Poverty breeds opposition

A visitor to Joseph Shonga's home can't help but notice the large fissure that zigzags from the roof of his mud hut, down the decaying wall, and into the ground. A few metres from the crumbling dwelling is a stinking metal and plastic shack that serves as the toilet for Shonga's family. These images of poverty and squalor are everywhere at Porta farm, a fast-expanding squatter camp 18 km southwest of Zimbabwe's capital, Harare. Shonga leans back in his battered chair, draws a long puff from his home-made cigar, and sums up the reasons why he and his family left the better environs of Harare's Warren Park "high density" suburb to come to Porta farm in 1999. "It is all about jobs. I lost my job when our company closed in September 1999. There was nowhere else where rentals were cheaper, except here at Porta farm," he told IRIN. Like the other shanties blighting the urban landscape, Porta farm is testimony to Zimbabwe's decline after a decade of failed economic policies. According to the UN Development Programme (UNDP), three-quarters of the country's 12.5 million people live in poverty. In 1990 that figure stood at 40 percent, just before President Robert Mugabe reluctantly embarked on Western-backed economic reforms. The government acknowledged in its latest poverty assessment survey that 45 percent of Zimbabweans are not able to meet "basic nutritional needs". Zimbabwe's early development success at independence has given way to despair. After the neglect of white minority rule, in its first decade in power, the government increased the number of primary schools by 90 percent to 4,549 in 1990. Several hundred clinics were built across the country, bringing the percentage of Zimbabweans with access to medical facilities to 87 percent, up from only 15 percent in 1980. By 1990, however, the economy was weighed down by debt and was in trouble. Most local analysts say Zimbabwe's economic reform programme, initiated in 1991, failed largely because of the government's persistent inability to meet agreed fiscal targets. Concerns over policy choices - including military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), extra budgetary awards to war veterans, and a chaotic land reform process - froze donor aid and investment. For the vulnerable in society, the reality - unseen in the poverty statistics - are of families being forced to survive on one meal a day, with little hope that things will improve. In the words of Shonga's neighbour at Porta farm, Simon Chadema, it has also meant: "Exerting super human labour on a daily basis but only to earn a sub-human living." At 4.00 a.m. each morning Chadema starts walking to Harare's Golden Quarry Road dump site, about 15 km from Porta farm. There he spends the day scavenging for plastic waste which he sells to a recycling company in town. He makes Zim $7,000 (US $127 at the official rate, US $27 on the blackmarket) or about one-third of what his family of six would need for their basic monthly survival, according to latest figures by the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe. "I believe it is the listlessness caused by hunger that has resulted in my son, who is doing grade six at Porta primary school, falling behind in his school work," Chadema told IRIN. "Poverty has reached alarming levels at a time when neither the economy has the capacity nor the government the resources to pay for proper social safety nets," University of Zimbabwe business studies professor Tony Hawkins explained. The government's Social Dimensions Fund (SDF), created to ease the conditions of people retrenched under structural adjustment, is now all but bankrupt. Social scientist Edwin Kaseke argues that, as economic failure turned into political opposition at the end of the 1990s, the authorities began to focus too much on "political survival". But, he told IRIN, the long term affects of poverty "are just too high. In the long run this has the potential to destabilise society itself and could even have a serious bearing on the political stability of the nation". Petros Shumba, a resident of Epworth - yet another shanty 30 km east of Harare - believes things have yet to get worse before they can improve. "If only everything could get worse, with more poverty and suffering then perhaps every Zimbabwean could awaken to the need to complete the change," Shumba told IRIN. "Completing the change" is a euphemism for voting for opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe's historic presidential election next year. Shumba moved to Epworth in 1999 because he could no longer afford the higher rentals in Harare's townships after a wire making company he worked for relocated to neighbouring Botswana, citing Zimbabwe's deteriorating economic climate. He now survives by selling firewood to other residents in the fast growing but un-electrified shantytown. Shumba, who blames his job loss on what he calls "President Mugabe's confrontational policies", said he wants to settle the score with the 77-year old president come election time early next year. The poll will be the first time in Mugabe's more than 20 years of rule that he faces a genuine political challenge. But it remains to be seen to what extent the electorate blames Mugabe and his party for the economic hardships, and whether poverty will translate into political change when Zimbabweans vote.