Escape!

I am about to escape to the ‘Diaspora’ for four weeks. What will Zimbabwe be like when I return?

Today the street rate for the dollar moved from 40 million to 1 USD to 100 million to 1 USD. This follows the release of 100 million dollar notes, 200 million dollar notes and 500 million dollar notes into the banking system and the ‘cash withdrawal’ allowance being moved from 100 million to 500 million a week. This morning I listened to the ZBC news to hear the director of the National Incomes and Pricing Commission threatening businesses who either put up their prices or leave their shops open but the shelves empty, that they will first be prosecuted and then have their trading licences withdrawn.

Government just don’t get it. After years of inflation and the corresponding ability to track it, it should now be obvious to even the dullest of minds that inflation is directly related to un-earned money supply injected into the system.

The Reserve Bank Governor has told the trade unions that by the 12th of January – the day I plan to return to Zimbabwe – workers will be able to withdraw their entire salaries of hundreds of billions of dollars on production of their payslips at the bank. By the 12th of January they might actually need hundreds of trillions of dollars to buy one single $US but that too seems to escape the minds of our ‘learned helpless’ leadership.

While this economic idiocy prevails, other arms of the ZANU FP ‘government’ (we do not have a government right now of any kind but Mugabe and his cronies pretend that we have) have been abducting civil and opposition political activists and the latest stories emanating from the Maranke diamond fields suggest that hundreds of civilians seeking to extract the raw diamonds have been killed in cold blood by helicopter gun-ships strafing the area.

Western leaders are threatening invasion ‘to save the Zimbabwean people from cholera’, their threats actually being music to Mugabe’s ears. If anyone is going to threaten Zimbabwe with invasion it must be seen to be a real threat and everyone knows that it isn’t so why make these threats? More dull political minds it would seem. To stem the chance of invasion happening, Mugabe has told us all, that the Cholera epidemic is ‘completely under control’, and therefore invasion is unwarranted. Talk about the twilight zone – this beats most of all that has gone before.

But if there is justification for invasion it is the ongoing and escalating abduction of civil and political activists and the wholesale slaughter of people scratching an opportunity from diamond fields that have themselves been stolen by the government of Zimbabwe from their rightful owners.

Meanwhile the South African government and ruling ANC have jointly said that they are going to ‘persuade’ Mugabe to retire. Another joke, of course.

Oh, well, Next Year will be Better!