Many will simply try again. Since 1998, when Mugabe made unbudgeted payouts to party militants and sent the economy into a death spiral, his countrymen have been fleeing en masse. And since the flawed presidential election this past March, the exodus has only intensified. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most of the people leaving are not the white “racist” ex-Rhodesians that the state propaganda machine decries. Rather, they are educated, middle-income Zimbabweans, the cream of the country’s work force. “I’m scared now,” says Agnes Moyo, a 44-year-old bank executive who is shortly to leave for a new job in South Africa. “It’s not normal to spend five hours in a queue for maize meal [the national staple]. It’s not normal to arrest journalists all the time. It is not normal for people to be killed for voting for who they want. It’s simply not acceptable.”
So it’s off to London–Harare North in local parlance–or to South Africa. There are no reliable statistics on the number of people who’ve left Zimbabwe over the last two or three years, but there is no question that the figure is large: in the first five months of this year, South Africa alone repatriated 20,397 Zimbabwean border crossers. Demographers estimate that there are more than 1 million Zimbabweans living illegally in South Africa and about 300,000 in Britain. There is much talk in London of Zimbabweans who’ve slipped through the immigration net on their second or third try (in order to gain legal residency, immigrants must prove they are capable of supporting themselves–a condition few of the arrivals are able to meet). ASA Consultants, a migration-advisory service from Australia, put an advertisement in a Harare newspaper last week offering assistance to would-be immigrants to Australia. “We are completely inundated [with prospective clients],” says an ASA official. “People want any which way to get out.”
“Three quarters of the people who applied to us were well-off black professionals and business people,” says Nick Jack, a migration consultant from New Zealand. “It’s a tragedy. The country is like a dying star; it’s imploding.”
While the corrupt political environment is troubling, it’s the collapsing economy that has many Zimbabweans packing their bags. The Zimbabwean dollar is now a tenth of its value of only 18 months ago, and the inflation rate is 120 percent. That has spurred the politically indifferent–and even many supporters of Mugabe’s ruling ZANU(PF) party–to get out. “We’ve got two kids at high school, and the fees just went up 100 percent this term,” says a bookkeeper who asks not to be named and plans to head to England. “Zimbabwe’s been our family’s home for four generations, and we love it. But we just cannot afford to live here anymore.”
Those Zimbabweans who do emigrate aren’t kicking up their heels in Soho. Families typically choose one member to go abroad, counting on him or her to send home remittances. That’s also hard for those left behind. “Most of the black kids at this school are now in split families because the breadwinner has gone overseas to earn money,” says the headmaster of a rural Christian private school. “As soon as the [wage earners] can accumulate the air fare, they are off. Some of them live 30 at a time in two-room apartments in London.”
The one thing that may slow the flight of migrants is a lack of money. In the last fortnight the Zimbabwean dollar has lost half its value at the semi-official “parallel” exchange rate, trading for U.S. dollars at a rate of 750 to 1. That has made buying plane tickets extremely expensive. “An open ticket to London for my wife and I will cost the best part of 1 million Zimbabwe dollars,” said retired doctor Jack Crossman last week. “We just could never afford that. But neither can we afford to live here now. We are trapped.” Many are feeling that way–and doing whatever’s necessary to get out.
