MUGABE TAKES THE CAKE

Jen Redshaw on the economy of

Zimbabwe, which combines Estee Lauder and mass starvation

Harare STROLLING through Sam Levy's shopping village in Harare, you'd never believe that Zimbabwe is tottering under its worst economic crisis ever. There are couples cellphone-shopping and schoolchildren doing gymnastic displays; in the furniture shops, there's a choice of tallboys. You can buy Estee Lauder here, for goodness' sake.

Half of Zimbabwe's population are supposed to be starving, thanks to drought and President Robert Mugabe's repressive policy on land. That must surely be in a country far removed from the chocolate-cake haven of Mimi's brasserie. Here, immaculately highlighted and braided women, black and white, toy with their cloppy gold sandals over iced coffee. Eavesdropping, you might catch the odd snippet about water shortages affecting the city's plush northern suburbs — the main indication that things are not quite right in this country — but that's as much as you'll pick up. Most of these women have got private boreholes anyway, so they're hardly going to have to store buckets in the bath.

Zimbabwe today is split right down the middle. There's the divide everyone knows about, between Mr Mugabe's land-grabbing patriots and the quieter followers of opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai. But there's another gap, too. It's between the haves and the have-nots, and it's getting wider by the day. How is it, a female columnist for the official Herald newspaper pondered recently, that so many people here 'can afford to ride in flashy cars [and] live in luxurious houses, yet Zimbabwe is supposedly poverty-stricken?' How do these people always manage to wear the latest imported fashions and 'drink and eat to their heart's content', when everyone else queues for bread and dreads starvation, she wondered.

It's forex, my dear, forex. Your Mr Mugabe's skewed economic policies have nurtured a ballooning parallel market in foreign currency — and everyone wants it. You might get it perfectly legally, like me, with the notes my worried mother stashes between the packets of dried soya mince and Ovaltine sachets in her fortnightly parcels. You might get it by some other means, say by plundering resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or by striking a little deal with Mr Mugabe's henchmen so that you can carry on farming. You take those nice bills to one of those dark bureaux de change off Harare's central First Street. A teller will show you the day's parallel market rate on her calculator screen, scared of speaking out loud. A few wordless minutes later, you're rolling in cash. Suddenly Zimbabwe is very, very cheap.

My mother's flO note at the moment gets me $12,000. That's twice a domestic worker's salary. It'll buy me 100 loaves of bread — made from cake flour, of course. There's a wheat shortage. Things aren't quite right in Zimbabwe, remember.

Ugly old fears are resurfacing, the sort that show that racial integration didn't really run that deep. Mr Mugabe is milking this for all it is worth. One of the propaganda songs that's played nearly every 15 minutes on state radio tells listeners to beware of whites 'with their barbed-wire tails'. It's sung in Shona, so most whites can't understand, but they can feel the hostility. And they've got their own to contend with.

Back in one of the tallboy shops, a middle-aged white woman is scared. She won't count her cash in front of the black store assistant. And, she whispers, her husband locks 14 doors each night before they go to bed. 'We've got one dog in the passageway and one in the entrance. And we've got a gun.' she confides.

White fears are running high here after the last killing, just a couple of weeks ago. An elderly white brother and sister were surprised in their Harare home, tied to their chairs and strangled with shoelaces. The intruders were looking for cash, the Herald said. They broke all the Phelpses' flower etchings.

As poverty rises, so does crime. Violent house burglaries and car-jackings are on the up. So is anti-white feeling. After all, these people are just 'greedy whites', according to Mr Mugabe. That, at least, is what my inlaws are being told. They're homeless now. They only had one farm, bought in the mid1980s. No one, except the Mugabe regime and its highly original definitions of legality, could accuse them of stealing land from anybody. But last year war veterans and squatters rampaged through the farmhouse, taking what they could and wrecking what they couldn't. My in-laws fled to a nearby town, where a friend lent them a house rentfree. My mother-in-law started rebuilding her wardrobe with visits to the fleamarket.

They've had no money from the government to compensate them for the loss of their farm. They have no income. But suddenly their farmworkers — even the once friendly ones — have started clamouring for retrenchment packages running into millions of dollars. That's thousands of pounds, even at the black-market rate. Where are my in-laws supposed to get that from?

Mr Mugabe doesn't care. In fact, he's probably quite glad. Farmworkers used to be ardent supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which, according to the government, is white-led and British-sponsored. (It's not.) The more people Mr Mugabe can get to turn against the whites, the more voters our aging leader thinks he's got.

Mr Mugabe would like us all to believe that things are just perfect in Zimbabwe. Say any different and it's into prison with you. At least 12 journalists from the private and foreign press have been arrested here in the last five months. Several nights a week we have as our top news-story on state ZBC — or Dead BC, as it's not so fondly known as here — the fact that another delegation of African-Americans has come to Zimbabwe to find out the 'true story'. Invariably, we are shown pictures of Mr Mugabe embracing the visitors, who say they've seen nothing at all amiss in this beautiful country.

What ZBC oddly omits to tell us is that taxpayers are paying for these visits. It's a cool $11 million per delegation, if you please: the visitors, it seems, have a police escort and, of course, they get to stay in the Sheraton. The government may not have enough money to feed its starving millions, but it will roll out the red carpet for you if you'll profess your undying support for Mr Mugabe on prime-time TV. Even a Briton has joined in the praise chorus, apparently. A Mr David Jones was last month presented with the Tourist of the Decade award by the beaming minister of tourism, Francis Nhema. Mr Jones is reported to have made frequent trips to Zimbabwe since 1996 and has promised to 'undertake to correct the negative publicity Zimbabwe is receiving in the West, saying the country is paradise'.

Well, Harare looks just fine from air-conditioned hotels or the hallowed arcades of Sam Levy's village, though I am not sure if there are potholes in paradise. And if you're changing your pounds in one of those dark little bureaux, Mr Jones, then, yes, your holiday is unbelievably cheap. But things are not right in Zimbabwe. And the more people who say that they are, the longer this madness will last.