Mugabe's elderly live on 13p a month

You wonder if it can possibly get any worse....and it
does!

Mugabe's elderly live on 13p a month

The Sunday Times London March 26, 2006
Mugabe’s elderly live on 13p a month
Christina Lamb, Bulawayo
IN ONE hand Frank Wiggill holds his monthly
pension statement and in the other a 500 gram packet
of salt. It is the only thing in the supermarket that
his pension will buy, unless he prefers to
splash out on two eggs. When Wiggill retired after 38
years as an engine driver on the Zimbabwean railways,
he looked forward to enjoying his twilight years in comfort.

Instead he and his wife Jeanette depend on monthly
food parcels from well-wishers and handouts from their
son in South Africa. The collapsing currency combined with
the world’s highest inflation — estimated at more
than 1,000% a year — has cut their pension to 13p a month.


“It’s embarrassing,” said Wiggill, 79. “I worked all my
life and here I am living on food parcels of milk powder
and toilet paper.” His monthly pension of Z$49,000 is less
than the cost of a newspaper (Z$50,000) or a loaf of
bread (Z$70,000). It would take him two months to buy
a pint of milk (Z$89,000) and nine months to afford the
cheapest pack of four toilet rolls (Z$440,000).

“The pension is a laugh,” he said. “It must cost them
Z$25,000 to post the statement.” This month the Wiggills
received nothing. Deductions for three items on prescription
(Z$30,000 a time) after Wiggill cut down a cactus and got
poisonous sap in his eye left him Z$41,000 in debt to the
pension company.

At the same time the monthly rates on his bungalow have increased to
Z$679,124. Water and electricity are extra. Like most Zimbabwean pensioners, the only way the Wiggills can survive is by selling their possessions. First they sold their Ford Cortina. Then Frank’s beloved piano and Jeanette’s sewing machine.
Next to go will be the precious Royal Doulton plates commemorating the centenary
of Cecil Rhodes’s founding of Rhodesia.

They placed the proceeds from the car with a lump sum from their son in
an investment fund from which they received a monthly income. But two
months ago the fund was suspended, leaving them with no income apart from the
pension.

“We’ll keep selling more and more till eventually we’ll have nothing
left,” Jeanette said. After learning from auctioneers that pensioners
were selling their furniture to buy food, people in the community set up the
Bulawayo Help Network. Three groups formed. One, which helps to pay rates and
rent, is funded by a benefactor; one donates medicines; and the other
provides food parcels for 200 pensioners.

All the organisations asked not to be named, fearing that President
Robert Mugabe would close them and arrest their volunteers.
That helping pensioners is a clandestine activity in Zimbabwe
illustrates just how repressive the Mugabe regime has become. Many of the pensioners
say they would die of hunger were it not for the volunteers. The Wiggills’
case is typical. According to one of the distributors of the food parcels,
some receive as little as $4,000 — less than 1½p. “I’ve come across some so desperate that they are living on blackjacks (seeds),” he said. “My own mother-in-law
receives just Z$4,000 and she is a diabetic whose drugs cost at least $4.5m a
month.”

Yet they are well aware that in their pleasant homes with crocheted seat
covers and proper beds, they are still better off than millions of black
Zimbabweans, many of whom had their homes demolished last year in
Operation Murambatswina, Mugabe’s clean-up campaign, and are now living in
makeshift shelters of plastic sheets and scrap metal.

After comfortable middle-class lives, sending children to good schools
and employing maids and gardeners, the white pensioners find it difficult to
get used to charity. “They’ve turned us into welfare cases which is not a
nice feeling when you’ve worked all your life,” said Val Goodes, whose
husband John worked for 36 years as an auditor for the railway company and has a
pension of Z$129,000 (about 30p).

Like the Wiggills, the couple are sent money by their children. “You
just scrape by,” said Goodes. “We long ago stopped buying dairy products or
fruit. When the kettle blew up, we found an old pot. When the iron went,
we stopped ironing things. Now the element has gone in the oven so I can’t
bake.” Their biggest fear is falling ill. The public health system is in such a
state of collapse that hospitals do not have sterile gloves or hand-wash
solution. Private hospitals demand money up front. “As for dentists,
well I will just have to die with the broken teeth I have,” Goodes said.
“It’s very stressful,” Wiggill agreed. “I lay awake at night worrying
about the situation, which doesn’t help the health.”

Finding himself almost destitute is not easy for a proud man who worked
throughout the bush war in the 1970s when his trains carried armed guards
and had three steel trucks on the front in case they hit landmines.

“I feel so isolated,” he said. “I used to go with friends to the pub for
a beer or fishing but now cannot go anywhere, so I don’t know what’s going
on.” The couple’s television and hi-fi blew up in a lightning storm. Their
only source of entertainment is a transistor radio. It is too far to walk into town and there is no bus service. The few old people who go to a supermarket often stare
dumbfounded at the million-dollar prices and leave with a single egg or a bread
roll. To buy this may mean queueing for an hour as shoppers count out
stacks of Z$20,000 notes. The last official inflation figure was 782% in
February, but most businesses estimate that it is well over 1,000%.

University students recently went on strike in protest at astronomical fee increases.
Arts and humanities courses rose from Z$3m to Z$30m a year and medical
courses from Z$4m to Z$60m. Mugabe said recently that the solution to the
economic crisis was printing more money. The dollar is now worth so little
that some people use petrol vouchers as currency. Most shops have counting machines or scales but some have stopped counting, preferring to compare the heights of bundles of notes. “I just let people pay in bricks,” said the owner of an upmarket
Harare restaurant where bills often reach Z$50m-Z$60m.