Smash hit

The government claims the centre of Harare had become unsightly and that the campaign is aimed at shutting down black market operators whom they accused of trading scarce commodities such as sugar and the staple mealie meal, and illegal foreign exchange transactions. Every day last week anonymous letters were printed in the state-owned Zimbabwe Herald newspaper supporting the clean-up campaign as “long overdue”.

Another suggestion was that the vendors had been cleared out to make way for Chinese traders. China has become Mugabe’s new best friend, supplying commercial and military planes and sending in advisers.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that people were given almost no warning and have been provided with no alternative. With unemployment at 80%, selling sweets or phone cards, cutting hair or mending shoes by the side of the road is the only way most people can survive.

Yesterday many of the victims were too scared to talk to a British journalist, fearing the presence of intelligence agents in their midst. At Mbare, people milled around stunned.

A few brave souls were still trying to sell odd things they had managed to retrieve, only to be rounded up again by police. One man showed me heaps of rotting vegetables stamped and trodden on by laughing militia, an incredible insult in a country where aid agencies estimate almost half the population of 11m is facing starvation.

Nearby, a group of women huddled by piles of empty chicken coops, one breastfeeding a tiny baby. “What are we supposed to do?” asked one. “We have nothing left to sell and now sleep here, freezing at night. We cannot send our children to school. How can they do this and give us nowhere else to live or work?”

When no police were around, a man in a black felt hat sold me a kitchen sieve at an exaggerated price to raise the bus fare for him and his family to move to a village near the Mozambique border.

The man said his home of seven years was first bulldozed then set ablaze on Tuesday, destroying everything he had worked for in just an hour.

“They came at 6am. We were still sleeping, then they started breaking the house with no warning. I have five children including a seven-month-old baby and they were terrified.

“To think I used to vote for him,” he added, pointing at a torn calendar on the ground bearing Mugabe’s face.

There were similar scenes in Bulawayo. Traders at the town’s Fifth Avenue market, which was licensed by the city council, sat on the kerbside staring at the wreckage in disbelief.

The clean-up campaign is the latest in a series of measures against Mugabe’s own people to have been carried out by the increasingly irrational 81-year-old president.

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