Tendai Ruben Mbofana
This morning I came across a deeply revealing article by Engineer Jacob Kudzayi Mutisi that speaks directly to a painful truth every Zimbabwean faces daily.
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The severe, steady deterioration of product quality across our country.
Engineer Mutisi rightly highlights how Zimbabwe has become a dumping ground for inferior engineering equipment.
He points out that critical imports—from industrial motors to household cables and switches—are no longer built to last, but merely to be cheap enough to sell.
Crucially, he exposes regulatory failures by SAZ and border authorities, asking why post-market surveillance is nonexistent.
As he sharply observes, counting 500 imported motors at the border proves nothing about whether they will survive six months.
But as I reflected on his observations, I realized that what we are witnessing goes far beyond simple market failure or institutional negligence.
The systemic proliferation of substandard products in Zimbabwe is a deliberate, unwritten government plot to give citizens a false sense of living in a functional country.
The sheer scale of this quality collapse touches every corner of our daily lives.
Look at our electrical devices—motors, pumps, cables, switches, stoves, and fridges that burn out or break down long before their expected lifespan.
Consider our construction sector, where freshly built houses display cracking walls within months, and roofing tiles crumble under moderate wind and rain.
Look at our furniture, our car parts, and even our basic groceries.
The bread, milk, and butter on our shelves—unless imported—no longer bear the rich taste, substance, or quality we grew up with in the 1980s and 1990s.
Vehicle owners now routinely resort to refurbishing original, decades-old car parts like engine mountings rather than buying new replacements, knowing that brand-new store-bought parts will snap in no time.
I experienced this exact frustration with my private home borehole, which broke down less than a year after installation because the imported pump cable degraded within months.
This decay becomes even starker when contrasted with the past.
I am continuously amazed by items in my home stamped “Made in Rhodesia” that still function flawlessly after half a century.
My late mother’s stove, purchased in 1974 when I was just a year old, remained operational until a few years ago.
The door latches, locksets, plumbing fixtures, tiles, and structural brickwork of houses built in that era still hold strong today as if constructed yesterday.
Contrast that durability with my own recent experience of installing a new power socket that melted and charred the moment I plugged in a standard electric kettle to boil water.
Why have we transitioned from enduring craftsmanship to fragile junk?
I agree with Engineer Mutisi that Zimbabwe has become a dumping ground for inferior goods, and that institutions like the SAZ and border control frameworks are failing to protect consumers.
However, this matter goes deeper than regulatory incompetence.
It is structural.
It is political.
I have written extensively about Zimbabwe’s “feja-feja” economy—a fake, speculative economy born out of the catastrophic economic freefall of the early 2000s when basic commodities vanished overnight from supermarket shelves.
Faced with empty stores, widespread public outrage, and the immediate threat of a citizen uprising, the authorities needed a way to mask the collapse.
Their solution was as cunning as it was cruel: lower the bar entirely and turn Zimbabwe into an open dumping ground for cheap, low-grade imports.
Hardware stores, electrical shops, and supermarkets were suddenly refilled.
To the casual observer, the economy appeared to have recovered.
The government claimed victory, presenting fully stocked shelves as evidence of normalcy.
But it was a illusion.
By flooding the nation with dirt-cheap, substandard products, the state created a mirage of affordability.
It gave ordinary Zimbabweans—over 85 percent of whom live in multidimensional poverty—the false impression that they could still afford a middle-class lifestyle.
In a country where citizens reject the local currency and rely almost entirely on foreign currency, true market-standard goods would be completely out of reach for the majority.
If the government were to strictly enforce SAZ quality standards today and ban substandard imports, the facade would shatter instantly.
Millions of Zimbabweans would confront the reality of their deep impoverishment.
Overnight, ordinary families would find themselves unable to afford a single light switch, a bag of cement, a car repair, or a borehole.
The illusion of a functional life would disappear, exposing the sheer scale of economic failure.
This deliberate pacification strategy comes at a devastating cost to human life.
We are living amidst structural hazards.
Substandard car parts cause fatal brake failures on our roads.
Defective electrical cables and sockets spark devastating house fires.
Inferior cement and weak building materials leave families sleeping under structures at risk of collapse.
We saw the deadly risks of this false sense of security in the tragic loss of 97 lives when a ferry capsized in Kariba.
Relying on a four-decade-old vessel gave residents the facade of a normal life.
Yet, when hit by waves that a modern, more powerful ferry could easily handle, it capsized—with no adequate life jackets on board.
This is a fatal testament to the danger of living under the illusion of a functional country.
Across the nation, aging bridges and crumbling infrastructure receive official stamp-of-approval certificates despite being long overdue for replacement, silently waiting for the next catastrophe.
Zimbabweans are being forced to live in a national house of cards.
The state would rather we navigate a dangerous, fragile illusion of normalcy than face the true depth of our economic decline.
It is time to confront this reality head-on.
We are not building a modern, industrial economy.
We are surviving inside a carefully engineered facade designed to hide state failure at the expense of our safety, dignity, and future.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com