We’re still blogging at Sky News - Monday entry
Sokwanele has been asked to continue blogging 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’
I occasionally help a friend by collecting her daughter from school. I wait a little way from the gates, and chat to “Sally”, a woman who has a roadside shop selling items that she hopes parents fetching their children at the school might buy at the last minute.
Her stall is nothing more than a cardboard box turned upside down. Her shop stock changes from day to day. On Friday, she had a small bottle of cooking oil, a bar of soap, and about four or five bright red tomatoes neatly piled in a pyramid.
Sally told me that the oil was bought from a “cross border trader” who travels to Botswana regularly to buy groceries for re-sale back in Zimbabwe.
Cross border trading is a new Zimbabwean occupation, one that attracts more and more people as fast as our economy collapses. These traders play an important role in keeping our economy afloat; they function as wholesalers to informal retailers like the lovely Sally, and source required scarce goods for bigger businesses.
For example, the office where I work buys all our ink cartridges from a crossborder trader.
The crossborder trader has to buy her Botswana currency (Pula) on the black-market, because there is no foreign currency available through normal channels. The trader catches a bus through to Francistown in Botswana - sometimes queuing for hours and hours at the border post - and buys as many groceries as her duty free allowance will allow her to bring back into Zimbabwe.
Cooking oil sells well, and so does soap and sugar. Toilet paper is a good seller too: the traders buy no-name brands in bulk, to be sold on Zimbabwe’s streets a single roll at a time.
Once back in Zimbabwe, the crossborder trader faces the big challenge of working out how much to ask people like Sally to pay for the precious groceries. She has to be sure that she charges enough Zimbabwe dollars to be able to trade the dollars back into Pula at black-market rates - very difficult to judge because the black-market rates change so quickly and unpredictably. At 1,800% inflation, even the best economist would struggle to calculate how much a Pula would cost in a week’s time!
I asked Sally why she did not become a crossborder trader instead of sitting with a small box every day. She explained that it was a very difficult life.
Every now and then the brutal Zimbabwean police will embark on a foreign currency crackdown on our local market places, and arrest traders they think might have foreign currency.
The police demand proof from the traders that they bought their currency ‘legally’. No one can produce proof like this, so the police seize and keep all the foreign currency they find, and all the items already bought by the traders, saying they were illegally bought.
For many traders, a crackdown like this is the end of any means of earning an income.
But the thing that scared her the most was the risk that the Botswana police might think she was an illegal refugee, someone sneaking across the border from Zimbabwe to seek illegal employment in Botswana.
So many Zimbabwean people are driven by desperation to defy border patrols and creep across into next-door countries.
Sally told me used to have larger stall in a market where she had mostly sold vegetables. She lost everything during Operation Murambatsvina (Mugabe’s ‘Operation Clear out Trash’) two years ago.
The police, who attacked the stallholders with batons, trashed her market stall and everything she was selling. She was terrified by the experience.
She prefers her small box; she says that now, if she thinks the police are coming, she simply turns the box upside down, packs everything inside it and then puts it on her head and walks away.
I hear stories like these and I am so grateful for my job. I struggle to live in this country, but I don’t struggle as much as Sally and the people she was telling me about.
Sally’s story made it very clear to me that the ZCTU stayaway planned for this week is not only about better conditions for employed people - less than 20% of the people in our country are employed.
This stayaway is about giving the other 80% of Zimbabweans a chance for a stable way to earn a living and for our crossborder traders to have a chance at a less dangerous way to earn a living.
It doesn’t matter if we are rich or poor, formally employed or not; we really are all in this together.
* Sally is not her real name
April 3rd, 2007 20:08
With 80% unemployment and 1700+%inflation how are people surviving?It must be a real struggle from day to day.
April 3rd, 2007 20:27
People aren’t surviving Stephen. That’s the real nightmare for us. Life expectancy in our country is 34 years for women and 37 for men. A lot of that has to do high HIV/AIDS statistics, but these are made much worse by very little nutritional support (no food available or too expensive to buy) and a destroyed health care system. Inflation and economic mismanagement is literally taking people in Zimbabwe to an early grave.
Our life expectancy is the lowest in the world.