A veteran's tale

Arthur Chadzingwa is a 57-year-old veteran of Zimbabwe's war of liberation against white settler rule. He was a leader of the Zimbabwe People's African Union (ZAPU) youth wing when it was formed in 1960, and was jailed for treason in the 1970s. He was a personal advisor to the late Joshua Nkomo, the founder of ZAPU, who served as vice-president of Zimbabwe from 1987 until his death in 1999. Chadzingwa served in ambassadorial postings from independence in 1980, but in 2000 lost his influential job as the ruling ZANU-PF party's national director. He has not been in permanent employment since. "It is unfortunate that I lost a stable source of income when things were beginning to deteriorate for most people. When I look back, I find it funny that I have to depend on handouts from well-wishers inside and outside the country. Even the mobile phone I am using was given to me by a friend. I feel guilty that I have not been able to send anything to my daughter since I lost my job," he tells IRIN. Chadzingwa is a divorcee, and his 12-year-old daughter lives with her mother in her home country, Lesotho. He relies on odd jobs he occasionally gets from NGOs that require research assistants, but they are becoming scarcer. Whenever he can, he sends some groceries to his rural home in Zimunya, from where he in turn obtains maize-meal for the staple food, "sadza". He also receives a small pension paid out to former freedom fighters. "Our problem is economic and not political, but of course bad economics makes bad politics. The economic situation is really bad and I never thought that things would go as far as this. We have been reduced to hand-to-mouth cases, concerned only with basics, which are difficult to obtain," he says. "In the 1980s and 1990s, people lived generally comfortably. There was no culture of willy-nilly raising prices of basic commodities then." Chadzingwa mostly blames Western governments, particularly Britain and the United States, for the economic downturn. He believes they are punishing Zimbabwe for the government's land reform programme, which since 2000 has compulsorily acquired land from white commercial farmers for distribution to landless Zimbabweans. "It is payback time for the whites' kith and kin in the West. They have deliberately caused shortages in order to fan anger and civil unrest in this country, so that [President Robert] Mugabe can be removed," he alleges. Chadzingwa says some of the country's problems are the downstream effects of economic reforms imposed on the government by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank during the 1990s. However, he feels some of the blame should also go to unscrupulous Zimbabweans who have taken advantage of the political and economic crisis to make fast money on the burgeoning black market, and corrupt and inefficient government and parastatal officials. A beneficiary of the land reform programme himself, Chadzingwa says agricultural reforms are the basis of Zimbabwe's economic future, and the government took too long to recognise this - hence the "chaotic" land reform exercise. "The government finally saw the light by empowering people through the land. It is now the time to produce from the land. I see us making progress through farming," he predicts. SEE ALSO: ZIMBABWE: A nurse's tale ZIMBABWE: A policeman's tale ZIMBABWE: A businessman's tale ZIMBABWE: A teacher's tale ZIMBABWE: Special Report on rising poverty