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'Zimbabwe is like a flipped coin in the air'
Christopher Thompson, The Spectator (UK)
December 05, 2007

http://talkzimbabwe.com/default.asp?smenu=84&sdetail=6354

Those who suffer under Mugabe see no cause for optimism

It's summer and the purple flowers on the jacaranda trees have begun to bloom, but they're little comfort to Zimbabweans in the middle of a dire economic crisis. You can tell it's bad here because even the death of Ian Smith last month did not arouse much hostile comment. The domestic consensus is that Mugabe has managed both to follow in Smith's tyrannical footsteps and to wreck the formal economy at the same time.

This is Africa's breadbasket turned basket-case and though the first EU-Africa summit in seven years starts this week and there are presidential elections in March next year, no one sees much prospect for change. It's true that Gordon Brown has done some macho posturing over Zimbabwe - chest-thumping over human rights abuses - but that has achieved precisely nothing for ordinary Zimbabweans and provided Mugabe with a treasure trove of propaganda material with which to lambast Britain and its 'colonial' ambitions - much like Smithy before him.

Many have banked on economic collapse as the surest way of bringing reform, but even that most depressing solution has been curiously elusive. Though the country has the fastest contracting economy in the world, down 12 per cent each year, and the highest inflation rate - 7,600 per cent - and though many commentators predicted long ago that the economy would simply collapse and take the country with it, Zimbabwean businesses have proved robust almost beyond belief, lumbering on like war-weary soldiers.

Recently, times have been especially hard. In a desperate attempt to contain runaway inflation in June, the government imposed price controls on all goods. Shops were ordered to halve their prices - which led to businesses being forced to sell at a loss. And of course because of the relative cheapness, commodities most Zimbabweans once took for granted - eggs, milk, bread, vegetable oil, sugar, soap and the national staple, maize - quickly moved out of the supermarket shelves and on to the streets where, once the supermarkets had run out, they could be sold illegally for many times their 'official' price.

Today, the merest rumour of a bread delivery is enough to make people join long queues for their two-loaf quota. But as Alfred, a labourer in Harare's suburbs, told me: 'Often people who go to the market don't eat what they buy. They keep it and sell it later for more money.' Well, with scarcity comes business opportunities - essential for the 80 per cent of the population without formal jobs. One supermarket attendant said that bread could be sold for over Z$100,000 (about £1.50) on the black market, a huge mark-up on its original Z$30,000 (about 50p) price in the store. 'It's risky, if you get caught you will almost certainly face jail,' she said. 'Still, that's how people are surviving.'

Since the price freeze came in, the government has imprisoned thousands under the Orwellian-sounding charge of 'non-compliance', and it's not just workers being banged up, but the managing directors of big companies as well. They're being caught by the police, of course, but also by Mugabe's notorious 'Green Bombers', a paramilitary organisation answerable only to the presidency whose young members are mostly drawn from rural areas where they are screened for their loyalty to Mugabe. So the price freeze has been a fiasco and, if anything, has led to more food shortages. And this combined with the decline of industrial agriculture since the 2000 farm invasions, and several consecutive years of bad rains, has meant that much of what the country now eats comes from abroad.

Abroad is also where Zimbabweans themselves are fleeing as they seek to escape what one industry worker described as the country's 'hand-to-mouth' economy. South Africa, Zimbabwe's booming southerly neighbour, is the principal destination, and is now home to between 1.5 and three million Zimbabwean expats. 'With our situation, everybody who can will go down south. It's just a waste of skills otherwise,' said Didymus, a 32-year-old part-time teacher who is hoping to leave himself as soon as he has finished a business degree.

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