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Africa: Zim Inflation Sparks Exodus of Foreign Students
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Mmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone)
COLUMN
26 March 2008
Posted to the web 27 March 2008
Mwenge Ng'ona
Gaborone
As one of the few Zambian children whose parents were working in Botswana but sent us to some of the best schools in Zimbabwe, I find the collapsed economy and political stalemate there very distressing.
It makes former students in Zimbabwe weep because they were forced to abandon their studies because of rocketing inflation.
When I think of Zimbabwe, as most visitors do, the first thing that comes to mind is the Victoria Falls.
The falls are an eye-opener to what else lies inside the borders of that beautiful Southern African nation. Filled with many wonderful tourist sites and mineral deposits of rare metals such as gold and platinum, it sounds almost too good to be true.
With a strong currency and booming economy, owing much to the then very strong mining and tourism industries, Zimbabwe was the place to be in its glory days.
I remember buying a bar of chocolate at ZW$21 in 1999. That is impossible today. Bread alone will cost you around ZW$2.5million! A bottle of coke would cost you, in the same year, something well below ZW$10. Those days are sadly gone, probably forever.
I went back to Zimbabwe in 2003, this time to pursue my high school education there from Botswana. So much had changed that I actually felt lost. Moving with foreign currency in Zimbabwe was risky business. I remember our car being searched thoroughly by the Zimbabwean police around 1 am for any foreign currency. Possession of any foreign currency was met with 'repossession'.
The searching was so thorough that they even opened the indicator light covers, looked under car seats and every visible storage compartment in the vehicle. The officers used abusive language and even threatened physical attacks for any resistance. Compliance was our only salvation.
Mobility was quite difficult with the widespread fuel shortages. Queues of vehicles stretched for kilometres as motorists waited their turn to refuel at the petrol stations. Things were no longer the same in Zimbabwe. The sanctions imposed by the West had ravaged the economy and the people were feeling the bite. A bar of chocolate no longer cost ZW$21 but ZW$1000. A bottle of coke went for a whooping ZW$2000. That was the beginning of sorrow for the man in the street. Along with the rising cost of living came the decline of a decent lifestyle led by many Zimbabweans.
They could no longer afford sending their children to schools, they no longer enjoyed three balanced meals a day, travel became a costly venture and many small businesses collapsed due to the severe scarcity of supplies, rendering thousands jobless.
Schools hiked their fees, sometimes, four times in a single term. I remember my school closed twice within a term to enable students to go home and collect more money because the school fees had been raised. Little learning was done that term.
I remember waking up one morning and attending a school assembly where we were told that the previous night inflation had risen by a staggering 300 percent. Prices around town that day reflected the new regime. Whatever cash one had the previous day and carried over into that day was 300 percent weaker. That was very demoralising indeed.
It seemed as though the whole world was curving in as things continued to worsen with no visible remedy in sight. To make ends meet some people adopted new businesse ventures, including running underground foreign cash exchange services, hoarding fuel in their homes and selling it to desperate motorists, prostitution and even violence became the order of the day.
Meanwhile, things worsened at my school. The diet changed drastically and suddenly we no longer had bread for breakfast and white maize meal was said to be out of stock in the Midlands Province by the Grain Management Board; so we had to make do with the yellow maize meal donated by the United States (US) government.
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By the time December 2003 came, it was clear that as foreign students it would be very risky to stay on in a country going through such hard times. After carefully assessing the political and economical environment, most of our parents took us out of Zimbabwe that December.
When I sit to think of how many other foreign families decided to withdraw their children from Zimbabwe, I am overwhelmed by the reality that so many left that country. That unprecedented exodus must have contributed to the destabilisation of the economy as it took away essential revenue and foreign exchange from the country. But my sufferings and those of my fellow students from Botswana and other countries in SADC, is nothing compared with the sufferings of our brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe. Shelves are empty and millions are jobless and destitute. The nation is plagued with acute food shortages.
Sanctions imposed on President Robert Mugabe and his regime by the West have definitely brought Zimbabwe to its knees, but it is not the government that is suffering. It is the Zimbabweans on the street, and the foreign students like some of us who are feeling the pinch.
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| Copyright © 2008 Mmegi/The Reporter. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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