By Taruberekera Masara |Poverty of shame is one of serious issues bedeviling Zimbabwe as a country. It is shameful that in a glaring case of acute unemployment Emmerson Mnangagwa’s stay beyond constitutionally prescribed 2 terms becomes a big and central issue. It seems to me that he is more visible than the suffering nation.

Discredited youth leaders in the mould of Taurai Kandishaya and his cabal choose to ignore the sickening unemployment levels in the country and peddle the succession battles as if they are so important more than the livelihood of the masses of the unemployed youth which they claim to represent. 

It’s so mad.

Reason Wafawarova once highlighted that ZANU Pf politicians hate to look into the mirror. They fear seeing how bad they’re. The choose a discourse with feel good morphines than to address the pressing issues weighing down our country. 

Unemployment in Zimbabwe should litter our public sphere.Unfortunaty it doesn’t,some peripheral issues take the fore. 

Unemployment in Zimbabwe doesn’t get as much attention and urgency in terms of public policy that it deserves. One of the reasons is that the unemployed suffer from the worst combination possible: invisibility and voicelessness. According to British poet Stephen Spender they are not “starvingly visible and shoutingly audible”. 

They can’t speak for themselves. No organisation represents them. They are simply not seen and unheard. We, you and me, and policymakers — talk about these citizens only in statistical terms. They have no faces, no families. President Emerson Mnangagwa will comfortably present us the parliament, the Senate,his cabinet, but won’t show us her unemployed twin.

As if to confirm the invisibility of the unemployed, unemployment data speaks of certain figures that beats even first world countries. The concerned minister,  will strongly contend that the numbers were accurate, the unemployed weren’t seen on the streets. And you will be shocked.

By the end of the June 2024 there were more than 5-million of them. At the height of the Great Depression in 1933 about 12.8-million Americans were unemployed, according to the Franklin D Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, a rate of about 25% in statistical terms. 

The US Federal Reserve describes the Great Depression as “the longest and deepest downturn” in the history of the modern industrial economy. It lasted for more than a decade. 

Zimbabwe is in no similar depression. Yet more than 67.83% of its labour force — or measured, another way, 78% of the population aged between 15 and 64 — are without jobs. That has been the case for a decades and more. 

That figure includes more than 3-million people who are classified as discouraged work-seekers simply because they hadn’t been out searching for jobs in the four weeks preceding the date of the survey by UNICEF. To be shoved into this tent of discouraged work-seekers, a person must also have given one of the following reasons: there were no jobs available in the area; unable to find work requiring his/her skills; and lost hope of finding any kind of work. 

To have such a figure of people unemployed, and for this long, should have spurred the nation to pull out all stops to try and get them into jobs.It is the invisibility and the voicelessness that even the politicians, whose lack of modesty of ambition (promises) is well known, have become modest in their electoral promises.

It is sad that this waste of human potential isn’t enough to galvanise all of us to do something, including kicking politicians hard in their backside to get them to act with urgency and purpose. 

 Spender articulated the problem clearly in his autobiography, World Within World.

“So our generation was driven into politics because world events presented us with situations in which it seemed impossible for us not to take sides. The first of those was the Wall Street crash of 1929, producing millions of unemployed not only in America but also in Europe.” 

 “Today we see the unemployed more often on television screens. They are images moving across glass screens, harvested for us from all over the world by a camera crew and some reporter who interprets them for us.

“These are three-dimensional figures transformed almost to abstractions — while we sit in our rooms perhaps eating dinners or high teas and watch them. The viewer may be shaken or depressed or distressed by these images, but they do not step out of the screen into his room, or shout from the street up to his windows. Everything today is spectacle.” 

In 1929 the unemployed “were starvingly visible and shoutingly audible”.

This moved young writers, himself included, who had thought that as artists politics wasn’t for them. They woke up to the fact that the economic system that had “enabled them to go (say) to university (and, in my own case, had provided me with a small private income)” could not provide the unemployed with jobs. The unemployed, the young writers noticed, were also being subjected to a means test “before they could receive the dole”. 

So, taking a cue from Spender, Zimbabwe ’s unemployment isn’t going to get the urgency and public policy seriousness it deserves because many of us who continue to benefit from the country’s economy think politics isn’t for us. And we will continue to think so because the unemployed aren’t starvingly visible and shoutingly audible in our living rooms.