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Million Dollar Chicken 12th April 2006 With Zimbabwe's
official inflation now at 913 per cent, (international accountants say
it is closer to 1500 percent,) it's a pain going shopping. A decent
sized whole chicken cost nearly a million Zim dollars this week. It's hard getting
enough money to pay for a couple of baskets of basics as there are long
queues in banks, and the automatic cash machines are always "run
out of funds'' or jammed. Imagine being an accountant and checking the
overdraft.Interest rates are officially about 783 per cent. Last week it
was 750 percent. A medium sized
engineering company had an overdraft of Z$10 billion in December. Now it
owes the bank Z$65 billion. It can't pay. In theory its trading
figures should have kept its overdraft manageable as the value of the
Zimbabwe dollar shrinks daily. In reality it's not OK
as this company like all others has to charge out its goods and services
in local currency, that is Zimbabwe dollars. So while its overdraft has
been fairly constant at about £130 000, (calculated at black market
rates) the Zimbabwe dollar numbers have forced this company to the
brink. Three years ago it
employed 300 people, most of them skilled technicians in mining
engineering.Today it employs 94 and needs to cut that number to 12 to
try and stay alive for better days, if there are ever better days. No
one knows how high these extraordinary figures - inflation and interest
rates - will go, nor what will happen when they continue to climb,
minute by minute. The Reserve Bank, which
runs most of the country (the army runs the other part) acknowledges
without blushing that it prints trillions and trillions of Zimbabwe
dollars, to keep the economy going. Tuesday after Easter is
Zimbabwe's independence day, 26 years since the Union Jack was lowered
in front of Prince Charles, and 26 years of rule by President Robert
Mugabe.When he came to power the Zimbabwe dollar was equivalent to US
$1.60. This week the black market rate of the Zimbabwe dollar - which is
the real rate - is Z$220 000 for US$1 on the street outside top hotel,
Meikles, in central Harare. The official rate is Z$99 000 to US$1. Every aspect of life in
Zimbabwe is in a state of collapse. Education, health care, trade,
commerce, and of course human rights. The most immediately visible decay
is the roads. Advertisements on billboards around Harare now invite
people to buy tarmac to ''mend your own potholes.''Zimbabwe's main
roads to South Africa and north to Zambia were probably the best roads
in Africa 26 years ago. Potholes are the minor
problem on serious roads south and north as the foundations are
shifting. The old networks of smaller roads, both gravel and narrow tar
linking the commercial farms and the communal or tribal lands are
disappearing. It is extraordinary for
those who knew and travelled those roads to see them now. In one of the
most fertile chunks of land in Africa, about 60 miles north west of
Harare large sections of some farm roads, previously maintained by Rural
Councils, then mostly funded by white commercial farmers, have
disappeared. There are some vague
tracks among long grass while small bridges have sunk into riverbeds and
this year's heavy rains carried off some roads altogether. Its six
years ago since Mr Mugabe began confiscating white farmers' land and
their equipment. By
Peta Thorneycroft - The Daily Telegraph (UK) |