{"id":2329,"date":"2019-01-23T13:59:52","date_gmt":"2019-01-23T13:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.com\/zimbabwe\/?p=2329"},"modified":"2019-01-23T14:16:25","modified_gmt":"2019-01-23T14:16:25","slug":"zimbabwes-angry-generation-has-nothing-to-lose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.cc\/zimbabwe\/all-news\/zimbabwes-angry-generation-has-nothing-to-lose","title":{"rendered":"Zimbabwe’s angry generation has nothing to lose"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Barely a year after coming to power, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa is facing a countrywide youth revolt, with many finding his idea of \u201cfull democracy\u201d unpalatable.<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

As Zimbabwe grapples with a youth revolt over a fuel hike amidst a flailing economy and severe economic crisis, President Emmerson Mnangagwa has cancelled his trip to Davos, Switzerland, where he was supposed to attend the World Economic Forum this week.<\/p>\n

So far the Zimbabwean police and paramilitary forces have shot dead eight people and nearly 70 people have been injured. Internet shutdowns are frequent. The protestors have given Mnangagwa a 30-day ultimatum to get things right or else they will be back on the streets.<\/p>\n

While the fuel hike became the main trigger for the protests, the long-simmering discontentment over the country\u2019s economic turmoil and rampant unemployment has added to young people\u2019s rage.<\/p>\n

Manangagwa justified the massive increase in fuel prices as the only way of ending the three-month long fuel shortages, however, the move was seen by economic analysts more as a desperate fundraising ploy. Close scrutiny of the new prices showed that government tax (excise duty) alone made up more than two-thirds of the new price of $3,11 and $3,31 for diesel and petrol respectively. The government of Zimbabwe is broke.<\/p>\n

The fuel price hike came as doctors were ending a 40-day strike for better salaries and working conditions while other government workers had given the state a 14-day notice to strike for better pay. Workers are struggling as in December alone inflation rose by more than 40 percent.<\/p>\n

In this environment the young people of Zimbabwean \u2013 who account for up to 60 percent of the 15 million-strong population \u2013 find themselves idle and disillusioned from sunrise to sunset. These include hundreds of thousands of university and college graduates as well as school leavers, some of whom have not worked for decades.<\/p>\n

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It was therefore not surprising that when former president of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe was deposed, they had high hopes. Mnangagwa replaced Mugabe with a promise of \u201ca new Zimbabwe, with a thriving and open economy, jobs for its youths, opportunities for investors and democracy and equal rights for all\u201d.<\/p>\n

The eagerly-awaited jobs that he promised are yet to arrive. Instead, more people have been losing jobs as businesses either downsize or close altogether due to the harsh operating environment, which is highlighted by severe foreign currency shortages.<\/p>\n

For decades, Zimbabweans were considered a docile people, due in part to older generations who have seared in their minds the traumatic memories of wartime and post-war brutalities and know better\u00a0than to challenge<\/a>\u00a0those in power.<\/p>\n

However, a new generation that was born decades after the much-talked-of war and only knows\u00a0unemployment,\u00a0abject poverty\u00a0and\u00a0hopelessness\u00a0cannot be sustained on a thin diet of\u00a0empty promises\u00a0and\u00a0threats\u00a0anymore. Without jobs, assets and \u2013 more importantly \u2013 hope, this is an angry generation with nothing to lose.<\/p>\n

When the country’s main labour body, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, responded to the fuel price hike by calling for a three-day national shutdown, it was seized upon with alacrity as it presented another opportunity for these frustrated young people to vent their pent-up anger on Mnangagwa and his administration. It was the\u00a0latest<\/a>\u00a0of around\u00a0half-a-dozen<\/a>\u00a0anti-government<\/a>\u00a0protests that the Mnangagwa administration has had to contend with since coming into power just over a year ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government has underestimated the enormous challenge posed by the growing numbers of the young, unemployed and desperate,\u201d Dr Alex Magaisa, a law teacher at the UK-based University of Kent, told\u00a0TRT World. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cTheir parents and older brothers and sisters may have been patient over the years but this is because they had memory of a better past and always clung on to it.”<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the other hand, the younger generation does not have that memory because they have never had good times. The older generation might have had something material to lose, but the younger generation has nothing to lose. It is not surprising that it is the young and unemployed youths who appear to be at the head of the current wave of unrest,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n

Another Harare-based expert on Zimbabwe’s politics, Martin Makanza, pointed out that with the high level of frustration in the country, violence was inevitable.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth is, with our dire economic situation and given the fuel price increases the violence would still have erupted irrespective of who is in power,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople\u2019s expectations after the November (2017) change in government leadership have not been met. Instead there has been a string of unhelpful new policies and taxation increases on already impoverished citizens. The bottom line is people are angry at the neverending unaffordable increases in the cost of living and lack of discernible positive economic policy direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The government has no shortage of scapegoats to conveniently blame for everything that is going wrong. All the ills are seen as the work of the\u00a0opposition,\u00a0non-governmental organisations, the putative Anglo-Saxon regime change conspiracy and most recently,\u00a0social media. The leadership is portrayed as hapless\u00a0victims\u00a0of this\u00a0widespread conspiracy.<\/p>\n

Could Mnangagwa be living in cloud cuckoo land?<\/p>\n

In 2015, when he was interviewed by the editor of New African magazine, Baffour Ankomah, he was asked for his opinion on today\u2019s young people and his response was dismissive.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the 1960s, our leaders decided that we must take up arms, and the youth were very enthusiastic to go to war. We had nothing to lose at the time. We had no wives and no property. The only property we had was the clothes we wore,\u201d Mnangagwa said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow the generation out of school, they have wives and children, they have homes and mortgages, so to tell them to sacrifice and die for the nation (laughs), they think twice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Referring to the interview, Magaisa said: \u201cHe [Mnangagwa] may have to revise his opinion because the generation which their leadership has produced since 1980 is not what he described in 2015. Some may have wives\/husbands and children but they have no jobs, no homes, have never held a payslip all their life and might not even know how to spell the word \u2018mortgage\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn short, it\u2019s as highly combustible a generation as his was in the Sixties. They too have nothing to lose and it is Mnangagwa\u2019s generation that created this incendiary generation. The chickens are coming home to roost.\u201d<\/p>\n

Talking of incendiary conditions, the former prime minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Sir Garfield Todd had something to say when he gave a public lecture at South Africa\u2019s Witwatersrand University in August 1964 entitled Danger: Men Thinking!. It came just as Mnangagwa and other angry and frustrated young people, under the leadership of Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Ndabaningi Sithole and other nationalists, started taking up arms to fight the racist settler regime of Ian Smith.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven fire itself burns when conditions are right,\u201d Todd said. \u201cWhen the grass is green, ranchers like me can scan the veld with pleasure and without anxiety. The little fires of the fishermen along the riverside add only to the beauty of the scene. But in Rhodesia when October comes and the grass is tinder dry, the rancher is tempted, not to just imprison fire-lighting campers, but to shoot them on sight\u2026 there is much to suggest that it is now October and many people have smouldering fires in their hearts, deeply resentful of the circumstances which others decree shall surround their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mnangagwa, who many dubbed \u2018the listening president\u2019, is facing immense criticism for using\u00a0heavy-handed tactics\u00a0<\/a>to quell the dissent.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe false hope that Mnangagwa might improve the economy while he takes away democratic freedoms has been shattered,\u201d said author Panashe Chigumadzi, who wrote a book on the coup that deposed Robert Mugabe. \u201cHis military regime has not only closed Zimbabwe for business but also violently shut down any chance for meaningful civic engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barely a year after coming to power, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa is facing a countrywide youth revolt, with many finding his idea of \u201cfull democracy\u201d unpalatable. 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