By Anonymous
Sunday, June 29, 2008

HARARE, Zimbabwe My father, who lives in Zimbabwe's countryside, sent me a letter the other day. The 74-year-old man wrote that he had not had soap, cooking oil, sugar or tea leaves -- virtually anything -- for a very long time. Could I help? And if I had any old shoes that I was no longer using, could I send them to him?

I felt castrated as I read his words. Like many Zimbabweans, I am in no position to aid my loved ones; I had been out of a job for a whole year when I got the letter. My father might have forgotten that, or simply been so desperate that he had to let me know about his plight. The company where I used to work closed down without any fanfare, and severance packages were not paid. In an eerie way, the demise of our business mirrored the demise of our country: The bosses at the top had proven adept at ruining the company, not at running it efficiently with the welfare of the people at heart. So we paid the price.

Now here was my father, asking for help I was honor-bound to give but simply could not provide. I was filled with impotent rage -- the same feeling my fellow citizens get as we watch Zimbabwe spiral out of control, caught in the turbulence of bad, self-serving decisions by the powers that be, ostensibly on our behalf but always at our expense.

In particular, my father's case fills me with simmering fury because he has been a staunch supporter of President Robert Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) since the 1960s, when he had served the liberation fighters in any way he could in their struggle against then-Rhodesia's British overlords. Back in the 1990s, when Mugabe's rule was turning sour, I was amazed to find in my father's house -- even then -- an official portrait of the president. When my father was in his early 60s, he wrote to inform me that he had taken a job in a different district as a secretary for his beloved party. He was eventually forced to retire, and he has been trying to eke out a living as a peasant farmer ever since. My father has been devoted to the party that he says has nurtured him over the years. What does he have to show for it? The very people to whom he pledged his loyalty over the decades are the ones responsible for his plight.

It is not only my father who is writing letters of lamentation; almost every one of us has plumbed the bottoms of our hearts every day. We may never write those thoughts down, but each moment we spend agonizing about how we are going to make ends meet is, in essence, the sending of a plea -- one that no one, sadly, seems to be able to answer. The hope of change offered by the March 29 presidential election has been ruthlessly and systematically crushed, and all that remains is the stain of our butchered dreams. Like my father, we have all been betrayed, mistreated and victimized for daring to speak our minds. In Zimbabwe, if you question a wrong or criticize an injustice, you are labeled a member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Since the regime rabidly calls the opposition puppets of the West, that label can have dire consequences.

One relative, a tobacco seller in his early 40s, was particularly bitter about the youth militia that is carrying out most of the regime's dirty work: boys and girls barely out of their teens who are ordering elderly men and women about with impunity. "Tisu tirikutonga," they declare: We are the ones in power and control. And so they are.

"What hurts me the most," one of my relatives said, "is that at my age, I have to live in constant fear. To come here to Harare, we had to ask for permission, and on our return, we have to go and report that we are back. . . . I am not a politician. I just want to earn a decent living and get by."

"The problem is that there are people who did not tell Mugabe the truth," another relative pointed out. "They lied to him that he was still popular. When he came to address rallies, they bused people from all over the province, and it was the same crowds that were ferried to the different venues, most of them forced. When Mugabe saw them teeming in their multitudes, dutifully cheering and applauding him, he thought they truly loved him."

No longer. If anything, our trials and tribulations deepened when the elections of March 29 failed to materialize into meaningful change -- a stillborn hope that haunts us.

There is a surreal quality to the crisis unfolding here. For the many citizens who depend on the state media, it is business as usual, with robust coverage of Mugabe's campaign appearances. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's withdrawal from the run-off vote held last Friday was treated like a non-event. One neighbor, a devout soccer fan, observed, "This is like having a penalty shootout with only one team." But Mugabe seems to see nothing wrong with banging the ball into an empty net, then sprinting down the field celebrating his victory. In fact, he does not seem to mind playing the entire match on his own. As long as he is playing, all is well with him.

But for the rest of us -- for my father, my relatives and friends, my country -- all is not well. The other day, a devout Mugabe supporter assured a friend of mine that once Mugabe had clinched his victory, the terrible inflation wracking the economy would subside, probably a day or so after his inauguration. Such people seem to believe that diesel could come out of a rock. We ordinary Zimbabweans do not deal with inflation by making unrealistic assurances; we deal with it at its grittiest, in our day-to-day struggle for survival. Last week, Zimbabwe's dollar fell a staggering 80 percent on the country's illegal currency markets as people hunkered down before the presidential runoff. In barely a week, the price of a loaf of bread -- which can be found only on the black market -- has shot up from $1 billion to more than $6 billion, but even that could have changed by the time this article appears. In less than two weeks, we have watched the fares for a commuter omnibus, our common means of public transportation, shoot up from $500 million to a price somewhere in the billions.

In Zimbabwe, we talk about these billions without batting an eye. A friend from my neighborhood has a 4-year-old son who is in kindergarten. The other day, I saw this boy holding a wad of $50 million notes; unless they all amounted to a billion of our dollars, he couldn't even buy a sweet with them. Even our kindergarteners have to be billionaires these days. Zimbabwean tycoons now talk in terms of quadrillions of dollars. I still haven't been able to get my artistic mind around nine zeroes, much less 15. You should see the people frowning, trying to count the bank notes.

As I count, I think of my father. His needs cannot be met, let alone my own. The skyrocketing cost of transportation and basic goods, most of which can be bought only on the black market, means that what one earns is less than what one must spend to survive. Yet day in and day out, people trek to and from work. I suppose this means that we have all been turned into criminals of one kind or another, selling and buying on the black market in order to make ends meet -- which they barely do. And all we want is a better life for ourselves and our children -- and an aging father who once believed in Robert Mugabe.

The author is a Zimbabwean writer. The Washington Post is withholding his name for safety reasons.