Zimbabweans Resort to Roadside Selling as Covid-19 Worsens Devastated Economy
In the usually quiet middle-income suburb of Westgate in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, several cars with their doors and boots open line the side of the road.
The car boots are packed with products, from packets of rice to sugar and sweets, baby clothes and essentials. Coronavirus is redefining the shopping experience in in Zimbabwe, where many people thrown out of jobs because of the pandemic are turning their vehicles into moving mini-supermarkets to survive.
Cythnia Danda used to work as an accounting officer in a bank but was retrenched due to the coronavirus outbreak.
“There are no jobs in Zimbabwe at the moment because the majority of Zimbabweans are surviving on the informal sector, buying and selling. But because of the coronavirus, because of the COVID-19 and the restrictions, this is the only way we can survive, by coming to buy and sell,” she says.
Selling items from car boots is not a new thing in the once prosperous southern African country, but prior to the pandemic it was mainly limited to those hawking second hand clothes.
Now, newly unemployed people clog roadsides and street corners in both rich and poor suburbs selling from their cars. Many say the items they sell are smuggled from neighbouring South Africa, which has closed it official border with Zimbabwe as part of lockdown measures.
Zimbabwe’s economy was already in the doldrums before coronavirus, beset by rising inflation, erosion of the value of the local currency, high unemployment, and acute shortages of water, electricity, gas and bank notes amid the government’s inability to borrow flexibly on the international market due to high and unpaid debts.
The country’s economy is likely to decline by more than 10 percent this year compared to the 3.2 percent contraction projected for the entire sub-Saharan African economy, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Unable to cope with the double burden of economic decline and coronavirus, many of the few companies still operating in Zimbabwe are either closing down or cutting jobs.
Marshall Chinyani has set up on the side of a busy road in Belgravia, a suburb that hosts many embassies, U.N agencies and offices of non-governmental agencies.
He abandoned school teaching three years ago to focus on a small import business that is now closed due to coronavirus. Hawking from the car is becoming his norm.
“I am here because of the worldwide current situation of corona pandemic that forces us, some of us, to leave our job, into the street to sell this. We never used to do to this. We’re forced to to leave our office, our shops,” he says.
Prosper Chitambara, a Harare based economist, says Zimbabwe’s economy was already heavily informalised due to massive de-industrialization over the past two decades, and coronavirus has just worsened the situation.
“We have seen the closure of companies, the closure of industries. We’ve seen more and more people are actually eking out a living in the informal sector. And to it’s been exacerbated, obviously, by the huge labour force that’s being churned out by our colleges, by our universities.”
According to the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce, about 25 percent of jobs in the formal sector, and 75 percent of informal jobs in Zimbabwe could be lost due to the outbreak of coronavirus.
The figures could be higher, according to the labour federation, Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. It claims even formally employed people such as civil servants earning less than $50 a month are supplementing their incomes with informal trade such as hawking.
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