SA not a green pasture

housands who became security guards by default.
Dube (25), formerly a promising journalist with a weekly newspaper in Bulawayo, and a holder of a degree in Communications and Media Studies, was forced by his homeland’s collapsing economy to join the great trek southwards.
“When I quit my job I thought my qualifications would come in handy. But look where I am now. I am a security guard and I hide from friends. I have lost hope of rediscovering my career,” he said.
The former scribe’s tale is a now too familiar story.
Thousands of skilled Zimbabweans, including civil servants, have quit their professions back home and joined the exodus to South Africa and neighbouring countries.
Most of these have found SA not as green a pasture as those at home believe it to be.
The exodus has intensified with the present food shortages, forcing other professionals to turn to prostitution to survive.
Professionals who are ‘lucky’ to land employment are employed as security guards, as ‘daggaboys’ in the informal construction industry or on the lowest rung as waiters in the hospitality and catering industry.
Ephraim Moyo, a Zimbabwean who owns a construction subcontracting firm, brags that in the company’s four years in existence he has employed 10 former teachers.
One of them is Khosamu Ndebele, a one time senior master at Mboma Secondary School in rural Plumtree, 120 kilometres west of Bulawayo. He came to South Africa two years ago hoping to find a teaching job.
“This is not my type of job. I have to make sure my family does not go to bed on an empty stomach, and I am in a foreign country hence I should hang in there. Whining would not help either,” says the father of two, panting under the load of rubble in his wheelbarrow.