Zimbabwe's Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival

Chapter Fourteen. Remittances, Informalisation and Dispossession in Urban Zimbabwe

Chapter Fourteen Remittances, Informalisation and Dispossession in Urban Zimbabwe Sarah Bracking and Lloyd Sachikonye During the multifaceted crisis that befell Zimbabwe after 2000, the plight of the people was manifest in a shrinking employment market, triple- or four-digit inflation, a dearth of available commodities, rising child mortality rates, falling life expectancy – to the worst female life expectancy in the world – and a governance crisis experienced as political violence, uncertainty and cultural and social isolationism. In this context, remittances have become centrally important to household well-being, reproduction and survival.1 The Zimbabwean crisis is of such magnitude that many of the country’s urban households are now unable to survive without the infusion of remittances from a globallydispersed diaspora.2 This chapter examines the role of remittances in basic survival and privatised social protection in the urban suburbs of Zimbabwe. It examines how individuals and households in urban Zimbabwe have responded to an extended period of economic crisis and retreat by the state into “spoils politics.”3 Optimism surrounding the ability of individuals to build institutions in periods of crisis, to substitute for those formal sector ones which have been functionally lost, must be tempered by a realistic acknowledgement of the limitations desperate and poor people face during such periods . Instead, an understandable widespread social and cultural implosion occurs in the everyday life of people, which remittances, though acts of solidarity, can only temper, not solve. CHAPTER FOURTEEN REMITTANCES, INFORMALISATION AND DISPOSSESSION 325 In Zimbabwe, there is an expanding cross-border, non-pecuniary goods economy and a shrinking, largely unused formal sector. Remitters are increasingly unwilling to use commercial companies, banks or friends and relatives to transit remittances and thus there is a shrinking institutional base for the political economy of remittances. In other words, reliance on the personal physical carriage of money has grown as trust in other individuals and firms has shrunk during a period of deep and extended crisis. This serves to arrest any undue romanticism about the ability of an informal sector to emerge in direct compensation and competition to an ossified formal sector: all institutions are in crisis and the new informal remittance transfer systems are no exception. MetHodoLoGy The data on which this chapter is based was collected in November – December 2005 and then again a year later in the suburbs of Harare and Bulawayo. Because of security concerns, the names and addresses of the original 300 households interviewed in 2005 were not retained. In 2006, a different 300 households in the same districts were interviewed. An exercise in currency renewal had just occurred, where three zeros were removed from the currency’s face value, in a state suffering the excesses of propaganda and fear. Some of the data is corrupted by this numeric confusion and fear-induced unwillingness to respond to strangers’ questions. The purpose of the second survey was to review any changes in remittance sending and receipt statistics since 2005 and, in particular, whether there were indications of a higher state of crisis in the economy; increased informalisation of economic activity; the rate of dollarisation in the informal economy; and changes to households’ living standards as these related to receipt of remittances. The survey also sought to review how the various sectors and institutions of the remittance economy – the informal sector money couriers, the Internet-based money exchangers, the informal commercial companies and cargo carriers – had grown or shrunk in relation to their formal sector comparators and to review the basic organisational contours of a parallel economy in the midst of a governance crisis. Both surveys were conducted in one high-density and one low-density suburb in both Harare and Bulwayo. The suburbs concerned were Mabelreign (low-density) and Highfield (high-density) in Harare and Glencara (low-density) and Nkulumane (high-density) ZIMBABWE’S EXODUS: CRISIS, MIGRATION, SURVIVAL 326 in Bulawayo. In 2006, the low-density Bulawayo sample included 25 households from Khumalo, although this suburb did not feature in 2005. The 2006 survey also included 6 households from low-density Parklands (compared to 24 in 2005). In 2005, 26 households from Selbourne Park were from low-density Bulawayo, but none from this area were included in 2006. All other households were drawn from the same suburbs in both 2005 and 2006. The two samples are relatively comparable by a number of demographic indicators, including age and sex (Table 14.1). Only the Highfield sample showed a...