COVID19: a Pandemic for the Privileged

Early this morning, my grandmother woke me to say that our water supplies were depleted. My job was to find a local borehole that had uncontaminated water and refill our containers. Easier said than done when my neighbourhood is considered a cholera hotspot. As I got to the borehole I found I was not the only one on a mission; a few dozen other people were standing in line to fill multiple 20-litre buckets with the precious commodity.

As I returned home from my mission, I realised we were also running out of cooking gas; a resource I’d previously campaigned against using whilst working with Oxfam in the UK, due to the associated negative ecological impact. Nevertheless, this gas remains the primary source of energy for my family and a couple of thousand others in my city. It is cheaper, readily available and cleaner to use than firewood, the main alternative.

We haven’t had electricity to cook within almost a month; the public energy supplier, the sole provider for all of Zimbabwe, is notoriously slow to respond to faults on a good day, let alone during the current lockdown. Furthermore, without the energy to power refrigerators or freezers, families are unable to buy perishables in bulk. This makes food shopping vastly more expensive and requires us to make daily trips to markets.

Despite my education and professional experience, I am not middle class. A number of my neighbours are in the same situation: they have what would be termed middle-class jobs in other countries, but their salaries are barely enough to live on. Here in Zimbabwe, teachers, middle managers, and nurses belong to a group known as the working poor.

But even with these difficulties, my neighbourhood is not the worst-off. Many Zimbabweans were living in unstable conditions before COVID-19 and millions more have been pushed into poverty and vulnerability because of it.

As the rest of the globalised world attempts to plan for a return to normal, whatever that entails, there are still over a billion people around the world who are unable to imagine what their lives will be like in a month’s time. With most African countries recording surprisingly low cases and death rates from COVID-19, people here are only beginning to understand the severity of the threat that the novel coronavirus poses. Health systems in low-income countries like Zimbabwe are not adequately equipped to deal with even a small increase in the number of COVID-19 cases, but even more importantly, we are certainly not prepared to deal with the current epidemic of financial destitution spreading throughout our communities.

Our government’s response to COVID-19 has followed the same global trend of apathy and disinterest in the face of stark warnings. It wasn’t until a prominent individual from a wealthy family was struck down by the virus that the Zimbabwean government finally started taking it seriously. The resulting lockdowns rendered more than 70% of the working population who rely on small-to-medium businesses temporarily jobless. Most of these people that relied on daily incomes now struggle to meet pay for necessities, and with the additional limitations on movement and conducting business, their situations become even more difficult with no additional support in sight.

There is no justification for preventing one epidemic by starting another. The lockdowns are there to serve “the greater good of the public”, but it is the same public we are sending to the gallows of poverty. The threat posed by COVID-19 could dissipate sooner than expected, but the socio-economic effects left by the responses we have currently adopted will persist for much longer.

After all, for the 40 years Zimbabwe has existed as an independent state, we have experienced multiple epidemics in the forms of recurrent waves of cholera and the endemic burden of HIV. We are still dealing with the damage they have caused. However, unlike the cases of cholera or HIV, there is no treatment to hold COVID-19 at bay. Without adequate clinical provision and management, death often follows, leaving the families of the deceased to pick up the remaining economic burdens. Lockdowns against COVID-19 directly affect families in similar ways, and while governments in the global North have been able to legislate methods by which to protect their citizens against total destitution, the global South appears to have no such capacity.

On a daily basis, I see people who are in desperate need of money or food assistance. In my own neighbourhood, reports of people waking up to find their vegetable gardens empty or their fruit trees harvested aren’t uncommon. Who can blame the culprits? People are hungry. What is difficult to imagine is how social protection services can be accelerated in places that had no semblance of such services before.

Our government promised to roll out a cash-assistance program whereby vulnerable families identified through a sophisticated algorithm would receive the equivalent of $3.50. This is barely enough to feed one person for a week, and what’s more, Zimbabwe’s current hyper-inflationary environment would erode the handout’s value no sooner as it had been dispensed. Even so, to date, there has been no evidence of this policy’s implementation and no families report receipt of the assistance.

For people who are hungry or thirsty, the ideals of staying at home and social distancing are an afterthought. In high-density areas in Harare queues are popping up everywhere; be it for fetching water, buying food or collecting remittances. Survival is the number one priority for many people, and the possibility of death at the hands of an invisible virus is deemed to be less pressing than the certainty of death that comes from starvation.

The International Labour organisation notes that “with these workers needing to work to feed their families, COVID-19 containment measures in many countries cannot be implemented successfully. This is endangering governments’ efforts to protect the population and fight the pandemic. It may become a source of social tension in countries with large informal economies.”

The lockdowns are a reminder that there can never be a universal prescription to a challenge that clearly affects countries and individuals differently. In the realm of global health, policies that are effective in the global North are often less so in low- to medium-income countries, especially when they take no account of the local governmental, economic or cultural structures that already exist. COVID-19 is a public health disaster, but staying at home has proven to be effective in mitigating its spread. In most developed countries, particularly those with moderate to excellent social services, the social impact of the virus is mostly faced by already marginalised groups that find it hard to access these services, such as the homeless, migrants, and refugees.

However, for countries like Zimbabwe, the devastation wreaked upon most working-class families extends far beyond viral infections. Financial destitution and the lack of access to everyday essentials brings with it a host of other risks, meaning that for the billions living in poverty across the globe, lockdown is a luxury that comes at too high a price.

This blog post was co-authored by Craig Dube and Jamie Smyth, and was originally published on their joint blog platform Enzana.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.