Public transport – the luxury we can’t afford

By late June, fuel was hard to find, and what was available on the black market sold for between Z$500,000 and Z$700,000 per litre.

These fuel price increases worsen the transport crisis, which now means that many people walk long distances to and from work – if they have work, that is, because in Zimbabwe’s ever-collapsing economy the unemployment rate stands at some 80 per cent.

What that means in the Monopoly money world of Zimbabwe – where the government can no longer print money fast enough to keep pace with inflation, and where all prices will have increased by the time this article is published – is that your average blue-collar worker needs at least $340,000 for transport to and from work each day. This is in addition to sharp rises in the price of other basic needs such as bread, which saw the price of a single loaf going up to $130,000 from $85,000 in a single week.

And ordinary people can now forget about travelling by bus the 440 kilometres between Harare and Bulawayo. It is now a million dollar one-way ride, and rising.

Back in the 1970s, teenager Shorai Mtizwa used to walk distances of 10 to 20 km to and from school and her rural home. When she moved to Harare in 1982, two years after independence, she thought the days of those long rural treks were over.

IWPR caught up with Shorai, now 45 and a mother of four, as she walked fast from her workplace in Harare’s Graniteside industrial area to the city centre, where she was rushing to catch what has been christened a “freedom train” by local government minister Ignatius Chombo.

So-called freedom trains were launched just before the last presidential election in 2002, in an attempt to woo city residents at a time when transport woes were among the reasons why people had voted in earlier parliamentary elections for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC.

Subsidised fares on the freedom trains are ridiculously low, and follow only the old colonial-era National Railways routes. No new lines have been built and whole suburbs and industrial areas are way beyond the reach of the railways.

So, while Shorai can cover part of her daily journey by train, she cannot afford the minibus fares to cover the other 20 km between her home in Mufakose and her workplace.

“I earn around $10 million a month and from that I have to buy food for my family, pay exorbitant water bills, now averaging $2.5 million a month, and pay rent,” she said. “I have an outstanding water bill of $8 million right now. My husband is a security guard and he brings home $5 million. So tell me what choice do I have other than to walk?”
Government ministers are spared the indignities of the freedom trains, minibuses or long walks. With the economy in freefall, they travel in top of the range Mercedes, the motor brand of choice of Africa’s ruling elite. In May this year, Mugabe bought more than 100 Mercedes Benzes, Toyota Land cruisers and Prados for loyalist parliamentarians.
A month earlier, Mugabe’s own new five-tonne, 7.3 litre Mercedes Benz S600 – built in Germany at a cost of more than 600,000 euro and specially armoured to withstand rocket and grenade attack – arrived on a truck from the South African port of Durban.

The vehicle was ordered before the European Union instituted sanctions prohibiting this sort of trade with Mugabe and his cabinet.

The new Mercedes, with tinted windows, features at the centre of Mugabe’s huge motorcade of trucks and sports utility vehicles packed with heavily armed soldiers, ambulances and sedans carrying plainclothes Central Intelligence Organisation agents.

When the convoy sweeps down a road in Harare or anywhere else in the country, all other vehicles are forced to pull to the side and stop. It is a crime to make rude gestures or comments as the convoy passes by. – IWPR