Against the Odds: A History of Zimbabwe Project

25. Hanging On, 2005–2007

— 351 — The new board recruited by Tobias Chipare was full of enthusiasm and energy and represented a variety of backgrounds and interests – business, tertiary education, human resources, health and finance, for example. On balance, though, the members had more associations with the business world than the NGO world, a fact that would help them to provide firm guidance but would require some to accustom themselves to a different mode of operating. After a year of interim chairmanship, an election was held, and Mary Ndlovu handed over to the dynamic leadership of Edwin Murwira. At the new board’s first meeting, in February 2005, priorities were set for the year, including the holding of an induction and orientation of the board members. This took place in May, conducted by Simon Matsvai, who knew ZimPro from the evaluation he had undertaken in 1995. Board committees were established and began to operate as the director also gained support for restructuring the organisation to meet changing needs. Yet if anyone thought that ZimPro would now be able to return to some kind of normal operating mode, they were suffering from delusions. The new board would have to carry the organisation through the worst years so far. While some Zimbabweans may have held out hopes that the 2005 parliamentary election would bring a political change and a return to some kind of rational policy-making at national level, they were to be disappointed. After another violent election in March saw ZANU-PF managing to win the majority of the parliamentary seats, the government unleashed a vicious assault on the infor25 Hanging On 2005–2007 — 352 — Against the Odds: a history of Zimbabwe Project mal sector in which so many retrenched urban workers and evicted farm workers had sought refuge. Within two months, between May and July, in an operation which quickly came to be known as Murambatsvina, they succeeded in destroying the livelihoods and homes of hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans , and sent many back to their rural homes. In the process they also struck the fatal blow to ZimPro’s Savings and Credit Scheme. This occurred at a time when it was becoming clear that agriculture under the ‘land reform’ was not recovering and the whole economy was in freefall. Food, as well as all agricultural inputs and most manufactured goods, were difficult to obtain. As the dollar continued to devalue, accompanied by unprecedented levels of inflation, cash shortages began to surface. The Reserve Bank, in its wisdom, chose to deal with this issue by printing more notes, inventing the ‘bearer cheque’, which, without being official currency, circulated as such in ever-higher denominations. As citizens queued at banks for hours with bags to carry away their bricks of million-, billionand eventually trillion-dollar notes, the entire population sunk into impoverished misery while Gideon Gono played games, deleting zeros from the notes whenever they became so many that they crashed computer accounting programmes. Financial gymnastics All for-profit and not-for-profit organisations faced financial and accounting nightmares. Since NGOs received most of their income from overseas denominated in foreign currency, they were to some extent sheltered from the worst effects of the devaluing dollar. The problem, however, was that government fixed official rates far below what could be attained at any given time on the black market. What was the ethical solution for an organisation trying to make the most of money received to feed starving people? To break the law by arranging exchanges on the black market, or stick to it and lose millions and millions of Zimbabwe dollars? There were agencies that offered a service of exchanging funds received from outside the country into Zimbabwe dollars at rates far above the official ones, apparently — 353 — Hanging On through direct negotiation with the Reserve Bank, but such ad hoc solutions were in a grey legal zone; everyone was looking for ways to maximise the funds they had, but no one was sure exactly what was permitted and what was not. Rumours circulated that the government itself was driving the devaluation and inflation by changing money through black market dealers; but even if it was true, in the lawless environment which prevailed, it did not mean that NGOs would be spared punishment if they were found to be doing the same thing. For a while it was possible to invest money at high...