'Restoring Order'? Operation murambatsvina and the urban crisis in Zimbabwe

Journal of Southern African Studies

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 273-291

  Potts, Deborah ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

POVERTY; URBAN ECONOMY; URBAN HOUSING; URBAN POPULATION;

AFRICA; SOUTHERN AFRICA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; ZIMBABWE;

EID: 33745111253     PISSN: 03057070     EISSN: 14653893     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03057070600656200     Document Type: Article

References (111)

1. M.C. Hoek-Smit, Housing Demand Study, Harare, Draft Report (prepared for US Agency for International Development, Harare, mimeo, 1982).
2. C. Rakodi, Harare: Inheriting a Settler Colonial City: Change or Continuity? (Chichester, Wiley, 1995).
3. Ibid., p. 128.
4. Zimbabwe National Vulnerability Assessment Committee [hereafter ZNVAC] (in collaboration with the SADC FANR Vulnerability Assessment Committee), Zimbabwe: Urban Areas Food Security and Vulnerability Assessment, September 2003 (Harare, Urban Report No. 1, 2004). [www.reliefweb.int/library/documents/2003/govzim-zim-30sep.pdf]
5. Murambatsvina can be variously translated from chiShona. 'Drive out the rubbish' is one possible rendition, although the government preferred to translate it as 'Restore Order'.
6. The campaign trickled on beyond July, but the main damage was done.
7. A. Tibaijuka, Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Zimbabwe to Assess the Scope and Impact of Operation Murambatsvina by the UN Special Envoy on Human Settlements Issues in Zimbabwe (United Nations, 2005) [http://www.un.org/News/dh/infocus/zimbabwe/zimbabwe_rpt.pdf]
8. Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum (ZHNGO), Order out of Chaos, or Chaos out of Order? A Preliminary Report on Operation "Murambatsvina" (ZHNGO, June 2005)
9. Action Aid International in collaboration with the Combined Harare Residents'Association [hereafter Action Aid/CHRA], A Study on the Impact of 'Operation Murambatsvina/Restore Order' in 26 Wards of Harare High Density Housing Areas, (July 2005) [www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0001388/ index.php]
10. Centre on Housing Rights and Eviction, Human Rights Watch, "Clear the Filth": Mass Evictions and Demolitions in Zimbabwe, (backgrounder, September 2005), [http://hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/zimbabwe0905/]
11. Solidarity Peace Trust, Discarding the Filth: Operation Murambatsvina: Interim Report on the Zimbabwean Government's 'Urban Cleansing' and Forced Eviction Campaign, May/June 2005 [http://www.ijr.org.za/transitionaljustice/zim/sptdf]
12. Trocaire, Chronology of Events Since Housing Demolition, Zimbabwe [http://www.trocaire.org/international/africa/zimbabweevents.htm]
13. Report to South African Council of Churches, Pastoral Visit to Zimbabwe on 10-11 July 2005 [http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/jul19_2005.html]
14. NVAC, Zimbabwe: Urban Areas.
15. D. Potts and C.C. Mutambirwa, 'High-Density Housing in Harare: Commodification and Overcrowding', Third World Planning Review, 13, 1 (1991), pp. 1-26
16. D. Potts and C.C. Mutambirwa, 'Rural-Urban Linkages in Contemporary Harare: Why Migrants Need Their Land', Journal of Southern African Studies, 16, 4 (1990), pp. 676-96
17. D. Potts and C.C. Mutambirwa, "Basics are Now a Luxury": Perceptions of ESAP's Impact on Rural and Urban Areas in Zimbabwe', Environment and Urbanization: Special Issue on 'Beyond the Rural-Urban Divide', 10, 1 (1998), pp. 55-76
18. D. Potts, 'Urban Unemployment and Migrants in Africa: Evidence from Harare, 1985-94', Development and Change, 31, 4 (2000), pp. 879-910
19. D. Potts, '"All my Hopes and Dreams are Shattered": Urbanization and Migrancy in an Imploding Economy - Zimbabwe in the 21st century', Geoforum (forthcoming 2006).
20. D. Potts, 'Urban Growth and Urban Economies in Eastern and Southern Africa: Trends and Prospects', in D. Bryceson, and D. Potts (eds), African Urban Economies: Viability, Vitality or Vitiation of Major Cities in East and Southern Africa? (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2005)
21. D. Potts, 'Regional Urbanization and Urban Livelihoods in the Context of Globalization' in D. Potts, and T. Bowyer-Bower (eds), Eastern and Southern Africa: Development Challenges in a Volatile Region (Harlow, Pearsons, IBG/DARG Series, 2004), pp. 328-68
22. D. Potts, 'Counter-Urbanization on the Zambian Copperbelt? Interpretations and Implications', Urban Studies, 42, 4 (2005), pp. 583-609
23. D. Potts, 'Urban Lives: Adopting New Strategies and Adapting Rural Links', in C. Rakodi (ed.), The Urban Challenge in Africa: Growth and Management of its Large Cities (Tokyo, United Nations University Press, 1997), pp. 447-94
24. D. Potts, 'Shall we go home? Increasing Urban Poverty in African Cities and Migration Processes', Geographical Journal, 161, 3 (1995), pp. 245-64.
25. The operation was nicknamed Operation Tsunami by the victims, due to its speed and ferocity.
26. These are the men who control access to the 'kombis' (minibuses) at 'taxi ranks' which provide most urban people with their means of public transport.
27. Verbatim report of speech appearing as Appendix 2 in Solidarity Peace Trust, 'Discarding the Filth', p. 36.
28. The speech was also reproduced in the Saturday Herald [Zimbabwe], 28 May 2005, p. 5.
29. Housing demolitions had actually begun two days earlier in Chitungwiza, Harare's large 'dormitory' township, 26 kilometres away. See Trocaire, Chronology of Events.
30. Official opposition, from either the central government or city governments, to informal housing and employment in urban areas was definitely not unprecedented in Zimbabwe - it was the scale and thoroughness of Operation Murambatsvina which set it apart. Furthermore this opposition had fluctuated over time and between different forms of government, and there had been a notable downturn in the central government's enforcement of many regulations as the 1990s progressed; see A. Kamete, 'Civil Society, Housing and Urban Governance: The Case of Urban Housing Co-operatives in Zimbabwe', in A. Tostensen, I. Tvedten and M. Vaa (eds), Associational Life in African Cities: Popular Responses to the Urban Crisis (Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2001)
31. A. Kamete, 'US AID's Private Sector Housing Programme in Urban Zimbabwe: Examining the Terrain from the Terraces', Environment and Urbanization, 13, 1 (2001), pp. 125-35
32. O. Musandu-Nyamayaro, 'Housing Design Standards for Urban Low-Income People in Zimbabwe', Third World Planning Review, 15, 4 (1993), pp. 329-54.
33. Nonetheless, this did not represent a true change of commitment to 'order' by many in the government and I have argued that a prevalent official ideology of a planned and modern urban environment was one of the factors underlying the instigation of Operation Murambatsvina; see D. Potts, 'City Life in Zimbabwe at a Time of Fear and Loathing: Urban Planning, Urban Poverty and Operation Murambatsvina', in G. Myers and M. Murray (eds), Cities in Contemporary Africa (Palgrave, forthcoming 2006).
34. Tibaijuka, 'Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Zimbabwe'.
35. Action Aid/CHRA, A Study on the Impact of "Operation Murambatsvina/ Restore Order".
36. As an illustration, the 1992 census enumerated 9,077, 5,863, 3,072 and 6,486 households in the four wards of Mbare, the oldest colonial-era township and most densely populated of Harare's high density areas. In other older townships, the three wards of Highfields had about 26,000 households altogether and the three wards of Glen Norah around 21,000. Even the much newer, post-independence Budiriro had almost 9,000 households. The average HDA household size used by the survey, 5.8, on the other hand, is very much higher than those reported in the census and many other surveys, which is around 4.2.
37. See Central Statistical Office, Census 1992, Provincial Profile, Harare (Harare, Central Statistical Office, 1994).
38. Action Aid/CHRA, A Study on the Impact of "Operation Murambatsvina/ Restore Order", p. ix.
39. On the basis of various assumptions, a total of 851,434 people were reportedly affected in the Harare HDAs. This calculation did recognise that, at best, the survey's coverage could not have exceeded one-ninth of HDA households, i.e. one-third of the three households at every third homestead/plot. However, even this does not tally with the households enumerated over ten years before, during the 1992 census.
40. One final note of caution is necessary as it is not stated how interviewers decided which household on any one plot to interview, and one of the first questions was 'When were you affected by Operation Murambatsvina?' (rather than 'Were you ... ?') and there is nowhere on the schedule to record that they were not. Thus there may have been an inbuilt bias to interviewing respondents who affirmed that they had been affected.
41. The report states that 73 per cent of primary sources of livelihood were destroyed by Operation Murambatsvina. However, it is clear from the questionnaire used that this information was not solicited, and that the report is merely repeating the proportion of livelihood sources prior to the campaign which it deemed to constitute the informal sector.
42. In Harare the market sites demolished included the retail vegetable market (leading to the closure of the wholesale market); Mupedzanhamo, which was the main market for secondhand clothes and traditional medicines; and Siyaso, a site where hardware and building materials were sold. See B. McGarry, 'Wreckage of the Tsunami', report posted to mandebusvnewsahoogroups.com, 30 June 2005.
43. B. Mbiba, Urban Agriculture in Zimbabwe: Implications for Urban Management, Urban Economy, the Environment, Poverty and Gender (Aldershot, Avebury, 1995)
44. D. Drakakis-Smith, T. Bowyer-Bower and D. Tevera, 'Urban Poverty and Urban Agriculture: An Overview of Linkages in Harare', Habitat International, 19, 2 (1995), pp. 183-93.
45. See, for example, BBC News, 'AU Rejects Action on Zim - South Africa "Irritated"', 24 June 2005 [http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/africa/4618341.stm]
46. C. Lamb, 'Mugabe Policy Branded "New Apartheid"', Sunday Times, 12 June 2005
47. New York Times, 'U.N. Condemns Zimbabwe for Bulldozing Urban Slums', 23 July 2005 [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/international/africa/ 23nations.html?th&emc=th].
48. Human Rights Watch, 'Clear the Filth', pp. 28ff.
49. For a more detailed analysis of this aspect of the campaign see Potts, 'City Life in Zimbabwe at a Time of Fear and Loathing'.
50. The report by the Solidarity Peace Trust, 'Discarding the Filth', is particularly useful in this respect, in that it provides an analysis of the perceptions and views of people displaced from Killarney in Bulawayo about the government's drive to push them out of the city.
51. See, for example, Potts, 'Shall we go home?'
52. Potts and Mutambirwa, 'Rural-Urban Linkages in Contemporary Harare'
53. D. Potts, 'Worker-Peasants and Farmer-Housewives in Africa: The Debate about "Committed" Farmers, Access to Land and Agricultural Production', Journal of Southern African Studies, 26, 4 (2000), pp. 807-32.
54. As explained in some detail in Potts, 'Counter-Urbanization on the Zambian Copperbelt?'.
55. 'Mugabe's Demolitions Target Churches', The Tablet, 29 July 2005 [http://www.thetablet.co.uk/cgi-bin/register.cgi/citw-past-00241].
56. Human Rights Watch, 'Clear the Filth', p. 32. Of the 700,000 or so estimated to be displaced, 114,000 (20 per cent) were estimated to be in the open with no shelter; 170,000 (30 per cent) with friends and family; and 170,000 (30 per cent) in churches and other temporary types of shelter.
57. Habitat International Coalition, Housing and Land Rights Network, 'Urgent Action Appeal: 200,000 People Evicted in Two Weeks and Another Million Threatened in Zimbabwe'. Case ZIM100605, 13 June 2005
58. N. Dixon, 'Zimbabwe: Mugabe's Terror Campaign Against Workers, Urban Poor', Green Left Weekly, 8 June 2005. [http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/629/629p20.htm]
59. 'Zim Deploys 3000 Riot Police to Destroy Homes', Mail & Guardian (SA, 27 May 2005
60. Associated Press, 'Zimbabwe Police Destroying Illegal Settlements', 28 May 2005.
61. Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, 'Political Violence Report, September 2004' (Harare, ZHNGO, 2004) [http://www.hrforumzim.com/monthly/september_04.htm].
62. To complicate matters further, in South African housing circles, uniquely, 'informal' is used to describe some planned and zoned residential settlements for low-income people where housing construction is based on site-and-services or, again using South African nomenclature, 'incrementalism'. Residents then can build their own homes, or contract others, to build their houses gradually. The short-to medium-term outcome may be a highly variable physical environment with a mixture of permanent and impermanent building materials. In this article the term 'informal' is used in the usual sense of unplanned.
63. Site-and-service was also used by the Rhodesian government, mainly towards the end of the 1970s.
64. On Rhodesian and Zimbabwean housing policy, and the mass shift to home-ownership policies and also to privatised provision of low-income housing loans, see Rakodi, Harare: Inheriting a Settler Colonial City;
65. P. Bond, Uneven Zimbabwe. A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment (Trenton and Asmara, Africa World Press, 1998)
66. Potts and Mutambirwa, 'High-Density Housing in Harare'
67. A. Musekiwa, 'Low-Income House Development in Harare: A Historical Perspective', in L. Zinyama, D. Tevera and S. Cumming (eds), Harare: The Growth and Problems of the City (Harare, University of Zimbabwe Publications, 1993)
68. C. Mafico, Urban Low Income Housing in Zimbabwe (Aldershot; Brookfield, Vermont, Avebury, 1991).
69. The inside is another matter and highly variable. See Potts, 'City Life in Zimbabwe'.
70. Nonetheless, it is not hard to imagine a determined bureaucrat pointing out that by-laws on space provision may be being breached in some houses.
71. This is another South African housing term, rarely used in other low-income housing literature but very useful in southern African circumstances in distinguishing between backyard shacks and 'proper' squatter settlements.
72. Upgrading means that land tenure is legalised, and services improved. The secure tenure generally encourages people to invest and improve their homes which, for obvious reasons, they fear to do prior to this.
73. See C. Butcher, 'Upgrading in Epworth', in Zinyama et al. (eds), Harare.
74. See Kamete, 'Civil Society, Housing and Urban Governance'.
75. See N. Marongwe, 'The Fast Track Resettlement and Urban Development Nexus: The Case for Harare' (paper presented at Symposium on Delivering Land and Securing Rural Livelihoods: Post Independence Land Reform and Resettlement in Zimbabwe, 26-28 March 2003, Mont Clair, Nyanga, Zimbabwe, 2003).
76. See, for example, Solidarity Peace Trust, Discarding the Filth.
77. Newspaper and television reports often pointed out that 'brick' houses were being demolished.
78. The census data, including the urban statistics, are disputed by many. Understandably, much of this dispute arises from electoral issues. Space precludes a proper discussion of this issue here but, given known national fertility, mortality and emigration trends, the general patterns indicated in the census are nonetheless explicable and broadly consistent with expectations. All of these trends are established by demographic studies. As the national population enumerated in 2002 had grown much more slowly than in the previous decade, it has been variously argued that this was due to deliberate under-counting, especially in urban areas, to diminish the electoral roll and/or that it was due to mass emigration. The opposition estimates of emigration often run into some millions of people. In fact, these two arguments are somewhat at odds with one another as people cannot both still be in Zimbabwe and deliberately not counted, and out of the country. The fall in urban growth rates is also consistent with expectations, given the drastic decline in living standards evidenced in this article, which would discourage net in-migration and make natural increase within the cities the main element of population growth. While reports in government-dominated media must be treated with circumspection, a recent article on the census stated that the 'bulk of the "missing millions" are missing because they were never born'
79. Tibaijuka, Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Zimbabwe, p. 25.
80. See D. Potts, 'Housing Policies in Southern Africa', in P. Gervais-Lambony, S. Jaglin and A. Mabin (eds), La question urbaine en Afrique australe: Perspectives de recherches (Paris, Karthala, 1998), pp. 185-213.
81. This estimate is based on a combination of government and UN figures.
82. Data from the 2002 census have not been published. Some data were available online for a while, and others have been made available to me by personal contacts. However, disaggregated data for urban wards have not yet been seen.
83. The police sometimes told people to demolish their own houses. The only advantage of this for the occupants was that they could rescue their possessions, and possibly even some housing materials. It also prevented people inside being killed by the bulldozers.
84. The UN report stated that in Mutare, backyard shacks accounted for 34,000 dwellings compared to 27,000 legal ones, and in Victoria Falls for 64 per cent of housing stock. However, without knowing the source of these estimates and, given a natural tendency to overestimate the impact of Operation Murambatsvina by some informants, these figures must be treated with caution. The Mutare figures, for example, suggest a total urban population far in excess of the enumerated population in 2002.
85. For an analysis of the reasons for the relative lack of backyard shacks in Bulawayo compared to Harare, see Potts, 'City Life in Zimbabwe'. I am grateful to Randal Smith for information on Kadoma.
86. Tenants usually rent the whole house with a formal agreement; lodgers rent one or more rooms in the house or in the backyard.
87. Potts and Mutambirwa, 'High-Density Housing in Harare'
88. Rakodi, Harare: Inheriting a Settler Colonial City
89. N. Mutizwa-Mangiza, 'Post-Independence Urban Low-Income Shelter Policies in Zimbabwe: A Preliminary Appraisal of Affordability' (paper presented at the Third World Planning Seminar on Shelter, Services and the Urban Poor, University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, Cardiff, 1985).
90. See, for example, A. Schlyter, 'Esther's House: One Woman's "Home Economics" in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe', in D. Bryceson and D. Potts (eds), African Urban Economies: Viability, Vitality or Vitiation (Houndmills, Palgrave, 2006), pp. 254-77.
91. Mbare Report, No. 12, 27 June 2005, 'Discarded People'.
92. Tibaijuka, Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Zimbabwe.
93. For example, 'Observations at Mbare Township', in Report to South African Council of Churches
94. 'Zimbabwe Demolitions Well Planned - Mugabe', 30 June 2005, iafrica.com. [http://iafrica.com/news/specialreport/zimbabwe/456439.htm]
95. Tibaijuka, Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to Zimbabwe.
96. Government of Zimbabwe, 1995 Poverty Assessment Study Survey (PASS) (Harare, Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, 1996).
97. ZNVAC, Zimbabwe: Urban Areas.
98. Economic Structural Adjustment Programme, Zimbabwe's Structural Adjustment Programme. The acronym came also to mean to local people, 'Ever Suffering African People',' Extreme Suffering for African People' or 'Even Sadza A Problem'.
99. It is not possible to detail here the causes and nature of this economic freefall, but see P. Bond and M. Manyanya. Zimbabwe's Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice (Scottsville, South Africa, University of Natal Press; London, Merlin; Harare, Weaver Press; 2002)
100. P. Carmody, Tearing the Social Fabric: Neoliberalism, Deindustrialization, and the Crisis of Governance in Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 2001)
101. R. Davies, 'Memories of Underdevelopment: A Personal Interpretation of Zimbabwe's Economic Decline', in B. Raftopoulos and T. Savage (eds), Zimbabwe: Injustice and Political Reconciliation (Cape Town Institute for Justice and Reconciliation [IJR], 2005).
102. It is recognised that insufficient formal jobs were created in the 1980s to absorb all work seekers, and that this was an economic problem. Nonetheless, the degree of dependence on, and employment in, the formal sector was extremely high for an African country at that time.
103. For details of the gap between survival living costs and formal sector incomes in recent times in urban Zimbabwe, see Potts, 'All My Hopes and Dreams are Shattered'.
104. See Potts and Mutambirwa, 'Basics are a Luxury'.
105. See Potts, 'Urban Unemployment and Migrants in Africa'.
106. My surveys in the HDAs in 1994 and 2001 found well under 10 per cent of interviewed household heads were unemployed.
107. These have been reduced over time, but not enough to make a major difference. See Kamete, 'US AID's Private Sector Housing Programme in Urban Zimbabwe'
108. Musandu-Nyamayaro, 'Housing Design Standards for Urban Low-Income People in Zimbabwe'. Ironically, statements made after Operation Murambatsvina suggest that they are to be revised downwards again, possibly partly in response to the recommendations of international housing agencies in their response to the campaign.
109. See Potts, 'City Life in Zimbabwe at a Time of Fear and Loathing'.
110. See Rakodi, Harare: Inheriting a Settler Colonial City.
111. See Potts, 'City Life in Zimbabwe at a Time of Fear and Loathing'.