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February 7, 2007
From bad to worse
This NY Times article is right. Watching Zimbabwe over the last few years has been like watching a tragedy in slow motion. You don't know exactly how it will end, but you know it will end badly. Here's the latest installment:
JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 6 — For close to seven years, Zimbabwe’s economy and quality of life have been in slow, uninterrupted decline. They are still declining this year, people there say, with one notable difference: the pace is no longer so slow.
Indeed, Zimbabwe’s economic descent has picked up so much speed that President Robert G. Mugabe, the nation’s leader for 27 years, is starting to lose support from parts of his own party.
In recent weeks, the national power authority has warned of a collapse of electrical service. A breakdown in water treatment has set off a new outbreak of cholera in the capital, Harare. All public services were cut off in Marondera, a regional capital of 50,000 in eastern Zimbabwe, after the city ran out of money to fix broken equipment. In Chitungwiza, just south of Harare, electricity is supplied only four days a week.
The government awarded all civil servants a 300 percent raise two weeks ago. But the increase is only a fraction of the inflation rate, so the nation’s 110,000 teachers are staging a work slowdown for more money. Measured by the black-market value of Zimbabwe’s ragtag currency, even their new salaries total less than 60 American dollars a month.
The article goes on, and I encourage you to read it all. Here is just one choice example of how things are going so very wrong:
Seeking to revive farm production, for example, the government sells gasoline to farmers at a bargain rate of 330 Zimbabwe dollars per liter — and farmers promptly resell it on the black market for 10 times that, leaving their fields idle.
The anecdotes coming out of Zimbabwe are beginning to sound like scenarios made-up for textbook examples, but they are not hypothetical. This is happening...right now...to real people.
And you just know it is going to get worse.
Posted by William Polley at February 7, 2007 11:46 PM
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