Spiralling prices
A 10kg bag of maize meal now costs Z$1,5 million up from Z$500 000 last week. The same bag of meal in the city is now Z$3 million, up from Z$1,5 million last week. An emergency taxi now costs Z$200 000, also having doubled in a week.
The average worker in industry earns the minimum wage of Z$12 million. If you convert that at the bank rate it comes out at US$400, but only zpf and their cronies can access that kind of cheap currency. For the man on the street the US$ is Z$1 million, so his real buying power is US$12.
Nobody can survive on that, so many companies are now buying supplies for their staff to stave off starvation.
The worst off are farm workers whose salaries recently went up from Z$600 000 to a whopping $2,6 million = US$2,60. But the newly resettled farmers have actually cut their wages back to Z$50 000.
Compare this to a time when the farm labourers received free schooling, housing, clinics and were always well fed.
And this government has the cheek to declare this season the “Mother” of seasons.
This all proves that nobody can mess with economic laws, yet the dictator continues to interfere in economic policy, oblivious to the starvation right next to his mansion. He is worried sick about the mediation process in South Africa, he has been warned that there will be no economic improvement if he does not co-operate.
November 2nd, 2007 15:14
How long can this go on for? Things in Zim seem to go from bad to worse, but then bad becomes the new ‘worse’ and you go from bad to worse again.
Surely this can’t go on forever? Is what we see in Zim the fate for a future South Africa too?
November 3rd, 2007 08:38
It is rumored in the U.S. that Mr. Mugabe once earned an economics degree by correspondence, while he was imprisoned by Ian Smith. Apparently, Mr. Mugabe missed the study of neo-classical macroeconomic theory, all of which is devoted to the best methods of growing an economy and building a people’s prosperity.
Every Nobel Prize in Economics in the modern era has been awarded to the research by economics authors and scholars on how to build prosperity for a people. Are these many scholarly economics books available in Zimbabwe?