Here again! What a year. The deadly corona virus that has ravaged the rest of the world has not spared Zimbabwe. Masakhaneni staff has had to minimize days spent in the office and work from home for the past 4 months. Our programs are based entirely in rural areas where cyber connectivity is unreliable in most areas. Most programming activities require physical interaction with the communities we work with. Besides, most of the programs are about how members of the community interact with each other. We are into conflict resolution and management in all of our programs. We also seek to engender a sense of community solidarity, co-existence and cooperation as a way of enhancing community productivity. Our lobby work seeks to enhance the agency of these communities.
As we met with communities to discuss the ravages of Covid-19, we shared with these same communities our collective strength when we sought to look out for each other. Covid-19 is an anti-social disease which is the antithesis of the socialization that all our programs require in communities. No shaking of hands, stay 2 meters apart, cover your face, avoid crowds, and do not attend funerals! These strictures that are key in preventing infections, run foul the interpersonal socialization that is required in our programs. Communities should work together to reduce suspicion and tension that result from “not knowing one another properly”. Covid-19 has closed schools. We hear sad stories of young girls falling pregnant during this lockdown as they have nothing else to do! We have come across incidents of domestic violence which can be directly attributed to the lockdown. Subsistence activities are curtailed by Covid-19. Thus escalating poverty in the communities.
This difficult Covid-19 period has not deterred staff from carrying out limited fields trips. These have been important occasions that have kept the programs alive. Where possible electronic means have been employed to effect contact with communities. Covid-19 takes place in a country that already has a myriad of problems. Our politics is unstable, judging by consistent utterances by those in government suggesting that there is a hidden hand working to sabotage the economy and create havoc in the country. Meanwhile for the average Zimbabweans, the quality of life is degraded on a daily bases as the prices of commodities shoot up regularly thus eroding the buying power of ordinary citizens.
The regular arrests of alleged anti state activists accentuates the political tensions in the country and compound the insecurity that the citizens perceive.
We work among the poorest communities who are largely dependent on food handouts from the state or NGOs. Listening to their stories about inadequate food, unfair distribution and the humiliating effect of poverty makes one appreciate the debilitating effects of drought, economic mismanagement and the role of endemic corruption in all this. The sum total of all this are communities whose quality of life has been severely degraded over the years. We are exposed to communities who have lost hope about the future ever yielding a better life. This creates inertia and poor productivity. What becomes abundant is suspicion and the blame game. Solidarity goes flying out of the windows, poverty increases as communities fail to find common cause that would enable them to collectively address factors that accentuate their poverty.
Forty years into independence and majority rule, rural poverty is extremely debilitating. Masakhaneni’s livelihood programs indicate the extent of this poverty as these limited projects are oversubscribed and are at times a cause of friction when the selection criterion of who should benefit is not clear.
The closure of schools due to Covid has raised all sorts of disciplinary issues for parents as school going children, for lack of better things to do, indulge in unsavory behavior. There is also the real threat that a whole generation of poorly educated citizens will result from this Covid-19 lockdown, unless an alternative education process is put in place. In a country where internet connectivity is limited and non-existent in some rural areas, prospects of e-learning are not an alternative. In these difficult times we are positioning Masakhaneni much stronger and able to implement its programs more efficiently and effectively.