The children being paid $1 a week

The Guardian tells us of children in Zimbabwe making just $1 a week working in the sugar cane fields. Indeed a dreadful happening:

“I’ve never been to school. This is all I do,” he tells the Guardian in a shy voice. “I am helping my grandmother. If I don’t do it, we will die of hunger. My grandmother does not want me to go hungry, so she encourages me to work. It is tough, I get sick sometimes.”

Tapiwa is joined in this “maricho” (menial work) by his grandmother. They both earn $2 (£1.5) every fortnight.

This goes towards buying food and soap. “I would want to go to school one day so that I [can] buy my grandmother what she wants,” Tapiwa says.

This is life for the poorest young boys at the plantations. Mukwasine farmers have been criticised for underpaying labourers who constitute a critical part of the sugarcane industry in Zimbabwe. In cane cutting season, local farmers want cheap, casual labour.

What we’d like to know is, well, what caused this? Zimbabwe used to be better, richer, than this.

We could perhaps point to the ruination of the economy brought about by the insistence that it was to make it fairer. Or in more detail the breaking up of commercial and productive farms into peasant and green plots. These wages are being paid by very small scale farmers. Or to return to the grander scale, point out that Zimbabwe has had a state directed economy this past 30 years, something that doesn’t seem to have worked out well.

But that would be to project that story of utter destitution onto our own political and electoral concerns, wouldn’t it? Something that would be unfair because none of those vying to rule us at present have held up Zimbabwe as a model for our own lives. Venezuela on the other hand…..