As the day passes, Zimbabwe’s inflation rates became sorer. In the previous month, Zimbabwe’s rate of inflation has touched new heights as it surged to 3,714 percent and The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warn that Zimbabwe’s annual rate of inflation will reach more than 6,400 per cent next year.
Country’s economy has totally dilapidated, as Mugabe government has failed in all fronts. Country’s debts has increased drastically, its foreign reserve has reduced, which leaves its national bank penurious. Nation’s financial condition has shattered as its prices rose about 36-fold between the end of April last year and the same day this year.
The Central Statistics Office said that prices of all needed articles are soaring incessantly. Employment has fallen and Zimbabweans find it difficult to pay its increasing power bills, even life has become as difficult as most of compatriots find it difficult to make two ends meet.
Prices of food like meat, vegetables, cooking gas has risen to its all time high and transportation forgets it.
The annual inflation rate has been on a roller-coaster ride since December 2004 when it shot up to 622.8 percent. In March this year, it breached the 2,000 percent mark to reach 2,200 percent.
International Monetary Fund had projected that Zimbabwe’s inflation would not surge more than 3,000 marks to the end of the present financial year, but it has crossed the all projected limits.
Labor unions are demanding the government and employers raise the minimum wage to the poverty level, currently pegged at $6,800 on the official market but $50 on the black market.
Due to a increasing economic distress, black marketeers are thriving and even farmers, who receive gas as government subsidy to pump water for irrigation purposes are selling it into black market for they make a kill by selling the gas itself. Despite good rains, the primary sector, which is the backbone of the country’s economy it has taken a back seat.
Zimbabwe’s only ruler since its independence, Mugabe, blames Western sanctions for the Zimbabwe’s economy, but the bitter truth is that Mugabe is the solely responsible for the country’s present conditions. Mugabe’s controversial policies such as his seizure of white-owned farms and redistributing it among the blacks is at the root cause for decline in agriculture productivity.
Keeping a close eye on the hyperinflation, Mugabe government has signed a law establishing an incomes and prices commission, which would set prices and wages. But all such efforts appear non-starters, until and unless the country’s productivity, foreign currency and its foreign policies do not markedly improve.
Image: sfgate
Via: presstv
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Zimbabwe is a striking example of how most African nations cautiously started out experimenting with democracy, once they achieved independence from their colonial masters, only to sink into the worst kinds of dictatorships the world has known.
Robert Mugabe has proved not different. The old man has been too shrewd to allow another to occupy his position since it attained independence.
The nation’s economy has gone to the dogs. Yielding of the old order has not brought about any change for the better.
Things have only gone from bad to worse.
First snatching land from white farmers and distributing it among the blacks proved a costly mistake. The farm sector collapsed. Then trying to uproot the blacks and resettle the whites back in the farms added salt to injury.
Till Mugabe remains at the helm of affairs of that hapless nation, it has no hope.