The massive internal displacement of people that resulted from OM in 2005, has been
followed by further economic, humanitarian and political crises that have created seemingly
impossible conditions for Zimbabwe’s citizens. In 2008, a combination of political violence on
a scale unseen since the 1980s, the total economic implosion of the nation with inflation
running into the millions of percent, the almost total closure of schools and hospitals and the
resulting cholera epidemic, all led to another exponential movement of people, this time out of
the country in search of work, basic services and safe haven. In a previous report, we
documented that in 2008‐9, the rate of diasporisation increased onehundredfold from
that of the 1990s, in rural Matabeleland at least.6
3.
In this report
We follow up on previous OM research conducted by SPT in 2005 and 2006,7 and build on our
narratives of the lives of particular families and informal settlements from 2005 to 2010. The
story is a grim one, with many of those we remembered now prematurely dead, and others
living in unspeakable poverty.
Our 2010 research shows that in Bulawayo’s high density suburbs, the financial and other
crises of 2008 managed to achieve what OM failed to – namely, decongestion of urban housing
appears to have occurred, with properties that in 2006 housed 10 or more people, now
housing two or three. The large scale loss of dwellings and livelihoods that occurred during
OM in 2005, pushed millions of people to the very edge of survival. Successive further blows
to fragile and failing survival networks as the economy collapsed during 2007‐9 have led to
the anonymous deaths of many, while others have continued to live in dire urban conditions.
Bearing in mind the very high 2008 diasporisation rates that we have referred to, urban
decongestion is perhaps not that surprising. Ironically, considering the government’s stated
aim of OM to drive people back to rural areas ‐ and its failure by and large to achieve this at
the time ‐ we have also found that since 2008 many of Bulawayo’s urbanites are reported to
have returned to their rural homes. Contributing factors appear to have been: inability to
pay the costs of renting and living in the disastrous hyperinflation of the city; the need for
non‐existent foreign exchange to survive via the black market in 2008, and since 2009 to pay
utility bills; the hope of becoming eligible for food aid, which was more likely to be accessed
via rural areas, in a situation where shops countrywide were bare of commodities. In 2008,
mission hospitals and schools in rural areas remained almost the only ones functioning
countrywide, as government institutions collapsed, and so the search for health services in
particular may have provided further impetus to some of those “going rural”.
The deconstruction of urban society that was begun by OM and escalated by the ruralisation
and diasporisation of 2008‐9 in the wake of political violence and economic collapse, has
undermined the social movement and the MDC’s ability to organise. With the shrinking of the
formal employment base in the last five years, and a corresponding shrinking of the power of
the trades unions, MDC and civil society remain structurally in a weakened position in 2010.
6 www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/127/gone‐to‐egoli/ page 14 for the 2009 research on diasporisation. One
person per hundred families migrated yearly in 1991, and by 2009, one person per family was migrating
annually ‐ this was a hundred‐fold increase, and a three‐fold increase over the rate of diasporisation in 2005,
post OM, which saw 31 people migrating per 100 families.
7 SPT (June 2005), Discarding the filth, (October 2005) Crime of Poverty, (August 2006) Meltdown, all available
on www.solidaritypeacetrust.org/reports/
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