Blogging for Sky News - our Monday entry
Sokwanele was invited to blog for Sky News this week on The Insider Blog. The Sky audience is much wider and far more diverse than ours, so we encourage you to visit The Insider Blog and please participate in the comments and discussion being generated there.
Our Monday entry for ‘The Insider Blog’
Hello.
My day begins with a 30 minute walk to a place where I wait for a work colleague to pick me up.
Sometimes I have to walk further because we change the pick up spot every week. If I stay in one place too long, other people in the area soon learn that I have a lift organised and start waiting with me.
My work colleague doesn’t mind an extra one or two squeezing in, but objects to five or six trying to sit on laps to fit in the car.
I am extremely lucky to have a lift. Other work colleagues who rely on the ETs (Emergency Taxis - mini-bus cabs) are in a terrible situation. The country’s annual 1,800% inflation has forced the ET fares from $3,000 to $5,000 overnight (£6-8)- and that is just one way.
ETs divide their routes into sectors so the costs can sometimes be double that if you have to catch two ETs to get home.
An average commercial worker clears around $30,000 a week (£60). So if a person is spending $10,000 a day on ETs their transport bill comes to nearly twice the amount they earn in a week. What about food, school, fees, and rent?
Last week the employees of a major department store refused to go to work because their earnings didn’t cover their transport. The government’s solution at the beginning of this month was to force employers to give their employees an extra $60 000 (£120)on top of their wages as a transport allowance.
But before the month has even ended, inflation has made the figure nonsensical. This is why we see so many people walking these days.
Walking 15km to work is bad enough, but worse when you have to factor in Mugabe’s thugs trying to enforce an illegal curfew by intimidating and beating up civilians out on the streets at night.
One of my friends described how his walk home is taking him twice as long as it should because he is choosing back roads to avoid the patrolling thugs. He says he’s feeling exhausted all the time now because he can’t afford to eat three meals a day anymore, and all the walking is sapping his energy.
People are talking about having to make a choice; most of them are thinking about whether it is even worth working any more.
So I am incredibly lucky to have a colleague who gives lifts to us. In return, we share the cost of his fuel. The price of fuel goes up almost daily: it was $8 000 a week ago (£15)and today it is $18 000 (£35)in most garages.
We also help him by taking it in turns to sit in his car when he needs to queue for fuel (a person can queue for days to get hardly any fuel). But the impact of inflation tells me that it won’t be long before the whole country is walking a very long tiring walk to work every day - the whole country with the exception of the Zanu PF elite.
