Born to Suffer

It has just been the country’s 46^th anniversary of independence from colonial rule. A stark reality is that only 9% of the population are over 46 years old.

The demographic breakdown for 2026 shows that 88% of Zimbabweans are under 46.

The slogan for all those born after Freedom Day, April 18,1980, is that they were the Born Free generation. More common, as most describe themselves now, is that they have become the Born to Suffer generation.

Regardless of huge wealth amassed by the political leadership over past decades, it has emerged that abject poverty at home has forced dozens of young Zimbabweans into the Russian military.  At the last count 63 are in Ukraine where 18 have been killed.

Zhemu Soda, the information minister in Harare, says efforts are being made to stop the trafficking of men by illegal recruiting scams that offer lucrative jobs in Russia – for as much as euro 2,000 a month.

It’s too much to resist for those whose families live hand-to-mouth on roughly US $3 a day.

The traffickers use social media to recruit disaffected Zimbabweans, says Soda. Victims have their travel documents confiscated on arrival and are “coerced into active combat with little or no training” once there, he adds. Neither the men nor their families receive money that has been promised and the bodies of those killed in the snow and ice of the battlefield are not repatriated for family burials.

According to Ukraine, more than 1,700 Africans are fighting for Russia although the French Institute for Foreign Relations estimates that double that number are among 20,000 foreign fighters in Russian field troops. Most Africans will never have seen snow before or endured below zero temperatures. Imagine their desperation to go there at all.

Russian embassies across the continent, including the one in Harare (right), claim this is none of their doing and it’s not their fault Africans are falling into a money trap. But they do welcome ‘volunteers’ to Putin’s cause in Ukraine because African colonies largely won their own independence with Russian backing.

All along Zimbabwe, a firm ally of Putin and distasteful Belarus strongman Lukashenko, has learnt from them how autocracy and absolute power lies in the hands of elites, something amply demonstrated last Saturday.

Independence Day parades and speech making were as shameless as ever. President Mnangagwa and his inner circle loudly promoted their campaign to extend his statutory 5-year term by two years to 2030 despite constitutional provisions disallowing it. Their “Vision 2030” further envisages abolishing presidential elections, leaving his successor to be chosen by members of the parliament they overwhelmingly dominate.

They deny a referendum on the changes is needed under the constitution and public gatherings already called by the ruling party on the subject have been disrupted by violent party thugs and arrests of opposition leaders.

Official party vehicles and helicopters are painted with the insignia of the campaign whose proponents don’t hide their ostentation. The design refers to the upcoming Constitutional Amendment Bill Number 3.

At the 18^th birthday party of the daughter of one of Mnangagwa’s closest aides the other day she was asked what she wanted as a birthday gift.

No, she didn’t want a new top of the range car. She already had one. She asked for house – and got one in the leafy upmarket Harare suburb of Borrowdale.

Flashback to our desperate army recruits in Russia. And there’s crippling unemployment countrywide as well, industries are shutting down, hospitals are without drugs and schools are without books.

Chasms deepen every day between the acquisition of money by the powerful and the lack of it in the hands of everybody else.

This Zimbabwe registered Rolls Royce Wraith starts at US$ 400,000, rising to $700 000 depending on its interior fittings.

Independence Day this year saw the donation of bicycles to veterans of the country’s liberation war prior to 1980.

Born Free and Born to Suffer. Unfortunately it doesn’t help to look for good news from elsewhere in the world.