Robert Mugabe, the batshit dictator of Zimbabwe, has extended his policy of price-fixing to steminflation and threatened to sieze any business that doesn’t comply.
Mugabe claims that it is profiteering by private enterprise that is responsible for the official 4,500% rate of inflation in Zimbabwe (which most independent financial institutions put at near 9,000%) and not the fact that whenever the Zimbabwean government runs out of money, it just prints some more.
Many businessmen said that they would simply cut or stop production rather than produce goods at a loss prompting the Mugabe to threaten to steal sieze any business that doesn’t comply.
The price-cuts started on essential items such as bread, meat and other foodstuffs and were extended to other items such as consumer goods, mobile phone call charges, air fares and car spares. The price cuts have now been extended to fuel which is already in short supply. As a result, shops have sold out of essential items, mobile phone networks are too busy to route calls and petrol stations are closing down.
A few years ago, Zimbabwe was a net producer of food and was one of the strongest economies on the continent. Zimbabwe was known as the Bread Basket of Africa. Then Mugabe siezed white-owned farms, divided them up into too-small plots and gave them to black farm workers who don’t know how to run a farm. As a result, Zimbabwe’s farms can no longer support the population and foreign investment has all but stopped with the exception of the Chinese who are trying to establish Zimbabwe as a client state in Africa. One of Mugabe’s other bright ideas – announced a couple of weeks ago – is to sieze any foreign-owned business that isn’t at least 50% owned by a black Zimbabwean. This includes Barclays Bank and a couple of huge mining companies, basically all that is left of western foreign investment.
Black farmers don’t know how to farm? Who works on the farms?
I work for a large multi-national corporation, doesn’t mean I know how to run it.
Fair point, but since it is the black farmworkers who were keeping the farms going, it wouldn’t be a stretch for them to run the farm itself…
I doubt that there would be much difficulty in you and your colleagues running that particular multi-national. Industrial democracy is not impossible – though there might be questions to its desirability…
My point is that the economic problems did not begin when the regime started supporting land seizures — which were already ongoing — but rather the media attention started. Mugabe’s plans to seize white-owned businesses are probably popular, even with the opposition.
But the land reform has been half-hearted and corrupt, and is slipped in whenever repression of opposition activists is mentioned. Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector cannot support the population because it is harder for the country to trade internationally. Sanctions imposed regimes rarely hit those at the top, as was proved in Iraq in the nineties.