Stranded Zimbabweans sleep outside banks

IOL – Independent Foreign Service

17th December 2015

Bulawayo – Thousands of old people are sleeping outside banks in Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, hoping they will be paid their November pension cheques this week.

Many of them say they remember the hyperinflationery period in 2008 when banks had no money before the government abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar.

But this time it is different.

The government has no US dollars, which it has used since it abandoned the domestic currency, to deposit in banks to pay pensions.

It cannot pay civil servants their 13th cheque and some teachers say they fear they will not get their December salary until after Christmas.

Even the security forces have not yet received their annual bonus, according to public service minister Prisca Mupfumira, who told the Daily News in Harare this week that the uniformed services were supposed to receive their bonus’s last month, but had not been paid because of a lack of funds.

“So far we have not received information from Treasury that cash inflows have improved,” she said.

The government wage bill eats up about 82% of revenue, according to official statistics.

Some of the pensioners sleeping in the streets, many of them former teachers, say they now have no money to go home.

“We are sleeping in queues like refugees,” Khalani Moyo told The Chronicle newspaper this week. “Now I am stuck in town with no money to get home.”

David Coltart, former education minister in the inclusive government which ended two years ago, said: “How does (finance minister Patrick) Chinamasa and the entire Zanu-PF cabinet think pensioners will survive if they don’t receive their miserly pensions?”

Referring to last week’s Zanu-PF conference at Victoria Falls, Coltart tweeted: “Only an utterly callous government would hold a lavish conference in Victoria Falls and yet not pay its pensioners their due.”

Some teachers in Harare said they didn’t expect they would be paid their salaries, let alone bonuses, before Christmas.

“We don’t know officially, but we hear from people in the salaries department that we are only going to get paid our salaries after Christmas. And we now believe we will never get the bonus,” said a primary school teacher from a poor Harare suburb, which has been without water for the past week.