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Zimbabwe groans under world's highest inflation rate
Cris Chinaka, Reuters
April 08, 2006

http://in.today.reuters.com/

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabweans woke up on Saturday to news of an inflation figure that confirmed life in a country already on its knees is getting worse.

The cost of bread rose by 60 percent overnight after the southern African country's official statistics agency announced that the annual inflation rate -- already the highest in the world -- was heading towards 1,000 percent.

Zimbabwe's main state media tucked the bad news in the middle of bulletins dominated by what critics call "useless speeches" by President Robert Mugabe's government officials.

But the new 913.6 percent inflation rate still announced itself loudly on the streets of Harare where survival remains a challenge even to citizens well practiced in the art.

Like the rest of her compatriots, Shamiso Mapanga said she has learned to live one day at a time.

The 38-year-old assistant accountant and her teacher husband have long stopped trying to calculate how much money their family of four needs for groceries every month.

"It is an impossible and extremely stressful exercise," she said at a Harare supermarket on Saturday where she was forced to leave behind one of the three loaves of bread she wanted to buy because the price had risen to Z$95,000 ($0.958) from Z$60,000 overnight.

"I am sick to the bone with all these things," she said to a Reuters correspondent in the same shop.

"How are we expected to survive, and how long is this going to last?," she asked angrily, and without pausing for a reply, answered her own question: "I think only God knows how it will all end."

A man in the same queue said despairingly: "For me whatever happens. I am going with the flow but at the same time praying that we survive the tide."

The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe says an average family of five requires at least 35 million Zimbabwe dollars every month but an average middle class citizen earns 15 million Zimbabwe dollars.

Political and economic analysts say many urban Zimbabweans have so far survived the country's long-running economic crisis through wheeling and dealing and through subsidies from relatives abroad who send money for groceries.

A recent study by economists at Harare's University of Zimbabwe says 90 percent of urban families are spending most of their income on food and accommodation in the face of the galloping inflation rate.

Aid agencies have also helped ease the crisis in rural Zimbabwe. But many people have simply left the country.

Regional officials estimate up to 2 million Zimbabweans have sought economic refuge in neighbouring South Africa in the face the crisis, which Mugabe's critics say has forced a quarter of the country's 12 million people abroad.

Mugabe's government has branded inflation and corruption as arch-enemies in its war to revive an economy which has shrunk by an estimated 40 percent in the last seven years.

The crisis has left Zimbabwe battling chronic shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency, a crumbling infrastructure and poor medical services.

The World Health Organisation said in a report on Friday that life in Zimbabwe is shorter than anywhere else in the world, with neither men nor women expected to live to 40 because of the affects of AIDS and poverty on the population.

The opposition -- along many other critics -- blames the deepening economic crisis on Mugabe's policies and expects the public to explode in an angry revolt soon.

Mugabe, 82 and in power since independence from Britain in 1980, has used tough security laws to clamp down on protests.

Last week Mugabe warned opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai that he would be "dicing with death" if he tries to drive him out of power through mass demonstrations.

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