Around and around we go …

It’s all spinning out of control but those who can unspin it either can’t or won’t.

Here in my lil’ ol’ home town prices have got to the Moon on their way to Mars.

Petrol, as we call it in the King’s English, is up 39 percent to US$ 2.17 a litre from a once constant US$1.54 or thereabouts, this being the highest increase throughout southern Africa. The knock-on effects are outlandish – bizarre, off-the-wall, outré, hallucinatory, atrocious, outrageous and more, as the dictionary defines it.

Apart from the knock-on effects throughout the supply chain economy,  a US$ 1.00 public transport fare for a single short journey around town went up to US $ 1.50 but because Zimbabwe doesn’t have coinage or a functioning local currency the fare in reckless pirate taxis and minibuses doubled to US$ 2.00.

Break the journey into two rides – four bucks and the same to get home needs eight bucks when poor families survive on about three bucks a day.

A mad blessing therefore it is that more than 80 percent of the population is unemployed and don’t have to travel to and from jobs, yet they still must move around to survive by street vending, begging, hustling, bustling and stealing.

The government has pledged it now is setting up a mechanism, a committee, to see how best it can help those disadvantaged the most.

This reminds me of the old British political comedy Yes, Minister in which Sir Humphrey, the permanent secretary, advises the minister to avoid problems he can neither deal with nor pay for. Set up a committee, that’s our answer, what we can tell the people we’re doing.

The Zimbabwe government is broke, it claims, hence the collapse of health and other public services. No account is given of the origins of the extreme wealth of its leaders and its coterie of the elite who splash out millions on luxury cars, new mansions, you name it …

The other day President Mnangagwa’s first car when he was a student  50 years ago, an Austin Morris 1300, sold for US$ 1.8 million at a ruling party fundraising event proclaiming it was going into a Mnangagwa student scholarship trust.

This was given great fanfare in the state media without a mention that few pupils in crumbling government schools will ever get far enough to qualify for scholarships to complete their education into adulthood.

Dropout rates from dilapidated and barely furnished government schools  have reached record levels with poverty and transport difficulties cited by parents as the main reason the kids can no longer go to class. That is set to increase with the petrol price spikes.

The last available official stats show that in 2024 15,809  dropped out of junior schools and 33,746 dropped out of senior schools. The government insisted  the latter figure was affected by increasing schoolgirl pregnancies. Their fault.

Another 900,000 children out of seven million of school-going age don’t go to school at all, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.

All this is distracted by bitter succession rivalry in the ruling party accompanied by violence and threats against its opponents. Mnangagwa, 83, and his wealthy supporters are vying for changes to the constitution that would see an extension of the mandatory 5-year term in presidential office. Also a future president would not be chosen by a popular vote but by parliamentarians alone. Needless to say the ruling cabal holds holds a massive majority in the parliament.

But there is a slow groundswell against this. As one local legend says, if one man is hungry and wants to kill the village bull for meat the other 19 villagers must agree.

Most if not all villagers will not concur, says the legend, and the bull (here the constitution) survives intact.

Here’s hoping so, but, as in the spinning Middle East, nothing is certain any longer.

Footnote: Scores of destitute unemployed Zimbabweans have been lured to Russia on the promise of well paying jobs there – euros 2,000 a month, families say – but soon find themselves forced into brief military training for the icy battlefields of Ukraine. Several have been killed and their bodies have not been repatriated for customary family funerals. The lure includes one-way air tickets to Moscow. Watch this space for upcoming revelations on Russia’s sinister veil of secrecy over its African recruits and its silence to loved-ones at home on casualties.