Generation Mugabe: 'he has normalised the abnormal'

When Sandra Musakasa visits her hometown, Zimbabwe’s second city, there are no childhood or college friends left for her to catch up with. They have all fled in search of jobs, an elusive pursuit in a country where up to 90% of young people are unemployed.

“If I go to Bulawayo, I can’t even find one friend I grew up beside or went to school with. Most people are going out to South Africa,” she says with a shrug. Being young and employed in Zimbabwe makes her a member of a tiny elite.

At 29 she is part of a frustrated generation, born, raised and educated under the presidency of Robert Mugabe. They make up a majority of Zimbabweans, with around three-quarters of the population under 35 years old today, and have borne the worst brunt of years of economic mismanagement.

“Mugabe has normalised the abnormal,” said Moses Chibaya, 32, an activist and writer in Harare who said most of his friends and classmates have failed to find jobs.

“Every day they wake up and don’t know what they are going to do. And that’s one thing I’m waiting for (after the coup), for Mugabe to experience the same, to wake up in the morning and not know what he will do.”

Millions of high-school and university graduates produced by one of Africa’s best education systems have sought work abroad as industry collapsed and inflation sky-rocketed. Others struggle to make ends meet with menial or manual piecemeal labour that makes no use of their skills.

The unexpected ousting of a man whose rule seemed like it would never end has brought the first glimpse of hope in years to many of them.

“Zimbabweans now need change through whatever means,” said Succeed, who won a first class degree from Midlands university in 2014 but has been unemployed ever since.

They have been long despairing years of “wasted talent, lost time and resources which my parents spent to finance my education,” and he is clear where the blame lies. “We are victims of our government, which personally I think is empty, exhausted and clueless.”

The lack of employment is corrosive not just for those who have graduated into unemployment. In a country proud of its highly-literate population, the incentive to study is falling away.

“Parents used to present education as the only way out of poverty,” said 25-year-old Kuda Meki. “But now you see those who were working hard just sitting around at home without jobs, there is no inspiration to study.”

Alcohol abuse and other problems are also on the rise, as young people struggle to find work, and unemployment becomes more common than going to work.

For years Mugabe’s iron grip on the country had also turned young people away from elections, said Chibaya, who was organising a music and barbecue “voter registration” party for 5,000 young people in Harare on Thursday.

Some lacked papers, but many felt voting was pointless in a country where one man had clung to power for nearly three decades.

Barely a third were even registered to vote before recent polls, according to a local thinktank and NGO the Research and Advocacy Unit, and only a fraction of those would-be voters bothered to cast a ballot in recent elections.

Even though the favourite to replace Mugabe, Emmerson Mnangagwa, is far from a reform figure, there is hope that the next presidential elections will herald real change.

Eighteen-year-old high school student Philip said the coup convinced him to register for the elections, which must be held by the middle of next year, but could be called sooner.

“If the military hadn’t taken action, I wouldn’t have bothered, because even if I did vote the same person would have won,” he said. “I’m happy with how they are handling stuff, at least they stood up (to Mugabe) when no one else would.”

He hopes to be a photographer, and is applying for degrees in South Africa, in part because he thinks Zimbabwean universities are struggling with resources and teaching, but also because he expects to have to look for work there.

“People here get educated, but then they can’t apply what they have learned. It doesn’t make sense for our country,” he said. “I just hope that things will get better now.”

A revival in the once-powerful economy would also benefit young people who never made it to university, like 24-year-old Takudzwa, who does construction jobs when he can find them, for $5 or $10 a day.

Often he walks up to 10 miles to work and back, to save $1 on the bus fare. “I hope it will be a change,” he says of the coup. “There are very few opportunities for us.”

Yolanda, a 20-year-old working as a maid on $100 a month to pay her sister’s school fees, hopes a new government might let her go back to studying and curb rising inflation. “The currency here doesn’t work,” she said. “I want them to sort out our money.”It is not only the economy that young people hope will change with the end of the Mugabe era.

“I hope we will get social security, protection of human rights and justice,” said Meki. “The kind of democracy we’ve known has been democracy on paper, not in practice.”