oking oil for Z$10,000, which is equal to anything from US$5 to US$50 depending on which exchange rate you use.
The minimum wage for a labourer is about Z$15,000 a month, the same price as 5kgs of imported margarine in the nearby supermarket. Local margarine is no longer available. So is cooking oil following the decision by Olivine Industries to stop production due to shortages of soyabean and cotton seed. So much for land reform. We whisper arrangements. I will meet him behind the garage across the road in Southerton in 45 minutes. At the appointed time, I walk along a sanitary lane at the back of the garage, and wait.
Phew! These deals take time. Two youths emerge from under a canvas covering the back of a derelict pick-up and hiss at me. I lift my hand and start walking towards them. They hand me two 5litre containers of cooking oil. The containers are wrapped in loose black plastic bags to disguise. I place the cooking oil on the ground and dig into about three inches of Z$1,000 bearer cheques, pick out 10 of the notes, and the transaction is over. The youths disappear back under the tarpaulin of the pick-up, and I have my cooking oil, enough to last me after New Year.
But more shopping has to be done. Sugar. That is usually available from youths at a shopping centre further west. As they see me and my friend’s old car roaring round the corner, they smile and disappear for a couple of minutes, re-emerging with two 2kgs packs of sugar in a cardboard box.
“Sorry blaz, the price has gone up to Z$1,200.”
Next on my list is milk. Too late – it’s 9.30am and all the milk in the supermarkets was sold an hour earlier. The bread queues at bakeries are too formidable to join. Many of the bakeries are next door to coffee shops, yet sipping an espresso while watching people queue for bread is too uncomfortable.
Then a shocker. We notice that my friend’s skorokoro(old car) petrol gauge is near empty. We had a week of no fuel queues, and like summer, I thought it would go on for ever. There is not enough in the tank to even get to “Mukoma vekuFilling Station”. Mukoma vekuFilling Station is a friendly garage owner, and is essential for those who cannot face queuing – or rather can afford not to. We will have to phone 10 minutes ahead before getting there – which is difficult as mobile phones hardly work and are congested.
Calling ahead is necessary so that the garage owner can tell in advance if the coast is clear, so that he can arrange for us to jump the queue without being lynched by other angry drivers who slept in the queue. We hop into a kombi, drive 10 kilometres to mukoma vekuFilling Station and fill up a jerry can at the friendly garage, then travel back to our skorokoro where we suck a tube and siphon all the petrol into the car.
On the way back from the hunt for cooking oil, sugar and milk, we pass children begging at traffic lights. There are six traffic lights to get through before home, and at each one we give them sugar, a teaspoonful wrapped in paper, taken from coffee shops. There is no point in giving them money, as most people cannot afford to give enough on a regular basis to buy even a banana, and sugar is a treat.
Along Enterprise Road, four-wheel-drive vehicles, including the famous Hummers, Prados and X5s speed to the suburbs, driven by rich members of the black middle class, girls with hair expensively plaited, ears fixed to cell phones. On the side of the uneven streets, the dwindling working class trudge home, unable to afford even a bus ticket. Out in the desolate townships and shanty towns it’s worse.
A woman bit the lip off another who jumped a queue last week in Mbare. On a hot afternoon recently fists flew at a bread queue on the western outskirts of town. At a township east of Harare on the same day there was a queue for cheap maize meal distributed by a local ruling party officials in Seke. He was selling it to people with a ruling party card that pre-dated the disputed rural district council elections, which was won by Zanu (PF). Opposition youths, who far outnumbered the ruling party shoppers, were grinning broadly. They claimed to have “redistributed” some of the food to those who had been turned away.
Last week, the World Food Programme issued a sudden warning about the deteriorating food situation in Zimbabwe at the same time announcing it was scaling back its operation in Zimbabwe due to donor fatigue. Yet for those whose pockets are stuffed with a few inches of Z$10,000 bearer cheques, everything can still be all right in Harare.
Post published in: News