War is usually told through its front lines: a port taken, a mountain road cut, a city encircled. This autumn in Yemen there is plenty of that. Fighting between the government and the Houthis is intensifying, with the government claiming Mocha and Dhubab on the Red Sea coast while the Houthis press towards Taiz. There is a second front, though, and it has no map. It runs through the shopping list, the rent and the half-filled prescription, and millions of people are fighting on it.
Reporting from Sanaa, Aden and Marib, Al Jazeera’s Samir Hassan and Abdullah Qatran describe a country where large parts of the workforce are paid late or not at all, prices keep climbing, and a banking system split in two has made it ever harder to send money from one part of Yemen to another.
Aden: the five-kilo bag
Start with one salary. Bushra Abdullah Abdulwarith works for the government in Aden, its interim capital. She earns 78,000 riyals a month, about $50 at the black-market rate. The Yemen Economic Tracking Initiative puts the food bill of a typical household in government-held areas at about 130,366 riyals, or $83, and that is before rent or anything else. Food alone, in other words, costs roughly one and two-thirds of her monthly pay.
Aden’s markets are not empty. The goods are on the shelves. What people lack is the money to buy them, because wages have fallen behind the cost of food, rent, healthcare and transport. Ayman al-Maqtari, who works at a shopping centre in the Mansoura district, says customers now check the price of rice, sugar, flour and oil before they decide to buy. They take the 5kg bag of rice rather than the 40kg sack, and towards the end of the month more of them buy on credit.
“Many people have come to live day by day, or week by week.”
Bushra says families have given up almost everything that is not essential. They eat less meat, buy in smaller amounts, and sometimes pay with credit or loans. Shops advertise discounts more and more often. Clothing and household goods, the things a family can put off buying, are hardly selling.
In May the government approved a 20 percent cost-of-living allowance for public-sector staff. It is calculated on base salary rather than total pay, so the real increase is small. Bushra called it “a temporary painkiller that does not reflect the scale of the actual pressure on people’s living standards.” In early October the World Food Programme found that 74 percent of households in the government areas it could reach were unable to meet their basic food needs.
A reflection, not a finding: governments in trouble are fond of percentages. Twenty percent sounds generous in a decree. It sounds different once it has been applied to the smallest figure on the payslip.
The arithmetic of a collapse
The World Bank estimates that real GDP per capita has fallen by roughly 58 percent since 2015. The causes are familiar. The monetary institutions have been divided since the Houthis took Sanaa in 2014 and built their own. Oil exports have been disrupted. Foreign aid is shrinking, and the hunger response is already running on about a fifth of its budget.
Marib: water or milk
Marib, east of Sanaa, is held by the government and has taken in hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Housing, jobs and public services are all under strain. A salary is spent within days of arriving. Day labourers find only a few days of work. Some displaced families have to choose between buying water and buying milk.
Abu Mohammed Nasser al-Asbahi earns 400,000 riyals, about $250, and more than half of it goes on rent. “We don’t even get to the first one-third of the month before the salary is gone,” he said. For the rest of the month his family lives on loans and credit from shops.
Salah al-Zuhaifi is a government worker in Marib. His parents live in Houthi-held territory, on the other side of the line that divides the country. “No matter how much you earn, it will not be enough to meet your needs,” he said.
Khaled Mohsen, a pharmacist, sees the same pressure at his counter. Patients buy only part of what they have been prescribed. People with chronic illnesses make their medicine last longer by taking smaller doses, which puts their health at serious risk. In Aden, where electricity comes for two to six hours a day, the sick are already rationing what the state cannot supply.
Sanaa: the steady rial
The Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, have held Sanaa and the northwest since 2014. Many public employees there have gone years without regular pay, receiving limited payments or half-salaries at irregular intervals. Private-sector workers face a slowing economy, layers of fees and levies, and very few jobs.
The paradox is that Sanaa’s currency is the steadier one. The Houthi authorities ban the newer banknotes printed by the government and hold the exchange rate largely fixed. The split goes back to January 2020, when the central bank in Sanaa banned the new notes issued by its rival in Aden. Since then Yemen has had two rials. On August 1 this year, according to the ACAPS exchange-rate tracker, which relies on unofficial market rates, a dollar bought 533 old-note riyals in Sanaa and 1,565 new-note riyals in Aden.
A stable price is not the same as having money. Cash is scarce in the north. Because the two banking systems are divided, it costs more to move money between them, and that cost falls hardest on households living on remittances. The rial in Sanaa holds its value while the people paid in it run short. Families there get by as families do everywhere in Yemen now: they borrow, they cut back, and they ask relatives for help.
The front lines move with each new offensive. The line through the currency has stayed where it is since 2020. Every transfer across it, from a son in Marib to parents in the north or from a worker abroad to a family in Sanaa, pays a fee for crossing it.