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Those who have not been exposed to Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation may find it difficult to comprehend the intensity of the suffering it causes to the country’s citizens. What difference does it make to people’s everyday lives? To say that inflation has become a matter of life and death for many, may sound like an exaggeration to readers outside Zimbabwe. But that is the tragic reality as this real life story illustrates. Inflation is a direct cause of incredible stress and hardship in many Zimbabwean lives.
The names in this article have been changed to protect the identity of our interviewee and people around him, but all the other details are exactly as provided to our reporter.
Mr Bernard Keswa is 85 years of age. The National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) employed Mr Keswa for most of his working life. His pension from the NRZ amounts to a paltry 33,000 Zimbabwe dollars plus some loose change. This income will not even buy him the lowest denomination postage stamp available in Zimbabwe.
To get the measure of this sum, consider that a pound sterling now equates to something in excess of a million Zimbabwe dollars. In other words our 85-year-old pensioner receives the equivalent of a tiny fraction of one pound a month to live on. Of course it is ludicrous. In fact it is an insult to Mr Keswa, a man who has worked hard all his life, deprived now of a dignified old age. 33,000 Zimbabwe dollars will not even provide a single one-way ride into town in an emergency taxi (public transport). (At the time of speaking to Mr Keswa an emergency taxi trip cost 150,000 dollars, but the fare increases almost daily).
The old Rhodesian Railways (precursor to the NRZ) was one of the country’s major employers and a rock-solid financial institution under colonial rule. It provided financial security to employees and pensioners alike and was much respected for that. But uncontrolled inflation and gross mismanagement of the national economy over nearly a decade have eroded pensions (and not just of railway employees) to the point at which they are now effectively worthless. Mr Keswa is a tragic example of this trend: he is only one among hundreds of thousands. And remember, there is no social security network in Zimbabwe to provide even the basics like food, shelter, medicine, water and electricity.
Out of his paltry 33,000 Zimbabwe dollars, Mr Bernard Keswa is expected to feed, educate, clothe, and accommodate his four grand-children (Beatrice[15], Brian[11], Belinda[8] and Beater[5] ) whose parents died of AIDS in 2005. Imagine the stress that comes with the responsibility of feeding four vulnerable children on an income that will not buy a postage stamp.
As a diabetic, Mr Keswa also has to provide himself with a special diet. This is an extremely difficult task: due to the current food shortages in Zimbabwe Mr Keswa can no longer even afford a simple ordinary breakfast. It is impossible for him to find food like the brown rice that forms part of a special diet for diabetics, and even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to afford to buy it.
Mr Keswa said that finding flour or bread is like looking for snowballs in the Sahara. To eke out his meager supplies during the times he has no alternative sources of food or support, Mr Keswa mixes small amounts of mealie-meal, sugar and water into a stiff paste. He then rolls the paste into small balls and boils them in water. The cooked product is called “maqhebelengwana”, and is usually eaten accompanied by a cup of tea, but Mr Keswa says it has been a long time since he has had tealeaves and sugar in his cupboard.
Mr Keswa owns a four-roomed house in Luveve, a high-density suburb on the western side of Bulawayo. He bought the house during the “good old days” when the NRZ floated a rent-to-buy scheme for its workers. Now two rooms leased to a well-mannered couple provide Mr Keswa with a modest monthly rental that does no more than pay for electricity, water and city council rates. But at least he has a roof over his head: many poverty-stricken pensioners had their fragile homes destroyed by the government during Operation Murambatsvina. Mr Keswa, as hard as it may be to believe it, is lucky.
The reality is that the Roman Catholic Church is Mr Keswa’s salvation.
Through its philanthropic programme called the St Vincent’s Society for the Very Poor [SVP], a society that looks after the most needy in the community, Mr Keswa receives regular handouts of sugar beans and mealie meal. Though the handouts arrive with long intervals between them (these were never intended to provide more than a food supplement for the very poor) they go a long way towards keeping extreme hunger from his door.
The SVP has, until recently when certain members of the Luveve Community took over, also been providing the funds to educate Mr Keswa’s four grand-children. And the church has managed to provide him with clothes to wear for a number of years.
Help Age Zimbabwe, a non-governmental organisation that assists the elderly, has given Mr Keswa supplements of sorghum, grain and bulgar. These have been an essential part of his diabetic diet.
Mr Keswa’s story highlights the charitable spirit of the community he lives in because, with their help, he has over the past five years been able to find ways of coping with his special dietary requirements despite the extreme difficulties presented by hyper-inflation and poverty.
Mr Keswa makes sadza made from ground sorghum (mhunga). This mhunga, or milo as it is also called, is brown in colour and is a delicacy for Shona traditionalists. (It is served in wooden utensils during holy ceremonies (zvirango zvinoera)). Mhunga’s metabolisable energy content is about 5-10% lower than maize, but it has a protein content that is 10-12% higher.
Mr Kaswa takes an extra precaution of his own: including garlic onion in vegetables and other dishes is now an ingrained habit because, as he says,
“It keeps me away from Dr Gloria’s vital medical check ups. It also saves me the humiliation of having to kneel down before my benefactors begging for money to pay for Dr Gloria’s check ups”.
The responsibility Mr Keswa has for his four young grandchildren means that he is keenly aware that he has to do all he can to stay healthy. Without him, they become mere numbers in the nation’s growing AIDS-orphan statistics.
As if all this was not enough, Mr Keswa also has heart problems, resulting in the occasional serious heart murmur. For someone living altogether on charity and, as the church would say, by the grace of God, it is nothing short of a miracle that to date he has managed to buy the prescribed drugs which come at a cost of 7.4 million Zimbabwean dollars. (Remember, his railway pension is 33,000 dollars.)
In April this year 85-year-old Mr Keswa suffered a mild stroke that badly affected his speech and left his mouth looking twisted. All of his dining, bedroom and lounge furniture was sold to pay the doctor’s consultation fees, hospital bedding, medicine and physiotherapy costs.
Within inflation-ravaged Zimbabwe Mr Keswa is one of the fortunate few whom friends, the church and other charitable bodies have kept alive. The government which has created the conditions leading to his sorry predicament, provides him with nothing whatsoever for his old age.
Were there even a semblance of democracy and free choice in Zimbabwe, it goes without saying that this government would have been shown the door many, many years ago.
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