Everyone arriving for chest x-rays at the screening clinic in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare presents with the same symptom: desperation to leave.
Professionals are in flight from what was once one of the most thriving pockets in Africa where the ruling Zanu-PF party has stiffened its 44-year grip on power.
For the teachers, engineers and nurses streaming in for medicals at a centre in Harare’s diplomatic district, a certificate showing they were free of tuberculosis is the final obstacle to escape.
“It is painful to be going, but what choice do we have?” shrugs Primrose, 42, who had resigned her university lecturer post to retrain as a geriatric carer. A clean health check meant a job in Huddersfield was hers.
A wrecked economy has made paupers of Zimbabwe’s middle class. The launch last week of a new national currency — the second time the regime has scrapped its local currency since 2008 when inflation hit 500 billion per cent — epitomises the basketcase economy.
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Talent, education and hard work offer no protection from hunger, power cuts or the filthy water that has brought a resurgence of cholera. That is, unless you are connected to President Mnangagwa’s looting regime — or have a relative who has already gone.
A third of the population — a larger portion than in any country not at war — has left to find work in neighbouring South Africa or overseas. Remittances from the diaspora account for about 10 per cent of Zimbabwe’s GDP, according to the World Bank.
Many Zimbabweans had hoped that last year’s general election might bring a change of leadership and a reason to stay. But the re-election of Mnangagwa — a result which observers even from the usually loyal southern African bloc refused to whitewash — has sealed their fate.
Primrose’s husband Leonard, a science academic, has a visa to accompany her to Britain and would “look into opportunities for Uber driving or painting jobs”, he told The Times under a tree outside the clinic.
They declined to give their full names to spare any retribution for their five children, aged between four and 12, who were staying in on Harare with a cousin. The new care job, paying £11 an hour, will keep them in school, the couple said with relief.
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Rocketing inflation has turned education into a luxury for Zimbabwe’s parents who grew up as the most literate pupils in Africa, under the public education programme of the late dictator Robert Mugabe’s early rule. Now, with families unable to fund fees, half of school-age children have dropped out and many girls have been forced into early marriage or sex work.
Michelle Nzowa, 18, has made her own way since sitting O-levels two years ago, but would have liked to have stayed studying and had ambitions to become a doctor. She spends four hours a day travelling into Harare to sell bottled water and snacks outside an office block. It’s worth the grind if she can make $4 a day, she said, though “the idea of going back to school is getting further away”.
Shrinking wages and the high cost of living is emptying staff rooms as well as classrooms. Teaching unions estimate 300 teachers are leaving their posts each month — if not for a job overseas, as a teacher or something menial, then to join the ranks of educated hustlers who survive by selling to each other at the roadside.
“A sad reality of being a teacher in Zimbabwe today is that we cannot afford our children to have what we had,” said Obert Masaraure, a teacher and leader of a union of rural teachers. Its members earn a basic monthly salary of $300, way short of the $1,500 required to keep a family of five housed, fed and in school.
“No one earns that, not nurses, not doctors, not teachers. People aren’t leaving Zimbabwe because they hate it, but because our thieving rulers have made us poor and impossible to stay,” he added.
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Constantino Chiwenga, the health minister and Mnangagwa’s deputy president, has pledged to outlaw foreign recruitment. “People are dying in hospitals because there are no nurses and doctors. That must be taken seriously,” he said.
Outside Parirenyatwa Hospital, which 20 years ago was one of Africa’s best, a group of trainee nurses on a break hesitate to admit their long-term ambitions. “It’s the plan we can’t talk about ,” one whispered.
Zimbabwe’s unravelling has, however, provided a large plug for Britain’s workforce gaps since Brexit and the pandemic. In the 12 months to September 2023, 21,130 Zimbabweans were given visas to work in the UK, according to Home Office data.
It was a 169 per cent increase from the same period the year before, putting the minnow Zimbabwe behind only the populous India and Nigeria with the largest number of citizens heading to Britain with this visa.
Obert Masararure, the union boss, can understand the trend. “We have an educated and hard-working population that is now used to sweating it out through the most difficult conditions. It’s not a nice thing to be able to boast about.”
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Between them, Primrose and Leonard have five university degrees including in chemical sciences and industrial relations. They do not dwell on the intellectual limitations of their new roles. There is no loss of pride in doing what needs to be done, they agreed.
“When you are in boiling water, you can only think of jumping out, not if your landing will be comfortable,” Primrose said.
