Mugabe is believes it’s his sole right to determine who can be graced with his patronage; who he wants to observe his elections, which journalists can write about what he wants, which judges should do his bidding to whom, who should be arrested and persecuted, who should be immune from the law, what rules he wants to set, and what lies he wants to be taken for truths.

If the West tries to exercise their right of dis-association they are meddling, colonialistic-minded racists.

Consider an amount of $4895500000, say for a bought item. There are no fractions of a cent so it now becomes 49 cents. In effect the trader has lost the equivalent of $4500000. And because no-one likes to lose money the item will be rounded up to the new $0.50. In one fell swoop item will have a price increase of $104500000.

Apply the same effect to an bank account, where obviously the error will be in favour of the bank. Add the un-resolved ‘gains’ for multiple accounts and there is going to be a substantial amount of money with no owner – until some enterprising banker pops all the accrued rounded down figures into an account of his own.

Mathematics was not my teaching subject – computers was. If the banks will maintain all the decimal points the system will crash all the same. The software falls short on recording digits, irrespective of where the decimal point falls. To be sure, trailing zeros will be superfluous.

All the same, an error by a factor of 3 was bad enough, now there will be an additional error by 10.

These moves, of course do nothing about inflation, which will dictate that inevitably a zero will sooner of later (probably sooner) creep onto the end of that bread price and taxi fare. Then, and I may stand corrected if wrong, in effect 11 zero’s will have been surreptitiously added – and that’s even ignoring the 3 zeros Gono lost in his previous attempt at being a monetary Gideon Scissorhands.

I forsee for a start, the comeback of the .99 ploy, so favoured by traders until the cent lost it’s significance years ago.

I predict that this monetary statement will hasten the demise of ZANU(PF) and strengthen dissent. Ecconomics is one enemy that the JOC cannot beat into submission with a big stick.