Tendai Ruben Mbofana
This morning, I was watching a news clip on the state-controlled broadcaster, ZBC, featuring a small group of women in rural Gutu who had been given goats as part of an “income-generating project.”
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These initiatives were lauded as genuine development—a transformative step toward improving their livelihoods.
In reality, these women were simply being handed a fragile lifeline to barely survive abject poverty, put basic food on the table, and perhaps keep their children in school for a little while longer.
What I found most unsettling about the entire scene was not just the meager nature of the aid, but the visual conformity: every single woman was donning the famous “ED scarf.”
As expected, they heaped praise on the president for providing these projects, hailing him as a listening, caring leader who leaves “no one and no place behind” on the path to economic growth.
To them, receiving the means to survive another day was spun as proof that the country is on track to achieve upper-middle-income status in just four years’ time.
My heart sank.
This is how the people of Zimbabwe are being duped into celebrating their own impoverishment.
The broadcast was deeply telling.
The fact that basic survival mechanisms must be hand-delivered to specific individuals says everything about the true state of Zimbabwe’s economy.
It announces to us all that the system is profoundly dysfunctional.
What kind of economy requires citizens, plunged into unimaginable hardship, to openly pledge support to the head of state just to receive a basic lifeline?
Does this not prove that real economic opportunities do not exist for the average person, forcing citizens to rely on state-sanctioned hand-outs just to feed their families and pay school fees?
In a functional, truly developing economy, opportunities for growth are not handed out like royal favors by the president.
They exist in the system itself.
They are everywhere.
A citizen should never need to sing the praises of the head of state or wrap themselves in a partisan scarf to escape grinding poverty.
When many of us were growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, our parents were able to uplift themselves and provide decent livelihoods for their families through honest work.
They did not need to attend ruling party meetings to put us through school.
They did not need to chant slogans to secure a home.
They certainly did not have to wear t-shirts emblazoned with the president’s face to afford the basics of life.
Opportunities were available to anyone willing to work hard.
That is the classic definition of a developing economy: an environment where effort translates directly into reward.
Bus drivers, builders, nurses, teachers, and small traders built dignified lives simply through honest labor.
They never felt compelled to hero-worship political leaders to secure their families’ futures, nor did they view their standard of living as an act of personal benevolence from the presidency.
They did not have to, because the economy actually worked.
Today, that dignity has been systematically stripped away and replaced with a culture of patronage.
When survival is tied directly to political compliance, it is not economic development—it is coercion disguised as charity.
A thriving nation builds institutions, creates open markets, fosters innovation, and enforces the rule of law so that its citizens can thrive independently.
When a nation instead reduces its economic strategy to distributing goats, chicken feed, or small-scale hand-outs in exchange for visible loyalty, it is admitting defeat.
It reveals a system incapable of generating real, sustainable wealth.
If a Zimbabwean must wear a political scarf to secure a livelihood, then the country is not developing.
It is regressing into deep feudal dependency.
Real progress is measured by how freely a citizen can succeed without owing their daily bread to the ruling elite.
Until hard work alone is enough to guarantee a decent life in Zimbabwe, any claim of national development remains nothing more than a hollow political illusion.
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