The recently presented national budget arrives in a climate that feels eerily familiar. Zimbabweans have once again been told to tighten belts that no longer exist. Austerity has returned in new language but with the same substance.
The cost of living has risen at a pace that outstrips wages. Civil servants are struggling to survive. Businesses are navigating a currency system that inspires neither confidence nor clarity.
This is not a new chapter but rather a continuation of the House of Hunger circumstances that defined much of the tenures of Patrick Chinamasa and Mthuli Ncube. Both men, though intelligent and experienced, ended up presiding over periods marked by shrinking real incomes, erratic monetary reforms, currency uncertainty and a State that repeatedly demanded sacrifice from citizens while shielding politically connected interests. Chinamasa’s years became synonymous with the quiet reintroduction of money creation through Treasury Bills.
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These instruments ballooned domestic debt and fuelled the eventual collapse of parity between electronic balances and real United States dollars. Poverty deepened as cash shortages worsened and businesses closed. Ncube’s promises of modernisation and technocratic renewal soon collided with the political realities of unilateral governance.
His reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar produced a cascade of inflationary shocks. Prices rose weekly, parallel market rates became the real reference point and citizens endured an austerity that offered no corresponding sense of hope. Both ministers confronted structural decay, but neither could overcome the political forces that demanded optics over honesty.
It is against this backdrop of recurring hardship that Zimbabweans increasingly cast their minds back to the period from 2009 to 2013 when Tendai Biti served as Minister of Finance under the Government of National Unity. It was the only time in recent memory when policy stability felt real, when shops stayed stocked without the need for cross-border hustles, when salaries held value and when the State operated with something approaching fiscal honesty. To understand why the Biti years are so frequently invoked as a benchmark, one must contrast them with the tenures of Chinamasa and Ncube.
All three men inherited toxic economic environments, but their responses differed sharply. Zimbabwe’s long crisis is as much a story of political power as it is a story of macroeconomic choices. Biti happened to operate in a political window that demanded discipline and restrained excess. Chinamasa and Ncube operated in the typical environment of unilateral ZANU PF rule where short-term political survival routinely overrides technocratic sense.
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