Tag Archives: Zimbabwe

Mugabe on holiday in Malaysia

It seems that the President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is on a month-long holiday in Malaysia. According to the news report, his wife has withdrawn about RM330,000.00 for the trip from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and the couple owns a home in the country. I wonder where it is. Perhaps one reason why they’re here might be because the travel bans imposed on them by the EU and the USA are still in effect. I guess the Malaysian government doesn’t have a problem with them spending their poor country’s money here.

It’s also worth noting that Mugabe’s wife, Grace Mugabe, has often been a target of criticism for her habit of going on expensive shopping sprees while most Zimbabweans are deprived of even the most basic necessities.

Mugabe: Cholera epidemic? What cholera epidemic?

I’m sorry but I just can’t stop myself from posting bad news from Zimbabwe because it’s so sad that it’s comical. Anyway, in response to growing pressure from the rest of the world to send in outside troops to bring relief to the Zimbabwean people, President Robert Mugabe has announced that there is no cholera epidemic in his country, and hence no reason for any other country to mount any kind of intervention. As he says:

“I am happy to say our doctors have been assisted by others and WHO (the World Health Organisation)… so now that there is no cholera,” he said in a nationally televised speech.

That’s not what everyone else is saying, of course. Take this example from ReliefWeb:

The U.N. aid agencies report the outbreak is worsening amidst growing criminality in the country. They say security is bad and looting is on the increase, as are attacks and robberies of humanitarian aid workers.

Cholera is having a devastating impact, as 43 out of Zimbabwe’s 62 districts are reporting cases. In addition, the United Nations reports cholera is spreading to South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique.

That’s some serious chutzpah right there, comparable to the Iraqi Information Minister’s bombastic claims that there were no American troops in Baghdad on live television in 2003 even while American tanks were rolling in behind him. Let’s hope that the world will see the back of Mugabe in fairly short order so that the real work of rebuilding Zimbabwe can begin.

UPDATE: The Zimbabwean government is now saying that the cholera epidemic is still going on but claims that it is caused by a biological weapon attack orchestrated by the United States.

Zimbabwe Inflation Rate Now at 2.2m%

Back in February, I blogged about Zimbabwe’s $10 million note and received a ton of hits when it got stumbled. At that time, Zimbabwe had an official annual inflation rate of over 150,000%. Now that Mugabe has blatantly stole the elections, inflation has again shot up so ridiculously high that it makes the previous rate look like just a milk run.

According to this report in the Guardian, the official, and hence woefully under-reported, inflation rate is now at 2.2m% and the largest bank note is now denominated at $50 billion, with a value of around 18 British pence. The government can’t even print money fast enough, so that ordinary people are now limited to only $100 billion of withdrawals a day.

Just another day in the ongoing trainwreck that is Zimbabwe.

$10 million note for Zimbabwe

Continuing its slide into barbarism, the government of Zimbabwe has just released a $10 million Zimbabwe dollar note, which as this article writes, is still not enough to buy a single hamburger. An inflation rate of 150,000% is almost impossible to comprehend, so to break it down a bit:

150,000% inflation per year / 365 days = 410.96% inflation per day

To put this into perspective, at a daily inflation rate of 410.96%, something that costs, say, $10 today would end up costing $51.10 at the same time tomorrow. Needless to say, this makes life in Zimbabwe pretty tough. The really sad thing is that Zimbabwe was once one of the most developed countries in Africa with decent transport and power infrastructure and a thriving economy based on agriculture, mining and tourism. This of course is due to President Mugabe’s harebrained land redistribution policy in the late 1990s which resulted in the eviction of 4,000 white farmers and a stubborn refusal to face basic facts.

Between 2000 and 2007, Zimbabwe’s economy contracted by 40%, tourist visits fell by 75% in 2000 and the government has given up publishing official inflation figures. Within a period of less than 10 years, Zimbabwe has gone from a big exporter of wheat to having its citizens hunt for rats in fields to eat. President Mugabe continues to insist that the economy’s problems are due to sanctions imposed by Western countries despite the fact that the only sanctions that have been imposed are travel bans against the members of his government. His government insists that the inflation is caused by shopkeepers who keep raising their prices and has introduced price controls, though these are impossible to properly enforce, that effectively obliges shops to sell goods at a loss.

Zimbabwe will make a fantastic case study of how not to run an economy for many decades to come. It’s an incredibly potent reminder of how quickly and how completely a country can be ruined by gross mismanagement.

Addendum (1st March):

Someone has since commented on StumbleUpon that my daily inflation calculation above is incorrect. He is in fact right and that my calculations suck because they do not take into account the compounded effects of daily inflation. In fact, with an annual inflation rate of 150,000%, the daily inflation rate for Zimbabwe should only be around 2.0240155%. I’ve left the original text unchanged as a record of my stupid mistake.