HARARE — It's a shock, entering Robert Mugabe's decaying, crumbling capital. The former urban gem of Africa, once prissy in its orderly efficiency, now sinking into a rank detritus of uncollected garbage, potholes, broken traffic lights, collapsing public services, paint-flaked, gloomy, empty stores and abandoned factories.
Harare, the Sunshine City of the tourist brochures, sparkled as recently as a decade ago. A bracing, healthy 1,500 metres above sea level on the stunning highveld, it was an intentional, sturdy metropolis of commerce and finance, trade, manufacturing, government, upmarket shops and professional services.
The sun remains but the shine is gone. Harare stinks.
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A man buys lemons at a store in Zimbabwe's capital Harare, Feb. 21. Zimbabwe's annual inflation surged to a record 100,580.2 percent in January, marking another setback to President Robert Mugabe's efforts to reverse a deep economic slide in the once prosperous African nation. (Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)
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Sunshine City turned sewage farm, as Zimbabwe's Financial Times, one of the country's very few independent news media voices, put it. Although sewage farming is just not the right wording.
There's a theft pandemic of sewer, telephone, electrical and water-supply equipment. The public nuts and bolts, the cables and pipes, of this city of nearly three million people are literally vanishing alongside the flawed management of what infrastructure remains. Think about this: People selling phone wires for food.
Electrical and water supply is erratic (although the reservoirs are full). Elevators in downtown buildings and gas stations are becoming artifacts of a past existence. Public servants in the city parked their cars years ago: no fuel affordable; no fuel to be found.
Officially inflation is 100,580 per cent. Unofficially (and probably more accurately) it is more than 150,000 per cent. In any event, there are too few retail commodities to make any kind of measurement accurate.
All surgery at Harare's Parirenyatwa Hospital, the biggest in the country, has ceased because of a shortage of anesthetic, functioning equipment and medical specialists. Nurses and other workers refuse to come to work because their bus transportation costs are greater than their salaries. With the Zimbabwean currency this week falling to a record low of $25-million for a single U.S. dollar, bus fares can change on a single trip.
The University of Zimbabwe's faculty is melting away across the country's borders, joining an estimated 3.5 million of their fellow citizens who have emigrated or fled. Industry — what industry that still exists — is operating at 20 per cent capacity.
The orderly market has simply dematerialized. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe borrows hard currency from shadowy traders in the black market to pay for food and drug imports, essential vehicle fuel and electricity from Zimbabwe's neighbours, further contributing to inflation.
Two professionals, a husband and wife, tell me their combined monthly income is $57-million. "That buys four loaves of bread," says the wife. When bread can be found.
Life in Harare has been described as an existential struggle.
I lived here two decades ago as The Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent. I have come back for a look at the country as its March 29 election campaign gets under way. Because foreign journalists at the moment are unwelcome — it's been four years since the government last gave The Globe permission to report in the country — I have entered as a teacher of religion.
My driver, John, who meets me at the airport, says he needs to buy cooking oil. (I have omitted his last name to protect him from any repercussions for ferrying me around.)
When we get into the city, he passes a shop I remember as a fashionable outlet for women's clothes. One rack with three dated and ugly dresses sits in the window. The rest of the store is bare and dark. Its neighbours are barred and padlocked, as are many shops on adjacent streets.
Only in Harare's opulent suburb of Borrowdale — home to diplomats, business and political elites, staff of international NGOs paid in foreign currency — are the Van Heusen dress shirts surreally advertised along the road from the airport likely to be found in Chinese- and South African-owned private shops located alongside new-car dealerships, nightclubs, international fast-food outlets and grocery stores filled with goods deliberately displayed without price tags in testament to Zimbabwe's inflation.
"Borrowdale," says the wife with the $57-million family income, as if she's mentioning a dirty word. "Two different countries inside one country."
A few kilometres but an economic light year from Borrowdale, John drives into a derelict, rusted-out factory yard and stops the car. He immediately is surrounded by black-market hawkers selling goods from bakkies — pick-up trucks — parked just out of sight in alleyways.
