If the economy is doing so well, Mr President, why are half of Zimbabweans determined to leave the country?

Source: If the economy is doing so well, Mr President, why are half of Zimbabweans determined to leave the country?

A detached leadership relies on illusion.

Listen to the official statements coming out of government, and you would be forgiven for believing that Zimbabwe is in the middle of a historic economic boom.
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President Emmerson Mnangagwa consistently reassures the nation that the country’s growth is trajectory-bound and irreversible, pointing to bustling mines, expanding industrial zones, and local goods filling domestic shelves.

Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube doubles down on this narrative with immaculate ledgers, boasting projected GDP growth around five percent and claiming single-digit average inflation for the first time in over three decades.
From high offices, the state of the nation appears orderly, prosperous, and firmly on course toward an upper-middle-income future.
Yet, step away from the polished parliamentary podiums and walk into any home, bus terminal, or street corner, and you enter an entirely different reality.
The disconnect between official government rhetoric and the daily survival of ordinary citizens has never been wider or more painful.
If the national economy is genuinely thriving, why are fifty-eight percent of Zimbabweans actively contemplating fleeing their own country?
This staggering figure, revealed in recent findings by Afrobarometer and the Mass Public Opinion Institute, exposes the stark truth that no clever fiscal accounting can obscure.
Over half the population is looking for an exit strategy, with more than a third thinking about leaving a lot.
These are not merely abstract figures on a survey; they represent millions of human beings who have lost faith in the promise of a domestic future.
Even more damning is who wants to walk away.
The desire to leave is highest among the very people any nation requires to build a sustainable future: sixty-eight percent of youth and an astonishing seventy-five percent of individuals with post-secondary education.
The country is systematically losing its doctors, engineers, teachers, software developers, and skilled tradespeople.
A nation whose educated youth sees no viable future at home is a nation quietly burning its own foundations.
The driving forces behind this mass impulse are not mysterious.
Fifty-eight percent of potential emigrants cite the desperate search for work opportunities, followed by relentless economic hardship and outright poverty.
People are not leaving because they lack patriotism; they are leaving because patriotism cannot buy groceries, pay school fees, or settle rising medical bills.
The fundamental flaw in the government’s economic commentary is its obsession with top-down metrics that completely ignore lived reality.
A rising GDP figure derived from capital-intensive mining exports does nothing for a university graduate sitting idle on a street corner.
Single-digit inflation statistics mean very little to a mother watching her stagnant local-currency wage evaporate against the real cost of basic goods, private water delivery, and alternative power generation.
Mining conglomerates may be balance-sheet wealthy, but the average Zimbabwean household remains desperately poor.
When state officials parade positive balance of payments and fiscal restraint, they reveal a profound detachment from the ground.
They celebrate the health of the balance sheet while ignoring the malnutrition of the household.
A government that judges economic success solely by abstract figures on a ledger is a government that has ceased to understand its own people.
Zimbabweans do not live inside Minister Ncube’s spreadsheets, nor do they feed their families on presidential speeches.
They live in a brutal everyday reality defined by informalized survival, eroding purchasing power, and non-existent social safety nets.
Those in power continue to hide behind selective statistics while ignoring systemic failures in job creation and economic stability.
The exodus will only accelerate.
Mr President, no country can claim its economy is doing well when its greatest export remains its own people.
***Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or ***mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com

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