@ Derrick Wini Dari
Zimbabweans keep blaming the wrong people for economic decay Bulawayo 24 17 June 2026
“There is a comfortable consensus forming in our economic conversations. The vendor on the pavement is the problem. The tuckshop on the corner is the problem. The hawker selling cheap imported wares is the problem. The argument is repeated by economists, ministers, columnists, and city fathers. And the question that always follows is the same: how do we formalise them? But there is a paradox hiding in that question that almost no one stops to examine. How do you formalise something that is already formal? The vendor is already inside the system, already contributing to the fiscus in more ways than they are ever credited for. It is a tidy story, then, but it is also wrong, and we have spent years trying to fix the one part of the chain that was never broken.
Let me begin with what is true, because honesty has to start there. Informality in Zimbabwe is now structural rather than peripheral. Roadside vending reflects distress rather than triumph. Cheap, often counterfeit imports are hollowing out what remains of our formal commerce. None of that is in dispute. The dispute is about who put us here, and who is being asked to carry the blame for it.
The Dollarisation Question
Consider the claim that dollarisation has done deeper, more irreversible damage than hyperinflation. The timeline does not support it. Deindustrialisation began in 1991 with ESAP, when manufacturing fell from 22.8 percent of GDP in 1990 to 17.1 percent by 1998. That is eighteen years before the US dollar arrived. And when it did arrive, it interrupted the collapse rather than deepening it: manufacturing swung from negative 17.1 percent in 2008 to positive 10.2 percent in 2009, and inflation dropped from billions of percent to single digits. The dollar did not kill our industry. It removed the smokescreen hiding a corpse.
What Really Killed Our Industry
What actually killed it was plant that was never retooled. To see how much that mattered, set Zimbabwe beside the nations that chose differently. In 1987 we were not far behind Malaysia in industrial terms, and ahead of much of South-East Asia in schooling. Singapore, South Korea, China and Malaysia then treated industrial upgrading almost as a national religion, reinvesting in machinery, in skills, and above all in research and development. South Korea today spends more than five percent of its economy on research and development; China and Singapore over two percent; even Malaysia around one percent. Zimbabwe's spending has languished at a fraction of one percent, much of it donor-funded. That is the most significant difference between us and them, and it has nothing to do with the dollar. While they retooled, we ran our inherited plant into the ground and called the breakdown a crisis of currency. DIMAF, the 2010 retooling facility, captures the pattern: Old Mutual put in 27 million dollars, Government defaulted on its share, and the terms were so tight that dying firms could not draw on it. By the 2010s, 63 percent of surveyed industries were operating below half capacity.
Other forces compounded this, and saying so strengthens rather than weakens the argument. Land reform collapsed agricultural productivity. The sanctions argument shaped our access to credit. Commodity swings, skills flight, power cuts and decaying infrastructure all played their part. Dollarisation itself entrenched import dependence and stripped us of monetary tools. But these forces compounded the governance failure; they did not cause the loans to go unpaid or the billions to go missing. And of all the causes, governance is the one entirely within our own hands. We cannot legislate away a commodity cycle. We can choose to account for three billion dollars.
Tracing the Real Pipeline
Now to the sharper charge, the vendor as the disease itself. The vendor is never the leaking point, and the easiest way to see it is to trace the pipeline a product travels before it reaches a stall. It starts in a foreign factory the vendor never commissioned. It passes a first gate, the inspection that Bureau Veritas has been paid for a decade to carry out before the goods even ship. It hits a second gate at the border, where under-invoicing and bribed clearance let it through; the Anti-Corruption Commission alone logged over 150 corruption cases at Beitbridge in four years. It passes a third gate, the licensed clearing agents, where insider breaches of the customs system itself have been documented. Then it reaches the importer-wholesaler, where the money actually escapes the country, because when that stock sells they take hard currency and send it back out to restock abroad. Only after all of that does it reach the vendor, who buys stock that has already cleared, or already evaded, every gate behind them, marks it up by a thin margin, and recirculates that margin here.
Pause on the phrase "breaching the customs system," because it deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. A national system is not breached from within by accident. It is breached because it was built, or left, porous enough to be breached. And the asymmetry tells the whole story. The state can name and prosecute a clearing agent to the cent. Hold that against the three billion dollars of Command Agriculture money the Auditor-General could not account for, including close to a billion the Treasury paid directly to suppliers with no transaction detail recorded. We prosecute the small version to the cent and file the large version as an unexplained line in a report. And none of this is hidden. ZIMRA and the Ministry of Finance hold the records of who imports what, in what volume. The importer is named in a database. The vendor is anonymous on a pavement. Yet it is the anonymous one we blame, and the named one we leave alone.
Not Scandals, but Directors' Drawings
And none of this is new, nor did it begin with the dollar. As far back as 1988, the Willowgate scandal saw senior officials loot Willowvale Motor Industries, the state-owned vehicle assembler. The plant could build over four thousand cars a year but managed only fourteen hundred for lack of foreign currency. Faced with an industrial asset crippled by a forex shortage, the elite did not fix the constraint. They monetised the scarcity for themselves.
The pattern scaled. The 2007/08 Farm Mechanisation Programme procured roughly 200 million dollars of equipment, real tractors and combine harvesters, as loans to farmers. When the beneficiary list surfaced years later, it was a roll-call of the powerful: generals, judges, ministers, and presidential relatives. They did not repay. The debt was quietly converted from loan to grant and loaded onto the taxpayer through the Debt Assumption Act of 2015. The assets were real; only the repayment was fictional. Then Command Agriculture, launched in 2016, ran roughly three billion dollars of unappropriated expenditure with an 85 percent default rate, financed for years outside the budget through an oil-trading company handed the contract without an open tender.
Look at them all together, across decades and political eras, and what emerges is something closer to directors' drawings than to public finance. The State was treated, by those with the keys, as a closely-held company they happened to run. What was called a loan was understood, by everyone involved, as something more like a withdrawal. The repayment was theatre. The default rates were not failures of recovery; they were the unspoken terms of the arrangement. Willowgate, DIMAF, Farm Mechanisation, Command Agriculture. Each touched the productive base. Each was drained from the top and the bill passed down. This is not a series of scandals. It is a habit of withdrawal, almost as old as the country itself.
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Very interesting.
One reason why the street vendor is blamed for everything is because he/she is an easy target. The economic collapse has continued even as the war on vendors has intensified, proof the vendors are not the problem!
