We got here; we didn’t think we could or would. A coup in November 2017 and then a contested poll in 2018 left us with armed soldiers on the streets of Harare shooting innocent people in broad daylight. From then till now, nothing was guaranteed.

We’ve watched our life savings, pensions and salaries crash and burn. Converted from US dollars to Zimbabwe dollars, our lives have been destroyed. More of our friends and families have left the country to survive.

We’ve watched democratic space shrink and repressive laws grow; democratic activists incarcerated for months at a time. The threads of survival grew more tenuous by the day.

Meeting a friend I hadn’t seen for months recently, I commented that he looked very thin.

And he said, so simply, so honestly: ‘I can’t afford to buy enough food anymore.’

That said it all. For all of us, it is the simple truth.

I stopped on a mountain roadside the other day, and a man came and stood under a tree. He looked exhausted and not in a good way at all. The only food I had was two bananas, which I held out to him. He clapped his hands, thanked me, took the fruit as if it were a precious treasure and ate it in seconds.

Such small things we can do in Zimbabwe, all of us, every day, to help each other survive this.

That’s what our lives have come down to: our clothes get more threadbare, our faces more gaunt and again and again, we put another hole in our belts.

Beyond absurd

To say that the run-up to election 2023 has been absurd is a huge understatement.

No electoral reforms, no votes for disenfranchised citizens by birth, constitutional provisions not backed up by legislation, no final voters roll, no number and location of polling stations, and so much more.

Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) candidate Senator David Coltart described it as: “The most illegal election I’ve ever participated in, it’s illegality on steroids.”

On election day, we saw the result of the illegalities: frustration, confusion, disbelief.

Journalist Hopewell Chin’ono describes it best: “The worst election in Zimbabwe’s post-colonial history … Polling stations didn’t have voting ballot papers … Choreographed voter suppression … this election is a complete disaster of unimaginable proportions.”

As I write this letter long before dawn the morning after the elections, there is trepidation and a cold fear in our hearts about how this will end.

Results should be released in days.

Copyright © Cathy Buckle