Zimbabwe experienced ‘robust growth’ for who, Mr. President?

Source: Zimbabwe experienced ‘robust growth’ for who, Mr. President? When those at the highest echelons of power lose touch with the people they are meant to serve, their priorities become completely divorced from the needs of ordinary citizens. Tendai Ruben Mbofana When President Emmerson Mnangagwa declares that Zimbabwe has enjoyed a “year of robust growth […]

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Source: Zimbabwe experienced ‘robust growth’ for who, Mr. President?

When those at the highest echelons of power lose touch with the people they are meant to serve, their priorities become completely divorced from the needs of ordinary citizens.

Tendai Ruben Mbofana

When President Emmerson Mnangagwa declares that Zimbabwe has enjoyed a “year of robust growth and enhanced services,” one is compelled to ask a painfully simple but unavoidable question: robust growth for who?

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For the millions of Zimbabweans struggling to survive on the margins, such claims sound not only detached from reality, but almost cruel.

According to reports carried by The Herald, the President told his Cabinet—at its final meeting of the year—that the Second Republic has ushered the country into “a new era of hope, development and improved service delivery,” citing economic resilience, fiscal prudence, and policy coordination under the National Development Strategy 1.

These are impressive phrases on paper, and they may even satisfy technocrats and political elites who measure progress through spreadsheets and GDP figures.

But for ordinary Zimbabweans, progress is measured very differently.

You cannot eat GDP.

You cannot medicate cancer with growth rates.

You cannot educate a child with slogans.

Zimbabwe may well be recording an economic growth rate of 6.6 percent, and government officials may proudly cite a US$44 billion GDP, but these numbers are meaningless when public hospitals have no functioning cancer treatment facilities, no diagnostic equipment, and no essential medicines.

They mean nothing when patients are asked to bring their own bandages, syringes, and painkillers, or are told—without shame—that the hospital has nothing to offer them except a referral to an expensive private facility they cannot afford.

If a mother dies because the public health system failed her at her most vulnerable moment, what consolation is a “robust” growth rate?

If a family must sell livestock, household property, or take humiliating loans to pay for basic treatment that should be publicly available, what exactly has grown?

The true test of economic growth is not found in Cabinet speeches, glossy policy documents, or carefully curated state media headlines.

It is found in the lived experiences of citizens.

It is found in whether clinics have drugs, whether hospitals have specialists, whether ambulances arrive on time, and whether healthcare workers are properly paid and motivated.

By those measures, Zimbabwe is not experiencing robust growth—it is enduring systemic decay.

The same applies to education.

Government officials frequently speak of investment, modernisation, and development, yet our public schools tell a different story.

Classrooms without textbooks.

Schools without running water or proper sanitation.

Teachers earning salaries that barely cover basic food and transport to work.

Parents forced to shoulder ever-increasing fees, levies, “fund-raising” charges in a country where formal employment has collapsed.

We are told the economy is growing, yet children are being sent home for non-payment of fees.

We are told service delivery has improved, yet students sit on floors, share outdated textbooks, or learn under trees.

We are told there is hope, yet the future confronting our young people is one of street vending, cross-border trading, or migration—often dangerous, undocumented, and dehumanising.

What kind of “robust growth” produces a generation whose greatest aspiration is simply to leave the country?

Even more alarming is the persistent and rising poverty in Zimbabwe.

Recent verified data indicates that around 80 percent of Zimbabweans live below the lower middle-income poverty line of $5.50 a day—a figure that has actually been increasing over the past few years.

When the majority of citizens are trapped in such poverty, grappling with hunger, unemployment, and lack of basic services, no other statistic—be it GDP growth or fiscal prudence—carries any meaning.

Real progress cannot be declared while such extreme deprivation persists.

Infrastructure projects are often paraded as evidence of progress—rehabilitated roads, refurbished airports, and new buildings.

Infrastructure matters, yes, but it cannot be fetishised while people go hungry.

A newly tarred road offers little comfort to a parent who cannot put food on the table or pay school fees.

A modern airport does nothing for a nurse earning the equivalent of a few hundred US dollars while watching patients die from treatable conditions.

Development is not aesthetic.

It is not about appearances.

It is about outcomes.

Traffic interchanges do not educate children.

Airports do not heal the sick.

Economic growth that does not translate into improved living standards for the majority is not growth—it is exclusion.

The President speaks of unity and hard work under the philosophy of “Nyika inovakwa nevene vayo.”

Yet one must ask: who exactly is building this country, and who is benefiting from that labour?

The informal trader working 14-hour days to survive?

The civil servant whose salary is eroded by inflation before it even reaches their account?

The youth hustling without capital, protection, or prospects?

If Zimbabwe’s growth were truly robust, it would be visible in rising real incomes, not deepening poverty.

It would be reflected in reduced inequality, not obscene wealth accumulation by a politically connected few.

It would be evident in functioning public institutions, not in the normalisation of failure.

Real growth uplifts workers.

It attracts investment that respects local communities, labour rights, and the environment.

It strengthens public services so that healthcare and education are rights, not privileges.

It restores dignity to citizens and offers genuine opportunity to the young.

Anything less is statistical gymnastics designed to mask suffering.

There is nothing wrong with economic data, but numbers divorced from human experience become propaganda.

When growth figures coexist with widespread hunger, collapsing services, and mass informalisation, they lose moral and political legitimacy.

A government serious about development does not lecture its citizens about success while their daily realities scream crisis.

Zimbabweans are not asking for miracles.

They are asking for honesty.

They are asking for leadership that acknowledges failure where it exists and fixes it, rather than celebrating itself while the nation bleeds.

They are asking for a definition of growth that includes them.

So, Mr. President, when you raise a toast to “great success” and declare an era of hope, one must ask again: hope for whom?

Because for the majority of Zimbabweans, hope remains deferred, services continue to deteriorate, and survival—not prosperity—is still the daily struggle.

Until economic growth translates into full hospitals, functional schools, affordable living, and dignified work, claims of “robust growth” will remain hollow words—echoing loudly in the corridors of power, but unheard and unfelt in the lives of the people who matter most.

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