Former Mt Pleasant MP Fadzayi Mahere has expressed sympathy for a man filmed cooking sadza, apparently for sale, in the open — an unusual sight in the Harare Central Business District.
While Harare Mayor Jacob Mafume said he would work with the relevant authorities to impose a total ban on night vending after the video went viral, Mahere argued that nobody chooses to cook sadza for sale in the middle of the night in the city centre.
Mafume said no economic challenge can ever justify such behaviour. Mahere, however, said the man symbolises what the ZANU PF-led government has reduced many Zimbabweans to: a leaderless, impoverished, desperate population stripped of dignity and hope. She wrote on X:
“Nobody chooses to be cooking sadza for sale in the CBD in the middle of the night. Nobody chooses poverty. Nobody chooses to live in a broken society.
“In a nation where ZANU-PF has destroyed the economy, killed jobs, loots over US$2 billion a year, siphons gold out of the country, spits on the faces of the masses daily, flaunts ill-gotten wealth and fails to provide basic services – you think the problem is the man cooking sadza in the middle of the street? He’s not.
“That man represents what this regime has reduced all of us to – a leaderless, impoverished, desperate population without dignity and robbed of hope.
“You can sweep him off Harare’s CBD like garbage, but the dirt of our collective despair will not go away until the goons are gone.”
Commenting on the video, journalist Hopewell Chin’ono said the incident should shame every Zimbabwean with a sense of decency, regardless of their political beliefs. He wrote:
“I do not know how my fellow Zimbabweans feel watching sadza being cooked in the middle of the capital city like this, at a place where real and structured economic life used to be vibrant and thriving.
“This is what one of the once beautiful and industrialised African capital cities has been reduced to.
“And this is happening barely a kilometre from the president’s office and less than 500 metres from the mayor’s office.
“A capital city should reflect order, productivity, and dignity. Instead, what we are witnessing is the visible collapse of urban management and the slow decay of a city that once stood as a symbol of possibility, all because of failed economic policies.
“This should bring shame to every right-thinking Zimbabwean, regardless of political persuasion. This man, and many like him, are victims of a failed system.
“A society that cannot create opportunities for its people pushes them into this kind of undignified survival mode.
“What we are witnessing in this video is not individual failure, but the real human cost of economic collapse and broken governance.”
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