COVID-19 and Zimbabwe: When an Irresistible Force Met an Immovable Object

COVID-19 has come at a really bad time for Zimbabwe

Sooner or later, the day of reckoning was always going to catch up with the Zimbabwe government. 

Up until now, they have found a ready excuse for why they have failed on their mandate to feed every citizen in the country, why the formal economy has been practically decimated to the point that it is more costly to be formally employed than stay at home; why millions have been fleeing the country and risking their lives in foreign lands in search of greener pastures.

Sanctions. It has always been the fault of sanctions.

But the devastating spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed a few home truths about the quality of leaders in most governments of the world; Zimbabwe included. In the sea, they say a captain’s worth – or lack thereof – come to fore during the mightiest of storms; and so it has proved with a global pandemic that has crept on the world unawares. By the time it gets done, the Coronavirus pandemic will have shown the world all it needs know about the leaders it chose to steer its ship through the Coronavirus storm. China and the USA have been publicly trading insults over the origins of COVID-19; while the US president Donald Trump has been willing for a miraculous shortcut; touting unproven and risky drugs like Hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has dangerous side effects to the heart, as a panacea; and even soliloquizing that people try disinfectant and ultraviolet light into their bodies to cure themselves “in literally in one minute.”

In Europe the very existence of the European Union has been put under severe test, following bitter complains by Italy and Spain that wealthier individual EU governments abandoned them in their hour of greatest need. China; the source of the virus, locked down everything for nearly three months and seems to have now escaped with little scars on the Wuhan population.

So far Africa has been spared the full force of the explosion in Coronavirus cases that has devasted other continents, but that has not stopped its states from taking precautions. South Africa followed Rwanda to become the second country to implement lockdown measures, so the government could buy time to brace for the worst impact – identifying venues for emergency hospitals, acquiring hospital beds, ventilators, other medical supplies; and recruiting more doctors and health personnel, among other measures. There seemed to be a clear method to the South African government’s lockdown panic; because what they wanted was a clear path to returning their country to normality, at least on paper. Thus far, they are sticking to the originally laid down plans.

So; during those initial days of pandemonium, what did the Republic of Zimbabwe do? Like the rest of the world, president Emmerson Mnangagwa appeared on the country’s sole national television to announce a total lockdown on March 16, 2020.

“(The lockdown) allows government to mobilise resources and take necessary measures in dealing with the pandemic. With immediate effect and for a unified and coordinated effort, I have directed that our National Disaster Management Machinery extend its mandate and focus to deal with the pandemic, with the Ministry of Health and Child Care as the lead agency,” President Mnangagwa said… before breaching his own state of disaster and lockdown orders, to hop into a plane for Namibia where the inauguration of President Hage Geingob was taking place. He did not even bother with quarantining himself upon his return, like the other statesmen who attended the event did.

President Mnangagwa ordered a national lockdown in March

And a few days later, his government walked back the total lockdown, reopening vegetable markets all over the country following protests from farmers, who argued that they were essential service providers and had to supply the nation with food. In Zimbabwe’s urban centres, vegetable markets are muddy open spaces where farmers sell their produce from plastic stalls, carts and baskets. Social distancing in these places is impossible to enforce or maintain; and so it proved when the markets were opened. Even with a midday curfew, people flocked to the trade centres, where no testing was in place; neither were there plans to keep people a respectable distance from each other. Masks then were then were not even in the lexicon.

And there-in lay the first hurdle when it comes to effectively implementing full lockdown measures in the impoverished southern African country – how do you encourage people to stay indoors, when 60 percent of the population lives under extreme poverty and an estimated 90 percent works in the informal economy, where their income is solely dependent on them being physically in the streets? Nobody is born with the iconic dream of hawking from a dilapidated stall on a street corner in their adult life, yet Harare’s streets are always teeming with hawkers peddling airtime recharge cards, vegetables, fruits, preowned books, even basic groceries like cooking oil, sugar and maize meal. When the odds are good, the hawkers may grow bold and set wooden and plastic structures that the government will raze to the ground without warning.

They have a word for it in the country. Resilience. For 40 years, the people have been continually betrayed by the ZANU-PF government that they have found ways to live without it. They have literally turned given up hope on their government doing anything for the country it purports to serve, and have called upon their resilient human spirit to pull themselves from one government-induced disaster through another.

In a rare but tacit admission of how badly the ZANU-PF government has fatally botched the business of steering the country to social and economic greatness, President Mnangagwa acknowledged that the death of the formal economy and the resultant brain drain had returned to haunt the country and handicap its already feeble fight against Coronavirus.

“Zimbabwe’s strategy and response to the pandemic has taken into account our nation’s realities,” said president Mnangagwa. 

“These include:

• The illegal sanctions and the associated vulnerabilities and sensitivities.
• A large informal economy which will impact on the nature, scope and anticipated impact of our interventions.
• An economy which is highly import-dependent, a situation that has exposed us to the shocks of disruptions in the external supply chain as source countries-imposed lockdowns, and as international freight systems are crippled.
• A notable Diaspora population from the red zones many of whom are opting to come back home, thereby threatening to constitute a large number of imported cases in the country.”

The International Monetary Fund, in its 2018 report, confirmed Zimbabwe as the biggest shadow economy in Africa, and only second behind Bolivia in the world. Locking everything down in a country where staying indoors means a one-way ticket to starvation would be practically akin to passing a death sentence on the citizens. Faced with Hobson’s choice of barely affording the public transport to and from work, and having to watch their patients die for lack of medicine when they get there, doctors and nurses in public hospitals have protested by downing their tools.

“Earlier this month, the High Court ruled that the government must provide PPE for healthcare workers,” lamented one Harare doctor. “Yet many still do not have it. My wife and I are both doctors, we have two young daughters and sometimes you wonder whether going to work is even worth the risk. At this point it feels like Hobson’s choice – stay at home and die from starvation; or go to work, contract the virus and risk dying from it.”

Hello irresistible force. Meet immovable object.

The Lockdown has been met with resistance in Zimbabwe

Police officers on patrol to enforce the lockdown have been seen traveling as packs in lorries without protective masks on; dangerous dices for a country whose health delivery systems has degenerated to naught. Private healthcare is too expensive for most citizens, and public hospitals have been crippled by doctors and nurses striking over salaries and shortages of drugs and most other medical supplies. In Mbare, a densely populated suburb a few kilometres to the south of Harare, expecting women fled the death traps that had become the hospital maternity ward, settling for the care of a local traditional midwife to have their babies delivered.

But the alternative – to pretend like everything is normal, and let the people gamble with their lives on the streets with no protection – might just be too blatantly heartless, even for a government whose decorated history of ignoring its people’s needs is the sole reason why Zimbabwe finds itself mired in a sticky wicket today. As if to confirm this, a letter from the country’s finance minister – in which he pled with international financial institutions to come to Zimbabwe’s rescue because it was on the verge of collapse again, barely ten years after a coalition government pulled it from the deep end – was leaked to the media.

The leak was hardly surprising; anybody who has followed the history of Zimbabwe knows there is no love lost between the southern African state and international money lenders since the turn of the millennium. The lenders contended that Zimbabwe had done nothing to owner its debt, which meant no loans would be forthcoming to the country until it paid back what is owed. And they were not going to forgive the debt like they had done with the other indebted countries either, despite the fact that Zimbabwe is one of the poorest countries in the world. Its external debt stood at US$9,8billion in 2019, according to the IMF. For it to stand a chance of being considered for any more loans, it has to pay back US$687 million to the African Development Bank, US$1.4 billion to the World Bank and US$322 million to the European Investment Bank.  After that, there is the small matter of satisfying the conditions set by the USA’s Zimbabwe Economic Recovery Act (ZiDERA) of 2001, which make it illegal for institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and related lending institutions to extend budgetary support or debt relief to Zimbabwe.

Yet, perhaps mindful of the certain doom that would befall vulnerable economies should the global lenders stand by and watch them thrashing in murky waters as they vainly try to negotiate past a genuine disaster without outside help, the World Bank opened a special trust fund to help black-listed countries whose arrears are so red they cannot access regular funding. Zimbabwe will get $7million from that purse; $2million of which will go towards another disaster that the country has failed to deal with – Cyclone Idai, which destroyed homes near the country’s north-eastern border in March 2019.

“The bank's senior management has underlined the need for additional trust fund financing to ensure that Zimbabwe and the small group of other countries in arrears can receive support as part of our global effort to help countries respond to the COVID-19 crisis,” the bank said.

Aid. 

That’s what it always come to, when the Zimbabwe government is asked to stand up and help its people in times of crisis. International aid; that is what Zimbabwe called for when famine struck in 1992 and 1997. Aid is what they begged for when the cyclone disasters visited in 2000 and 2019; where some bridges and roads swept away have no hope of being replaced. With the COVID-19 grim reaper knocking on their door again, the government is taking it for granted that the rest of the world will again come to their rescue.

Yet, this global disaster has been a time for heroes to stand up; time for leaders to show up and assure everybody that they got this; that they will be their people to the bitter end, and be their vanguard at a time when they need their government the most. South Africa has increased its social grant payments to unemployed and vulnerable citizens for the projected duration of the disease. South Africa, where millions of Zimbabweans are living and working illegally; and hence cannot benefit from the respite offered by their host. They fled their homes where years of unmitigated autocracy, kakistocracy and kleptocracy has meant that the Zimbabwe government is ill-equipped for one, let alone two disasters in quick succession.

But two disasters in the blink of an eye is as real as it gets. In Chimanimani, Manicaland Province, the majority of the 270,000 people displaced by the raging cyclone in March last year are still shacking up in ageing tents in camps where they were moved with a promise to find them permanent new homes soon. Almost all of them are small holder subsistence farmers who lost loved ones – 300 dead while an estimated 300 more are still unaccounted for – and more; their land was part of the nearly 15million acres of arable land Cyclone Idai swept into rivers en route to the Indian Ocean. They are staring at hunger and malnutrition in the face – and winter is coming.

Now they have a new invisible enemy to contend with.

There was the brief respite recently when the Japanese Embassy extended a donation of US$9,000 as part of relief efforts to relocate the families from their current base, but such as been their lives, and the lives of Zimbabwean citizens – their government has either paid lip service or simply buried its face in the sand and relegated its national obligations to donors and well-wishers.  Like the rest of the country, the cyclone victims are going to have to go through the COVID-19 disaster with little from government besides President Mnangagwa’s speeches and more rhetoric from other government officials. In a recent interview, vice president Kembo Mohadi was asked what measures his government was taking to soften the blow of coronavirus on its people. His response?

“My view is that from hating ourselves with abundant recklessness, Covid-19 provides us with a turning point,” Mohadi said. “It provides us with the opportunity to retrace the stoic resilience of our people in the past. I am sure we will conquer the current crisis just as we have done in the past. The 16 years of the brutal war towards independence taught us that no matter how hard and difficult a situation might be, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, some of our comrades perished during the liberation struggle without an end in sight. I lost a brother at Mkushi in Zambia, Tongogara, Chitepo, Ziyapapa Moyo and many more comrades lost their lives, but Zimbabwe eventually became independent. Indeed, as observed by His Excellency, Covid-19 provides a turning point for Zimbabwe. We are beginning to witness a brand of leadership that takes pride in the critical synergies demonstrated by the public-private partnership.”

Words by the second man in charge. Resilience. War rhetoric; the ever-effective template to be used again and again whenever government is faced with a crisis that needs practical accountability. Not actual plans on what the government has been doing besides asking for donors to contribute. No plans whether they had projections on how many people could be affected by the virus. No word on the preparedness of clinics, hospitals and other health centres. No assurances that the healthcare workers on the frontlines would be adequately protected and supported. No word on what they were planning to do with the time borrowed from locking down the country. Nothing on how much of the economy was going to be affected by this, and whether there would be socio-economic relief plans to help workers whose lives have been upended by the sudden situation.

Begging your pardon, Mr Vice President, it is not a public-private partnership at all. The needs of hoi polloi are being attended to only by well-wishers within and outside the country while government keeps its powder dry for elections. For all its mineral, agricultural and academic wealth, Zimbabwe’s only brush with real governance has been through charitable individuals and organisations. Telecommunications mogul and Econet Wireless founder Strive Masiyiwa picked up the salary bill for doctors last November when government failed to pay them, and then fired them for protesting. Now, Masiyiwa, and other local business people have been on the forefront trying to find help for COVID-19 victims. Donors like Christian Care have been feeding millions in drought-stricken areas like Masvingo, Matebeleland and Midlands provinces for years and years. Elsewhere, desperate students are attaching their Ordinary and Advanced Level results slips on their social media SOS’s in the desperate hope that somebody will be sympathetic enough to sponsor their further education. Diaspora citizens like Freeman Chari are working round the clock looking for funds and material donations to help in the fight against COVID-19 – something that government is charged with doing.

Instead, according to Mohadi, the following is what happened with the help that Zimbabweans and international sympathisers took pains to collect and extend to Cyclone Idai survivors; and what has already befallen some aid to the current global crisis.

“Some donations ended being diverted from the intended victims of the cyclone.”

Indeed, they were. Three soldiers were arrested for theft when they tried to convert donations they were supposed to deliver to cyclone victims into personal property. They were not the first, and would not be the last. Even recently, government has been forced to write to its line ministries, calling them to order over reports that some of them were claiming allowances from funds donated for the fight against COVID-19.

Amid this flagrant dishonesty, government would have you believe that the pariah treatment they are getting from international financial institutions is because of politics; and the fact that Zimbabwe had dared redistribute land to the landless majority, who had waged a war for nearly 100 years to get their country back. For that, the country was slapped with; you can choose your word here – restrictive measures, travel restrictions, sanctions, smart sanctions, targeted sanctions – but the result was the same; the sun would have to rise from the west and set in the east, rivers would have to flow upstream; and hell would have to freeze over for Zimbabwe to borrow money from the IMF, the World bank and their related lending institutions again. Or they would have to return the land the people they had taken it from. Or change Harare’s administration.

Seeing as none of these things is likely to happen in the near future, the stalemate stays put. Which would be sadly short-sighted on the Zimbabwe government’s part, because of course, there were always going to be consequences once the government chose to restructure agriculture by redistributing land in the manner it did. People lost lives and limbs in the violence that characterised Zimbabwe’s efforts to right colonial wrongs in the early 2000s. You would think that a decent government would anticipate some reaction from the watching world, and work hard to prove that the route it has taken was necessary. On paper, empowering to the majority of previously disenfranchised citizens with the means of production to contribute to the national economy through agriculture was a noble idea. But twenty years after land reclamation, there is ample evidence to conclude that government might have overestimated the people’s penchant for using the prime land they inherited.

If Julius Nyerere told Mugabe that in Zimbabwe, he inherited the jewel of Africa, then the new farmers inherited the heart of that jewel when they received farmlands at the turn of the millennium. But it was at the hands of the new farmers that agriculture died in Zimbabwe; ushering in a period of rapid economic decline that was long in coming. In its 2019 review on government’s expenditure on agriculture, the World had a really deem view of the period that followed the fast track land reform programme in Zimbabwe.

“The dramatic changes to Zimbabwean production and the broader economy following the (fast track land reform programme), increasingly depleted sources of resilience,” the review noted. “Revenue had collapsed, weakened tenure security undermined access to credit, irrigation infrastructure had decayed, and there was greater vulnerability to drought.

Access to international capital dried up. Agricultural diversification fell, and the Strategic Grain Reserve was depleted.”

“In an attempt to arrest the decline, government embarked on massive spending on agriculture in 2004, a first round of quasi-fiscal activities (spending financed with RBZ credit) and which was a harbinger of the Command Agriculture scheme over a decade later. But this was just like flooding a fire with petrol.

“Hyperinflation in 2009 was a consequence of these activities, costing Zimbabwe its own currency and monetary policy through dollarization, leaving it more vulnerable to global monetary and terms-of-trade shocks. Following a brief period of optimism after dollarization, the external environment deteriorated, and banks experienced rising loan impairments, making them more reluctant to finance the private sector. When drought struck again in 2015, the economy had few buffers left to respond to this shock and government introduced the Command Agriculture program to shore up production and guarantee national food security.”

Which harks us back to the present; to finance Minister Mthuli Ncube’s SOS letter, whose underlying desperation should be an indictment on the way Harare has been running its affairs over the years, and a wakeup call for redirection, especially in these apocalyptic times of a virus reaping into the world population with its murderous scythe.

A history of Cock-Ups

Robert Mugabe led Zimbabwe for 37 years from 1980

“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped,” said the late former USA vice president Hubert Humphreys in 1977. International aid notwithstanding, a government that cares for its people would at least have a disaster response plan in place, to cushion its people during times when they are required to follow unusual procedures and regulations until a disaster passes.

But asking that would be too much of Zimbabwean leaders, whose iron-fisted reign has presided over so much suffering even their own citizens have questioned whether government knows the difference between good and bad governance. 40 years they have dragged the country from the very edge of economic prosperity back into the dungeons of despair; simply because they may not know what better governance is. Their ancestors lived under an absolute monarch system where the man with the strongest army got the reins of power; so their history is a steady retinue of kings – from the Mutapa, Rozvi and Ndebele kingdoms – ruling with an iron fist until their death or overthrow by a new powerful man. It was not a system that allowed for people to choose their leaders based on who they thought had the best ideas to get them forward and make their lives better.

Colonisation – which was what most of Zimbabwe’s leaders today were born into – was not a better example of democracy either, for it treated the black natives as brainless automatons who were only good at applying their physical energy and heat-resistant melanin into working the fields, the mines, the grunt work in factories and naught else.

To their credit, the current leaders recognised this blatant subjugation and racism for the injustice it was, and resumed the Chimurenga war that had wiped their forefathers at the onset of colonisation in the late 1800s. Sadly, the resultant historic election in March 1980 is where the good news ended; for it remains the only election where national power was transferred peacefully with no violent run-in or aftermath, whether on the national political platform or within the political parties themselves. For some reason, Zimbabwe’s political leaders have never known a good way to let people with new ideas take over without any retribution. It was March 1975 when Herbert Chitepo’s hold to power in ZANU was cut short by a parcel bomb he received in in the mailbox while steering the war effort in Zambia. His successor, Ndabaningi Sithole was left to lead a splintered party after an internal coup disposed him of leadership at Mgagao in Tanzania in 1977, and installed Robert Mugabe at the helm of Zanu PF.

Robert Mugabe. Well; everybody knows the story of Robert Mugabe, the guerrilla leader who took the first reins of an independent Zimbabwe in 1980, became a darling of the world for a time – before he held on and on and on and on, leading his country to ruin – until a soft coup relieved him of power in November 2017.

Mugabe’s tumultuous 37-year reign at the helm of Zimbabwe’s government oversaw the Gukurahundi massacres in the 80s, the massive retrenchments in the 1990s; the looting of the War Victims Compensation Fund before anybody even knew such fund existed; which then triggered unbudgeted pay-outs to aggrieved war veterans, and the resultant unprecedented tumbling of the Zimbabwe dollar in November 1997; the drastic land reform measures of the 2000s, which were rewarded by the sanctions that have become the government’s pantomime villain of what is wrong with the country today. It was Mugabe who presided over rolling power cuts that plunged the country into a dark cesspool, and the destruction of social services delivery. Dry water taps and years of uncollected refuse ushered in the cholera epidemic of 2008 that affected 100,000 people and left at least 5,000 dead. Government’s response was typical – call in the donors, and take no responsibility for the ruinous economic policies that got us here.

“Cholera is a calculated racist, terrorist attack on Zimbabwe by the unrepentant former colonial power which has enlisted support from its American and Western allies so that they invade the country,” said the then Information Minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, who died in 2015. "The cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe is a serious biological, chemical war force, a genocidal onslaught, on the people of Zimbabwe by the British. It’s a genocide of our people."

Well; those taps are still dry today, even as government calls for people to stay in their homes. Harareans cannot avoid close contact as they queue up to fetch water from boreholes sunk all over the city because both the government and the municipal authorities have failed to provide water into people’s homes.

Zimbabwe's cities have been experiencing water shortages for a long time

The year 2008 was especially annus horribilis for the Zimbabwean people, who paid dearly for daring to vote Mugabe out of power; the strongman being forced to concede an election for the first and only time in his life, to long-time rival, the late Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change. The resultant run-off that followed the March 2008 presidential election, which Mugabe lost, is only remembered for the sadistic violent campaign period that saw Tsvangirai pull out in protest. 2008 was also the year that saw Zimbabwe entering the Guinness Book of Records for the highest inflation rate in the world, which precipitated another mass exodus.

As Mugabe sought to entrench his stranglehold around power in his party and the state, party members like Margaret Dongo and Dzikamai Mavhaire were purged for publicly voicing their disillusionment in his leadership and calling for a change of guard. Because challenging the incumbent leadership is not the Zanu PF way; all borne out the myopia that a leader knows everything, and while his reign subsists, he is the best hope the country has, even after years of plummeting standards of living and blatant cancerous corruption. Even when good farms were parcelled out to party heavyweights and those with the best bootlicking skills and zero knowledge about the first rule of farming. Nothing was done to the people who looted proceeds from the Chiadzwa diamond fields, even after the president admitted that shady business in the mines had deprived his government of $15billion. The admission of rampant corruption from the president’s own mouth should have been enough for heads to be spiked, in a government that takes itself, its country and its people seriously.

But that country is not Zimbabwe.

That aversion to new ideas has the Zimbabwean political landscape into an animal kingdom where rules of the jungle prevail. Political elites will stop at nothing to keep power, including violence, murder and the sickening tendency for to pretend that everything is alright as long as leaders are personally profiting from a corrupt system; only to make noises and point fingers as soon as they are tossed by the wayside.

“Tell them that this man had used his position to enrich himself,” observed Odili, in Chinua Achebe’s classic novel, A Man of the People, “and they would ask you if you thought that a sensible man would spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune placed in his mouth.” For the political elite, a government position is once in a lifetime opportunity, not to serve the country and improve the lives of its citizens, but to right all personal wrongs in one’s life and suck as much from the juicy morsel as one can. Even the opposition did not open their mouths wide enough when they forced their feet through the door between 2009 and 2013 – yet that was the time when Zanu PF created parallel government structures that saw the government revenue collector, Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (ZIMRA) keeping a percentage of the revenue they were supposed to turn over to the finance ministry. The police service kept all the fines collected from road traffic offenders and other petty law breakers, and the finance ministry received no cent from diamond proceeds in Chiadzwa.

Yet there was only token dissent from the then Finance Minister Tendai Biti at his annual budget presentations There was no effort on the MDC’s party to publicly expose these follies when they had that golden chance. One would have imagined that they went in there with ideas on what they wanted to accomplish in the unity government. A plan to disrupt the archaic way that government operations were conducted, keep the rulers on their toes all the time, and expose them if they showed signs of neglecting the people. Sadly, all Zimbabwean citizens inherited at the death of the Government of National Unit were the usual allegations of cheating, rigging and abuse of office made previously by a retinue of party or government officials forced off the gravy train.

And now were here; where people have woken up to the reality that their new leaders fought the war so they could themselves become the new colonialists, who believed in communism and Gwara Regutsaruzhinji; only insofar as it was the masses who became communist while the elites looted state coffers and amassed personal wealth beyond measure.

The masses. The long-suffering Zimbabwean citizens who have since lost all hope in their government to the point of refusing to believe anything that comes out of its mouth. Terrified of the various ways in which their government has exerted physical and mental torture on its population, the people have looked for ways to tip-toe around the mine field called their own country and grabbed at opportunities to adapt to the maladministration vagaries thrown at them over the years. They have erected stalls to sell grocery wares by the roadside; they smuggle bales of second-hand clothing and shoes to sell at Mupedzanhamo market in Harare. They have hijacked foreign currency trading into the streets, where sometime, even government has followed. They have resorted to cross-border trading. And yes, they have made lemonade out of previously demeaning enterprises; Zimbabwe is a country where touting for commuters at a taxi rank is way more profitable than a proper teaching job.

But there comes a time when one can stretch resilience for so long.

“I am tired of being a resilient Zimbabwean, please,” lamented one citizen on Twitter, as she decried her government’s response to COVID-19. “I want a normal life. This toxic situation must fall.”

But the government has made no moved to protect its citizens by actively testing them for symptoms of the disease; instead, it has chosen to screen and test only people who report to major hospitals. Small wonder then, that they have only screened 20,000 people thus far, while by comparison, their neighbour South Africa, has tested at least 500,000.

Millions have fled the country in droves. At first it was people with trades to actually sell; nurses, doctors, computer geniuses and people with critical skills, who were immediately snapped up by the colonial motherland, the UK; South Africa, USA, Australia and Canada. But thanks to the horrors of 2008, it is now estimated that anything between 3million and 5million Zimbabweans have fled the country in search of a better life, a staggering number for a small country not in active war.

They have a popular saying on the streets in Zimbabwe; chikuru kufema (the only important thing is breathing) – but the COVID-19 disaster has again put the that resilient gene under a severe stress; the people need to be on the street to flaunt their resilience. In their houses, they are just sitting ducks waiting for disaster to happen, and one can only ignore a grumbling stomach for so long. The callous disregard with which their government has shown to human life has driven Zimbabweans to a point where they have lost respect for even their country.

Because if they are to pull through this latest tug of war between the irresistible force that is COVID-19 and the immovable object that is their government’s ineptitude, there is only one thing that the common people in Zimbabwe can do.

Pray.

Update: Obviously, we do not know how this pandemic is going to pan out in the long run. This update is being made in August 2021, more than almost two years since the rona upended our lives. The governance allegations made against the government of Zimbabwe and their past transgressions still stand. 

But we have to admit that the country seems to have handled the pandemic situation in the country admirably well. Although the lockdown measures have come with a lose of livelihoods for many unemployed citizens, the country's vaccination programme and pace has been one of the best in Africa.

Which is refreshingly different. And great.