Cry the beloved Zimbabwe!
I have been grappling with a troubling but necessary question: why have Zimbabweans elevated the Toyota Fortuner GD6 into a symbol of extraordinary success?
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Why is a clearly mid-range vehicle treated as though it were the pinnacle of achievement?
Why is it the preferred gift of tenderpreneurs like Wicknell Chivayo, handed out to celebrities and Mnangagwa praise-singers, while we watch viral videos of Zimbabweans — including trained professionals such as nurses — humiliating themselves in public, begging for a GD6?
Why has this particular vehicle become the default marker of having “made it”?
To answer these questions honestly, we must first strip away the illusion.
The Toyota Fortuner GD6 is not a luxury vehicle.
It is not premium.
It is not top-of-the-range.
It is a competent, durable, mid-range SUV — no more, no less.
In the language of consumer technology, it is comparable to a Samsung Galaxy A56 smartphone: respectable, functional, but firmly outside the flagship category.
I personally use a Galaxy A53 5G, an earlier device in the same A50 range.
It works well, but I would never imagine it to be a premium, top-tier phone.
That would only be possible if I had never seen or experienced a Galaxy S-series or the latest iPhone.
This is precisely the problem confronting Zimbabwe.
Zimbabweans are not glamorising the GD6 because it is exceptional.
They are glamorising it because they are no longer exposed to what genuinely exceptional looks like.
In an economy that has been systematically hollowed out over decades, the upper class has shrunk to a tiny elite, the middle class has been effectively wiped out, and the vast majority of citizens are trapped in poverty or precarious survival.
High-end products — whether vehicles, homes, technology, or lifestyles — have disappeared from everyday visibility.
Millions of Zimbabweans have never owned, interacted with, or even closely observed genuinely premium goods.
When exposure disappears, benchmarks collapse.
If you have never seen an iPhone 16 or a Galaxy S25, the A56 you encounter may appear to be the best phone in existence.
Not because it is, but because your frame of reference has been erased.
This is not ignorance; it is deprivation.
The same logic applies to vehicles.
In a country where luxury SUVs, executive sedans, and high-performance vehicles are rare to the point of near invisibility, a mid-range SUV begins to look extraordinary by default.
This is the critical point: the GD6 is not being elevated because it has become better; it is being elevated because Zimbabwe has become poorer.
Decades of economic decay under ZANU-PF — marked by hyperinflation, deindustrialisation, unemployment, collapsing incomes, and capital flight — have progressively stripped society of economic diversity.
In healthier economies, you find a visible spectrum: entry-level goods, mid-range goods, and high-end goods coexisting in the same social space.
In Zimbabwe, that spectrum has collapsed inward.
The bottom has expanded massively, the middle has vanished, and the top has become so small and insulated that it is largely invisible to the majority.
As a result, mid-range products occupy a false position at the top of the visible hierarchy.
This explains why the Fortuner GD6 has become the vehicle of choice for government officials, local authorities, tenderpreneurs, and aspirational elites.
It is not because it represents success by global standards.
It is because it sits at the upper edge of what is still attainable and visible in a broken economy.
Those who drive it and regard it as a measure of success are not necessarily delusional or arrogant; they are themselves victims of the same economic decay.
Their expectations, too, have been lowered.
Their understanding of what constitutes prosperity has been compressed by crisis.
In this sense, both the beggar and the benefactor are trapped in the same illusion.
This also explains the disturbing spectacles we have witnessed — professionals pleading publicly for vehicles, citizens celebrating handouts with excessive gratitude, or thousands of people enduring sun, rain, and cold for two pieces of chicken and chips.
The infamous moment when a simple fast-food meal was described as “the food of angels” was not comedy; it was a window into a society whose material expectations have been brutally reduced.
When deprivation becomes normalised, the ordinary begins to look miraculous.
Poverty does not merely reduce income; it reprogrammes perception.
It narrows the imagination.
It trains people to overvalue what is merely accessible and to lose sight of what should be normal in a functioning society.
Over time, this distortion becomes collective.
Society begins to celebrate survival as success and proximity to power as achievement.
The GD6 phenomenon must therefore be understood not as consumer obsession, but as evidence of prolonged economic regression.
It tells us that Zimbabwe has fallen so far that a mid-range product now occupies the symbolic space once reserved for genuine prosperity.
It tells us that citizens — including those who appear successful — are operating far below any reasonable economic benchmark, even if they are unaware of it.
This is perhaps the most tragic aspect of the situation.
When people begin to see mediocrity as excellence, not out of choice but out of deprivation, the damage is no longer merely economic; it is civilisational.
The danger is not that people admire a car, but that society loses the ability to distinguish between adequacy and excellence, between progress and mere access.
The obsession with the Fortuner GD6 is therefore not about cars at all.
It is about a nation that has been economically starved for so long that its sense of proportion has collapsed.
It is about an economy that no longer produces, rewards, or even displays genuine success, leaving people to anchor their aspirations to whatever remains visible.
Until Zimbabwe confronts the structural causes of its decline — misgovernance, corruption, policy failure, and the deliberate destruction of productive capacity — this distortion will persist.
Mid-range will continue to masquerade as premium.
Survival will continue to be mistaken for success.
And symbols like the GD6 will continue to carry meanings they were never meant to bear.
That, more than any individual car or individual giver, is the real indictment of what Zimbabwe has become.
TENDAI RUBEN MBOFANA - THE UN-OPPRESSED MIND! 