More than two years after the establishment of the inclusive government, the plight of the 142,350 pensioners on the state’s payroll has been brought into sharp focus by the foreign currency denominated payment system.
The country’s social safety body, the National Social Security Authority, insists a monthly $25 payment is adequate – but pensioners are struggling to survive.
Sekuru Munemo, 67, said financial help for pensioners was welcome but more was needed.
"They should raise it maybe to $100," he said.
Prior to the introduction of the forex denominated system, pensioners had been completely neglected, getting a monthly allowance in Zimbabwe dollars that had been rapidly eroded by inflation and not worth the trip to the Post Office.
NSSA general manager James Matiza defended the payments.
“If anybody retires today we will pay $25 per month,” he said. “We have carried out investigations and found out that this money will be enough to buy their basics.”
However, the government's own Central Statistical Office said a family of six needs at least $554 per month merely to subsist. This is almost 20-times more than the government allowance to pensioners.
Critics say NSSA has deviated from its core mandate. Recently it was sucked into the Rennaisance Bank saga where it was reportedly mulling bailing out a distressed bank that had been fleeced by its shareholders.
The plight of pensioners in Zimbabwe is more defined among the elderly whites. Robbed of most of their pensions by government policy, and too proud to seek help, the estimated 2,000 white pensioners still in the country are the professionals and administrators who migrated here, mostly from Britain and South Africa, to escape the Depression of the 1930s and the bleakness of life after the Second World War. They thrived in a burgeoning economy. But now they have been reduced to beggars.
Sharon, 79, the widow of a former permanent secretary in the Rhodesian administration who worked as a secretary in the Ministry of Education in the late 70s, refused to give her full name. "I don't want anyone to think I need help," she said.
She lives in a decrepit downtown Harare flat with her 17-year-old grandson who suffers from down syndrome. She says the $25 is "peanuts" – not worth the trip to collect it from the Main Post Office.
A "Memory Box" is almost all that is left of her heirlooms. The rest were sold last year with the furniture, television and radio to get money to live by. She survives on a hamper of food and other basic commodities delivered monthly by a charity.
"I hate to impose on people," she said.
Post published in: News