies all being allocated brand new Mercedes, not to mention all the other perks, it is hardly surprising that critics are voicing their alarm that the MDC is no better than Zanu PF at resisting the patronage that is so freely coming their way. To paraphrase the prophetic words of the great African writer, Chinua Achebe, when people have been out in the rain and the cold for so long, they are reluctant to share the warmth and comfort of the cave with others when they finally get out of the rain. When asked by a reporter how he could justify driving around in a Mercedes, one MDC Minister replied that it was what the people expected of him, without such a status symbol, he would not have the people's respect! Such twisted logic does not suggest that Tendai Biti's 'Reality Budget' is being taken seriously by the Ministers so newly come in 'out of the rain.'

The 'reality' of Biti's revised emergency budget is that Zimbabwe is broke, there is no money and little prospect of western donors bailing out the government. The Education Minister admitted as much when he told the teachers that he cannot even guarantee their March salaries. "We'll give you fourteen days to increase our pay (from US$ 100 currently being paid to all civil servants) or we go back to the trenches" stormed Raymond Majongwe, the PTUZ boss. What this means is that children who have had almost no schooling in 2008 and a severely curtailed first term in 2009 face the prospect of a second term without teachers. Exam results, due out shortly, will surely reflect the disastrous effect all this disruption has had on children's lives. The children are the innocent victims of Zanu PF's politicisation of education; it is not surprising that the MDC were given the education portfolio and the job of cleaning up Zanu PF's mess! Money is a big part of the solution but it is also part of the problem. Teachers rightly claim that they cannot survive on $US 100 a month but they should remember that hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens have no jobs at all. Without education now for thousands of Zimbabwean children, the danger is that they too will join the ranks of the unemployed, ten years from now. Getting our children back to school must be a priority if Zimbabwe is ever to regain its status as the best-educated workforce in Africa. Greed and self-interest - from whatever side of the political divide - must be set aside for the greater good of the country.

Yours in the (continuing) struggle PH