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Mugabenomics
With an inflation rate probably nearer 500% than the official figure of 300%, prices are shooting up daily, making Zim-Bob-We possibly the world's fastest-documented contracting economy all thanks to Uncle Bob, who has always seemingly been bent on defying even the most basic laws of economics. Take for example his legendary dismissal of his finance ministers (the last one to taste his wrath was the literate but timid Simba Makoni, now tragically being touted as a presidential hopeful) and his passionate belief that the law of supply and demand does not apply to Zimbabwe.
| That goes back to the disbelief in Cause and Effect. It's not only Arabs... |
If anything is in short supply, Mugabe imposes price controls. The absurdity of Mugabenomics reached its zenith in the late 1980s when former cabinet minister Maurice Nyagumbo the liberation hero who had been incarcerated in prison the longest (20 years) by white minority leader Ian Smith committed suicide (or was he done in) after he could not understand why he was being humiliated in public for helping an agricultural co-operative to acquire a vehicle and selling it for above prescribed prices.
| Making a profit is bad. Everybody to the left of anybody knows that... |
One of the principal pillars of Mugabenomics, of course, is his apparent belief that a country cannot go broke. Under this misguided approach, he has used fixed assets to pay for recurrent expenditure: to the extent that he has even mortgaged land in his desperate attempts to get fuel from the Libyans — the same land that he says he is so keen to see get into the hands of ordinary Zimbabweans. Many Zimbabweans trace the beginning of their economic problems to payments made by Mugabe to war veterans in 1997, which cost the fiscus billions of unbudgeted Zimbabwe dollars. This launched the now official policy of printing paper money, which has fuelled inflation. Then there was the devastating blow dealt to the economy a year later, in 1998, when Mugabe greedily and expediently decided to get enmeshed in the Congo war. Although this war benefited many of his cronies as they looted the Congo's resources it proved to be a misadventure of monumental proportions; the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Zimbabwe has never been the same since then.
Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-05-30 |
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