Simbarashe Namusi
Zimbabwe’s economy is not simply struggling — it is in sustained collapse.
The national currency is volatile, formal employment is a rarity, and the cost of living rises faster than wages can catch up.
Out of this economic death, a survivalist society has emerged — one defined by vending on the streets, trading in the shadows, and engaging in vices from prostitution to armed robbery.
Where once the ambition was stable jobs, home ownership, and a secure future — the so-called Zimbabwean dream — the goal for many has become to simply make it through the week.
For millions, even that modest goal now lies elsewhere, in South Africa, the UK, Australia, or Canada.
The Hustle Economy
In a country where over 80% of the workforce now operates in the informal sector, the hustle has replaced the payslip.
Pavements have become markets, intersections double as shop floors, and vendors hawk goods from tomatoes to imported clothes.
This is not entrepreneurial flair; it is economic triage.
People sell not because they have spotted market gaps, but because vending is the only available path to bread on the table.
Yet even this fragile lifeline is under siege — from municipal police who confiscate goods to political actors who demand allegiance in exchange for trading space.
Vices as Economic Strategies
When legitimate income streams dry up, illegitimate ones thrive.
In Harare and Bulawayo, the sex trade has moved beyond traditional hotspots, with transactional relationships now embedded in everyday life.
Many of these are not driven by desire but by desperation — “small house” arrangements functioning as survival contracts.
Armed robbery, often involving serving or former security personnel, has become another symptom.
In 2024 alone, high-profile cash-in-transit heists, grocery store raids, and residential armed invasions made monthly headlines. These are crimes of both opportunity and necessity in an environment where wages cannot sustain life.
The Skills Flight
Perhaps the most profound consequence of economic collapse is the haemorrhaging of skills.
Doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, and artisans are leaving in droves, driven by wages that can barely cover bus fare.
The health sector is a stark example — in 2023, the Zimbabwe Nurses Association estimated that over 4,000 nurses had left the country in just two years, many to the UK.
This exodus is not just a labour market issue; it is a psychological one. For many, the Zimbabwean dream no longer exists within Zimbabwe’s borders.
The most ambitious now see emigration not as a last resort but as the primary route to success.
The Diaspora, once a symbol of global ambition, has become a measure of domestic failure — proof that the state cannot keep its best and brightest.
The Social Cost
The economic collapse has also corroded moral and social values.
In neighbourhoods once guided by shared ethics, survival has become the overriding principle. Dishonesty, petty theft, and transactional intimacy are normalised.
The idea that prosperity comes through hard work and national contribution has been replaced by the belief that you survive through cunning, connections, and luck.
Religious spaces, instead of challenging structural injustice, often preach quick-fix prosperity theology — offering miracle money while avoiding systemic critique.
The Zimbabwean Dream in Question
For decades after independence, Zimbabwe carried the promise of a middle-income nation with strong institutions, a literate population, and thriving agriculture. That vision is now deeply eroded. The children of the middle class now aspire less to degrees and local careers, and more to visas and remittances.
In the villages, the dream is reduced to having a relative in the city or abroad who can send groceries at Christmas. For the educated unemployed, it is the hope of a South African job offer or a nursing recruitment call from the UK.
The dream of building a future in Zimbabwe has, for many, become a nostalgic fantasy.
Is There a Way Back?
Yes — but only if the leadership confronts both the economic collapse and the moral decay it has spawned. That means:
Stabilising the currency and protecting wages from inflation.
Creating conditions for formal job growth while safeguarding the informal sector.
Implementing policies that incentivise skilled Zimbabweans to return, or at least engage in meaningful national projects from abroad.
Rebuilding institutions so that citizens see staying in Zimbabwe as viable, not foolish.
But recovery is not purely economic. It requires a civic renewal — a re-teaching of responsibility, honesty, and collective interest. Without that, even an economic rebound will simply create new ways to exploit the system rather than build the nation.
***Zimbabwe’s streets, and its airports, tell the same story: a people surviving in the wreckage, whether by vending under the sun, trading favours in the shadows, or boarding flights in search of dignity abroad.
The question is no longer whether there is a Zimbabwean dream. It is whether Zimbabwe itself can dream again — and whether its people will still be here when that happens.
