HARARE – Mike is a young man bitter with everything going on in Zimbabwe, the hardships, the violence, the poverty, the shortages, the misrule. Life, he says, went bad early and hasn’t gotten better.
“I have no job, no prospects,” said Mike Moyo, 22. “I have no money to go to college, no money to even buy a loaf of bread for my mother because inflation is so high, and even when I do have a little money, there is no bread on the shelves. The grocery (stores) are empty. Two of my best friends are dying of AIDS and the government doesn’t care. The police dither while mobs of government supporters attack people for engaging their democratic rights. I cannot even afford the taxis but they (governing party officials) all drive in brand new Mercs (Mercedes Benz) and 4X4s. I have a girlfriend and I want to marry, but what can I offer her? I can’t even afford admission fees into Synergy Night Club. Now I ask you: Why should I be mad at the British?”
Pencil-thin and smooth-skinned, Mike was born five years after 1980, the year that this former British colony won its independence and elected as its leader a hero of the liberation movement, Robert Mugabe.
In his anger and alienation, Mike represents the generational divide that poses perhaps the greatest threat to topple Mugabe, the only leader this southern African country has ever known. Mugabe, who faces an angry electorate in March, campaigns for re-election by repeatedly calling the opposition MDC a puppet of the British and other foreign countries who want to re-colonize Zimbabwe. In speeches, he derides the MDC’s presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, as “a joke” a “stooge of the West.”
But in trying to invoke the old wounds of colonial rule and foreign domination, Mugabe, 83, is appealing to instincts that are no longer the norm here.
Of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people, half are over the age of 18. But nearly 60 percent of adults are younger than 30, with virtually no memory of what it was like to live in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known before independence. For them, and particularly the ones who live in urban centres like Harare and Bulawayo, the issue is no longer white imperialism or Mugabe’s triumph over it. Instead, their issues are the bread-and-butter concerns of daily life. – Chief Reporter
Post published in: News