Zimbabwe’s railways have run out of track
In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, passenger rail services across the country were suspended, and three years on have yet to return.
To qualify for credit from international lenders, the country defunded its railways in the 1990s. The loans failed to prevent Zim’s economic meltdown in the 2000s. And slowly but surely its trains ground to a halt.
The many fatalities of the Covid pandemic in Zimbabwe include its once storied passenger rail services. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, passenger rail services across the country were suspended, and three years on have yet to return. It is doubtful they ever will. At Harare’s main train station, carriages stand idle. Not formally decommissioned, but seemingly abandoned by their erstwhile custodians and adopted instead by a motley crew: homeless people, sex workers and drug dealers now occupy some of the old passenger trains.
“We find shelter here on the trains when it rains, and warmth in winter,” says Bernard Chongwe, who has nowhere else to call home.
A young woman in the sex work industry tells The Continent that she has been sneaking clients onto the derelict carriages since there are “no charges for using them”. Not that there would be much to pay for: the carriages have no lighting or water. The toilets are filthy. The tracks beneath them are overgrown. The train station is a far cry from the buzzing travel hub of its heyday, and the abandoned coaches show no sign of their former glory. But make no mistake: glory there was.
Precious Shumba, now 47, recalls the experience of travelling by train as a youngster in the 1990s: “It was a hive of activity, you would meet friends, fellow villagers and even schoolmates. For me, the most exciting train ride was on the Harare to Rusape journeys.”
Shumba’s rural home of Rusape is 200km to the east of Harare, in Manicaland Province. As a teenager, he would walk 22km to the nearest station to board the Harare-bound train. It embarked at 11pm and arrived in the city the next morning at 6am. He remembers with great fondness the smartly appointed carriages, the tempting snacks for sale, and the sheer adventure of the experience. “I wonder if our children will have similar experiences,” he says. “It would be interesting to have them get on the train and travel to Rusape.”
The memories of Lucy Yasini, 57, are similarly rosy, though her best recollections pre-date even the 1990s of Shumba’s youth. “It was nice those days. We used the train because it was organised, cheap, safe and timely,” she says. “I would leave Harare by train at 9pm and be in Bulawayo by 5.30am the next day, just in time for breakfast with family.”
Even the country’s political elite travelled by train. “I remember the wife of former president Canaan Banana used the train, riding in first class,” says Yasini. “It was real first class – a bed with fresh linen and blankets and nice food that was prepared by the railway staff.”
This was before the World Bank and International Monetary Fund forced Zimbabwe’s government to drastically reduce spending in the 1990s, in the socalled Economic Structural Adjustment Programme, in order to qualify for the hefty loans the country sought.
By the height of Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown in 2007, hundreds of railway workers had left, their wages rendered worthless by hyperinflation.
“When trains were fully functional, I did business easily and cheaply,” says Rati Chihota, who imports second-hand clothes to Harare via Mozambique’s Beira port. “Now I have to pay more for road transport and for police, who require all sorts of non-existent paperwork.”
Cargo does still move on the tracks, but only barely. Just 2.3-million tonnes a year these days, according to National Railways of Zimbabwe figures.
As for train travel? By 2020 passenger rail in Zimbabwe was already near the end of the line. Covid was merely the final stop.