Survival of the Fittest

And we think we've got problems. In Zimbabwe they calculate the price of goods by the number of days they have to spend in line at the bank to withdraw the cash to buy them:

Long before the cockerel in their dirt yard crowed, Rose Moyo and her husband rolled out of bed. It was 2.20am.

They crept past their children – Cinderella, nine, and Chrissie, 10 – sleeping on the floor of the one-room house and took their daily moonlit stroll to the bank. The guard on the graveyard shift gave them a number. They were the 29th to arrive, all hoping for a chance to withdraw the maximum amount of Zimbabwean currency the government allowed – the equivalent of just a pound or two.

Zimbabwe is in the grip of one of the great hyperinflations in world history. The working people of the country's once proud capital have been plunged into a Darwinian struggle to get by. Many have been reduced to peddlers and paupers, hawkers and black-market hustlers, eating just a meal a day, their hollowed cheeks a testament to their hunger.

Like countless Zimbabweans, Moyo has calculated the price of goods by the number of days she has to spend in line at the bank to withdraw cash to buy them: a day for a bar of soap; another for a bag of salt; and four for a sack of cornmeal. The withdrawal limit rose last week, but with inflation surpassing what independent economists say is an almost unimaginable 40 million per cent, she said the value of the new amount would quickly be a pittance, too.

"It's survival of the fittest," said Moyo, 29, a hair braider who sells the greens she grows in her garden for a couple of pence a bunch. "If you're not fit, you will starve."

Economists here and abroad say Zimbabwe's economic collapse is gaining velocity, radiating instability into the heart of southern Africa. As the bankrupt government prints ever more money, inflation has gone wild, rising from 1,000% in 2006 to 12,000% in 2007 to a figure so high the government had to lop 10 zeroes off the currency in August to keep the nation's calculators from being overwhelmed. (Had it left the currency alone, £1 would now be worth about five trillion Zimbabwean dollars.)

Making matters worse, cash itself has become terribly scarce. Business executives and diplomats say Zimbabwe's central bank governor, Gideon Gono, desperate for foreign currency to stoke the governing party's patronage machine, sends runners into the streets with suitcases of the nation's currency to buy up US dollars and South African rand on the black market – drying up Zimbabwean dollars that would otherwise go to the banks.

Because of the cash shortage, the government strictly limits the amount that people can withdraw. Even so, Zimbabweans say they often wait in vain for hours at banks that send their customers away empty-handed.

 

Gono, who blames western sanctions for the nation's troubles, has shown few signs of doing anything differently. "I am going to print and print and sign the money until sanctions are removed," he told state media.

 

Economists say that the only thing that can halt Zimbabwe's inflationary spiral is a political solution that takes control over the country's economy out of the hands of Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old president who still maintains a vice-like hold on power after 28 years in office.

Update: I see (via Norm) that this piece was originally published in the NYT last week.