by Jenna Hutchings
Part 1 of 3: Fuel Is Not an Input. It’s a Liability.
Did you know that Tariro* spent US$3 a day getting to work in February?
This week: US$4.
Today: US$5.
She hasn’t moved from Epworth. Her job in Borrowdale hasn’t moved. Harare hasn’t moved.
Only the price of getting there has.
And if you think this is a commuter story, think again.
You may have felt it at the pump first. But by now you’ve felt it somewhere else too — in the quote that came in higher, in the delivery that costs more, in the bread now priced at US$1.17, in the trip quietly cancelled. And if you haven’t yet — you know it’s coming.
Even if you don’t take a kombi, other people do. This could be your employee. When workers spend the margin between earning and surviving just to arrive, that pressure doesn’t stay with them.
It walks into your payroll, your pricing, your logistics and your risk.
A commuter in Bulawayo said it plainly this week:
“We are now working for the kombis.”
In Zimbabwe right now, many people are not just working for the kombis.
They are working for the kombis and the government.
Because nearly 40% of what you pay at the pump is local tax and levies — decisions made here, not in the Middle East. Government tried to cushion the last increase.
It didn’t hold.
Zimbabwe imports every drop of fuel it burns. No domestic production. No real fallback. No serious buffer. We are running a country on a product we do not make, do not price, and do not control.
Fuel inflation does not stay at the pump. It enters your front door as school fees and groceries, as healthcare, and on the school run, or commute to work.
This is not bad luck. This is not a one-off. This is not just the Middle East.
When fuel moved twice in two weeks, Zimbabwe didn’t simply become more expensive.
It became more fragile.
How did we build a system that only works when fuel is cheap?
Part 2 of 3: We Built a System That Only Works When Fuel Is Cheap
Are we ok that Tariro* is now spending nearly HALF her salary on kombis (US$110/month)?
Yesterday’s fuel shock was not the story. It was the 𝐬𝐲𝐦𝐩𝐭𝐨𝐦.
Today, we discover how we built a system that only works when fuel is cheap.
- We underinvested in public transport.
- The school bus disappeared.
- Jobs and homes drifted apart.
- Kombis filled the gap.
- Cars became survival tools.
And we normalised all of it — the two-kombi commute, hundreds of cars to the same school gate, “popping out,” logistics vehicles returning empty.
None of it was intentional. All of it was habit.
But repeated at scale, habit becomes infrastructure. And infrastructure becomes destiny.
We designed dependence into daily life. The answer to every gap became the same: burn more fuel.
This week did not break the system.
It exposed it.
The real question is not whether fuel will rise again.
It will.
The question is:
What can Zimbabwe do to reduce how much fuel a household needs in the first place?
Now.
Part 3 of 3: The Cheapest Resilience Move Government Can Make Right Now
For two days we’ve established the problem: Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 doesn’t just have a fuel price problem. It has a fuel dependence problem.
If a country cannot control global oil prices, the smartest response is not only to cushion the next increase. It is to reduce how much fuel a household actually needs at all.
So what would be another way to respond to a fuel shock?
The bicycle.
Not a lifestyle accessory. A serious immediate resilience tool — and the most affordable entry point into fuel independence Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 has right now.
Here’s what most people don’t know.
In Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 a standard bicycle carries approximately 20% import duty plus VAT at 15.5%. An e-bike — the kind that makes a 25km commute actually possible — is taxed at 25% plus VAT.
A $400 e-bike that could land duty-free would sell at $577 instead. That $177 is not a price signal. It is a significant barrier because it’s easier to pay a kombi fare daily than buy a bicycle. That is a poverty penalty.
Take Tariro*.
Walk, kombi, kombi, walk — every morning, every evening. She now spends US$110 a month just to get to work on a US$260 wage.
Before food.
Before rent.
Before school fees.
A bicycle doesn’t have to replace every trip to change that arithmetic.
Tariro may never want to cycle. That is not the point.
The point is choice.
Not a decision made for her by a tariff schedule no one has reviewed since it was introduced pre-Independence to protect the bicycle industry.
The mechanism to change this exists. A Statutory Instrument can suspend these duties without waiting for the next budget. Government used it in 2023 (SI 80 of 2023). It could be used again within days.
Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 cannot control conflict in the Middle East.
But it can control its own tariff schedule (and taxes).
The humble bicycle sits at the intersection of every affordability, health, climate, and transport justice argument. And, it may be the most serious policy conversation Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 is not yet having.