IT is true that desperate times call for desperate measures. At the height of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis, families resorted to destructive innovation for survival.
Typical families saw mothers travelling to South Africa and Botswana on ramshackle vehicles to trade their wares as street vendors.
On arrival at Beitbridge or Plumtree border posts, the women would use all manner of imagination to expedite the immigration and customs clearance process. Once in the land flowing not only with milk and honey, but also with debauchery, the women set about selling their wares.
Of course, selling doilies, dried vegetables and wild fruits to arrogant foreigners is no enviable task. Most of the women found it easier to supplement their income by taking advantage of the prevailing Sodom and Gomorrah environment.
They made their bodies available for the pleasure of lecherous men for a fee.
They would return home with bundles of money and oodles of sexually transmitted illnesses for the pleasure of the family and to the detriment of their husbands’ and their own health.
No wonder why disease and pestilence decimated families.
The unsafe and unregulated cross-border trading opened survival avenues for the people of Zimbabwe. Families could survive even though in loose cohesion. The low intensity cross-border buying and selling temporarily uplifted the people from debasement.
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Like a contagion, everyone became involved selling something to someone. This unsustainable method of trading was slightly changed by the introduction of the United States dollar as official tender. The US dollar turned Zimbabwe into one big street teaming with aggressive street vendors selling imported goods.
US dollar-sniffing foreigners started bringing in fancy trinkets and gadgets and encouraged Zimbabweans to become internal petty traders. Unfortunately, most of the money generated through street vending gets neatly stacked in briefcases and exported out of Zimbabwe; hence the liquidity crisis.
Zimbabwe’s cashflow problems and economic stagnation provide the main ingredients for a disastrous civil strife.
The government finds itself in an untenable position as it struggles to pay its workers. Zimbabwean civil servants are subjected to persistent moneyless pay days due to cashflow problems. The army and the police cannot maintain peace and law for long as they only march on full stomachs.
Now the nation faces desperate times that in the long term threaten the core of nationhood. Desperate measures have had to be put in place to correct this.
Just like the women who provided relief to their families by subjecting themselves to the perils of the unknown, President Robert Mugabe has decided to fend for his big hungry family by personally embarking on a trip to sell diamonds in Dubai. The desperate president found Dubai more appealing than Antwerp on account of the Arabs’ way of doing business.
They do not scrutinise the product beyond quality checks. Furthermore, Arabs have an appetite for rhino horns; Zimbabwe’s other natural resource Mugabe might want to flog in desperation.
By no means does this imply that Mugabe smuggled some high quality diamonds into the United Arab Emirates and erected an illegal stall in the Dubai Multi-Commodities Centre where the Dubai Diamond Exchange is located. This does not imply that Mugabe found time to raise some extra cash by prowling the streets of Dubai as an iniquitous predator. No. The president is beyond reproach in this regard and he will act with decorum.
He cannot exercise some indiscretions in the area of intimacy risking bringing back some eerie disease for his one and only. In any case his lovely wife is always by his side whenever he tours.
The naked truth is that Mugabe acted like a desperate mother who is prepared to forego her dignity by selling on the streets in foreign lands for sustenance of her family.
He could have delegated some seasoned businesspeople from the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation to do the selling of diamonds in Dubai. Perhaps Mugabe could not entrust the fate of the economy to subordinates who have been caught fiddling while the country burned.
More compelling is the urgency to keep the army happy. He could not imagine his trusted soldiers and the police turning rowdy on the streets of Harare on account of not having been paid. Keeping the army regularly and sufficiently paid guarantees their availability when there is general disquiet on the streets.
Mugabe will walk the extra mile, including turning to street vending in order to keep his armed enforcers happy. The problem is that he has so many of them to please that he will have to be vending everyday if he has to meet their insatiable appetite for the US dollar.
Sadly, his age is now a liability and he will find it gruelling to keep up with the punishing schedules of street vending.
Masola waDabudabu is a social commentator
