Posted on 07/21/2006 1:37:12 PM PDT by Clive
Dear Family and Friends,
Zimbabwe has been slowly and painfully slipping downwards for the last six years but this week the pace moved into top speed. It has been a shocking week here and everyone is reeling as services and prices have suddenly taken on a life of their own.
Petrol was 260 thousand dollars a litre three weeks ago. Last week it rose to 360 thousand a litre and this week it galloped to 500 thousand dollars a litre and then disappeared altogether.
In the supermarkets the price increases are staggering and everywhere you see people bending down and counting digits on stickers before turning away empty handed. The smallest bag of shopping now needs great handfuls of money. Many people have resorted to handing a huge stack of notes to the tellers in shops and asking them to use the money counting machines to arrive at the required amount because it just takes too long to count by hand. Either way the queues at the tills are endlessly long as tellers count and recount and then struggle to close their tills which bulge at the seams with our almost worthless bank notes.
This week I met a friend who is a retired civil servant on a government medical aid scheme. The pensioner showed me a letter just received saying that with immediate effect monthly contributions had increased by nine hundred percent. No apologies, no excuses, no humanity - not even for a woman as old as President Mugabe.
In complete contrast to the realities of four figure inflation, this week a dramatic crisis arose with bread. Bakers put the prices up, the government ordered them to put it back down. Bakers took out a full page advert in the press detailing the increases of everything from flour and yeast to wages, packaging and delivery. At the price stipulated by government, bakers said they were operating at a loss and putting twenty thousand jobs at risk. The government refused to allow the price increases and called in the police. In a week over 280 bakers and shop assistants have been fined for overcharging. As the bread war continued all week the obvious happened and fewer and fewer shops had bread on their shelves as less and less loaves were baked. It has been an absurd but now familiar case of denial by the government. The inflation figure is calculated and published by the government. From April to May the government said that inflation rose by 151 percent and yet they insist that the price of bread must remain unchanged. Its not funny just frightening but one absolutely classic report in the state owned Herald raised a grimace of a smile. A quote was given by an Assistant Inspector Police woman who said: "I can confirm that we are arresting bakeries for overcharging." Not bakers, but bakeries : bricks and mortar !
Some months ago the opposition promised a cold winter of discontent in Zimbabwe. Well, it's cold and we are all very very discontented and winter is half way in and now...?
Thanks for reading, until next week, love cathy
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I truly believe President Mugabe has gone around the turn, he is out of his mind, crazy, senile, whatever you want to call it. I assume because he is basically the father of the country, much like George Washington for the US, that no one is willing to do anything. I think that will in the end be very bad for Zimbabwe.
"Sounds like a regular socialist worker's paradise to me."
Yesterday I got a copy of a Hamptons LI newspaper. On the cover is a photo of a little house, obviously quite old and situated very close to the highway. The headline says that the house has been assessed by the local government at over two million dollars.
Move over Africa, here we come.
Your words are true even if it ends today.
Sounds like Germany between the wars. People pushing around wheelbarrows full of money.
"...in the end..." ?????
It was the same scenario with the bread that brought about the French Revolution. Where are the Jean-Paul Marat's of Zimbabwe? Or does Africa breed a continent of cowards?
Isn't it great, though, that there's no more colonialism?
Strangely, Rhodesia ran beautifully when it was independent and under white rule. They exported food.
British imperialism was the high point for many countries in Africa and Asia. Most have gone downhill since.
Correct. Like I was told at our church: It was for a higher cause.
Remind me not to gripe about gas prices anymore.
With natural resources to sell to foreign companies in Red China or Russia, it seems the black elite that run Zimbabwe have decided Zimbabwean people are redundant and should be starved to extinction. The resources will be extracted by worker gangs from Red China and sent abroad in exchange for cash to the ruling black elite.
Silly British colonialists, building railroads, bridges and farms that gave jobs to the blacks along with health care. That was so 19th century.
Amen Brother.
And trying to export Christianity too...
This doesn't tell the whole story.
My friend was just "retired" by the government. She is a teacher with a Masters degree from a European university, and teaches at high school level. Because of her degree and her seniority, she gets paid a higher salary. So the "answer" is that she is now "retired". It is cheaper for the government to hire less qualified teachers...and since the school fees were raised, many people can't afford the fees to send the kids to schools anyway...
Multiply this by thousands, and you have the slow death of the middle class...and for the villages, of course, it is worse..
She is a nun, but was teaching at a govenrnment school...so now she is teaching catechism and working in the villages. But the problem is that her two brothers died a few years back, and because she was a teacher, she was allowed to have her nieces and nephew stay nearby and attend the school. Now, she is not near any schools, and cannot supervise them, and they are staying with her friends, since she does not have money for them to board at the school.
And, of course, this means her order (the sisters) have lost her salary as a teacher.
I send her money for their fees. If anyone wants addresses there to send money to the sisters. email me.
or are they all really really old dollars that are mostly spent so it takes more of them???
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