Zimbabwe's 'lost generation' turns to drugs, sex

PAIDA (not her real name) says she has sex more than once a day with different men. But she does not enjoy it, as she is only doing it to put food on the table.

Paida is a sex worker at Gazaland business and home industrial centre in Highfield, one of Harare's oldest low-class suburbs.

Dressed in a revealing outfit, she joins other sex workers at one of the popular night clubs at Gazaland.

At 21, she is among the youngest of the dozens of women who stand on either side of the road adjacent to the club. She charges $5 for a single session. To avoid spending too much time with one client, she takes them into a nearby abandoned building where they engage in the act.

"Because I have to fend for my two-year-old daughter, I can accept $1 on a bad day," she says, adjusting her blouse to reveal more of her cleavage.

Life in the fast lane of prostitution is traumatising, she says. So she now relies on marijuana and other drugs to keep her mind off her troubles. She lights up a cigarette and takes a long pull before blowing out the smoke.

"I have to work, talk to me tomorrow," she says, as she walks into the bar.

Paida is one of the many victims of the biting economic crisis that has become the bane of many young Zimbabweans, including school leavers and jobless graduates. This is a generation that has never experienced life in a functional economy.

Far from Highfield, where Paida is struggling to earn a living — albeit through means not of her own choice — Charles (26) is destitute after being banished from his family home in Dema, Seke.

A drug addict, Charles was chased from home after his uncle discovered he was now selling livestock and household property to meet the financial demands of his addiction to marijuana and other drugs.

He now hangs out at Dema growth point, where he engages in odd jobs for a dollar or two, money he admits is mainly to acquire drugs.

Puffing on a cigarette, his eyes slightly closed — as if in emotional recollection — he said he enjoyed his early childhood under the care of his father and mother in Highfield.

His father was a baker at a then vibrant bread company.

"He used to bring me some little cakes when I was a little boy," he recalls.

In 2003, Charles' father started vending after losing his job, as companies continued to downsize in response to the unabated economic haemorrhage.

The year 2005 brought the most unfortunate changes to Charles' family. Operation Murambatsvina, a government-driven wave of house demolitions in urban areas, started in June of that year.

The United Nations estimated that over 700 000 people were left hungry, homeless and without a source of income.

Families, whose homes had been summarily destroyed, were either forced to go to their rural homes, or were transported to transit camps, among them Caledonia, just outside Harare. Charles' family was among those directly affected.

Charles' father was not able to go back to selling wares on the streets of Harare, while Charles was forced out of school for nearly a year before enrolling at a school in Dema.

Starting all over was difficult, as the country's economic crisis was deepening, amid rising political instability and collapse of social services, as President Robert Mugabe's government struggled to maintain its stranglehold on power.

While doing his Ordinary Level studies in 2008, the year that Zimbabwe was experiencing the worst economic and governance crisis in its history, as the Mugabe regime — desperate to remain in power — unleashed a systematic military onslaught on people and a cholera epidemic swept across the country, leaving thousands dead.
Charles' parents did not survive the epidemic. With no hope of furthering his education, and heartbroken by the death of his parents, Charles found himself in the dark world of drug abuse.

Just as the Zimbabwean economy has not recovered, Charles has not mended. A visit to the rural homestead revealed a grimmer situation.

Three of Charles' half siblings are all graduates from various colleges and universities, but they spend their time tending to the family garden and looking after livestock. They are jobless.

With the crisis worsening in the midst of the Zanu-PF government's false promise to provide 2,2 million jobs, Charles and Paida find themselves hopeless. They join hundreds of thousands of a generation that has been most affected and traumatised by Mugabe's disastrous economic policies.

University of Zimbabwe lecturer and mental health practitioner, Clement Nhunzvi, who, in 2014, carried out a study titled Occupational Perspective on the Journey of Recovery from Substance Abuse Among Young Adult Zimbabwean Men, pointed to "unemployment, and economic frustration" experienced by youths as the chief driver of drug-related mental cases."

Back in Highfield, Paida dances in the bar. She wiggles her rounded hips, much to the awe of the male patrons. When she was still in Grade 1 at Chembira Primary School in Glen Norah, her teacher made her believe she could one day be a medical doctor.

Typical of an ambitious child then, she recalls how she loved the colour white, as she felt it associated her with the doctors' regalia. In 2008 her teachers and other civil servants, including doctors, were on long strikes and stayaways.

Many professionals were fleeing the country's deteriorating economic environment, leaving Paida and others to spend the better part of their time without any lessons. Despite this drawback, Paida's parents forged ahead and enrolled her at a private college, a privilege that was not accessible to many then.

In 2013, at 18, Paida passed her A Levels with eight points, not enough to get her to medical school. Watching other graduates roam the streets without jobs, Paida did not find an incentive to going to tertiary education. Instead, she fell pregnant and ended up with a toddler to look after, a broken heart, and the responsibility to look after her retired parents.