"They were working with us and we believed they were comrades and were standing by their leader. We did not know that they were standing with him during the day and at night they were working with the Americans and the British - what a shame. They can never be leaders of Zimbabwe - they are traitors and all Zimbabweans see them like that. They are abandoning their leader for 30 pieces of silver."
So says Didymus Mutasa, minister of state security, and of lands (Land Reform and Resettlement), when asked for his reaction to one of the Zimbabwean government's trusted generals abandoning President Robert Mugabe's bandwagon. Former Home Affairs minister and Politiburo member Dumiso Dabengwa, has defected to Simba Makoni's side. Another ally came in the form of former speaker of parliament, Cyril Ndebele. Mutasa said Mugabe was a charismatic leader loved by the people, adding that Dabengwa and Makoni were also to blame for the problems the country was facing. In not so many words, Mutasa admitted that the ruling party was to blame for collapse of the once great nation.
The queues in Zimbabwe, that shopper's paradise, were extra long this Christmas. Ordinary people were withdrawing their maximum daily allowance of Z$ 50 million while business owners were shunted to the back. Their allowance is a substantially more generous Z$ 750 million and Zimbabwe Reserve Bank Governor, Gideon Gono, said that they could wait.
The queues were compounded by people attempting to swap their old Z$ 200,000 notes which are being discontinued.
Those Zimbabweans must be really, really wealthy.
No, they're not.
Z$ 50 million is equivalent to less than US$ 7. Anyone attempting to swap more than their daily limit of Z$ 200,000 notes will be arrested for currency hoarding. In Zimbabwe, possession of "too much" of your own money is now a crime.
Food prices our outrageous. But you didn't need me to tell you that.
According to Stats SA the current inflation rate for vegetables is now 25.6%, and that of grain products – a staple for many – is 17.3%. And these rates of inflation are all increasing. These increases fall hardest on middle- to lower-income earners.
What is driving these price increases? No, not climate change ... not yet anyway. We have come out of a long period of declining food prices. The result is visibly apparent in any economic survey of agriculture. In the developed world agriculture is now only 2 – 3% of economic production. In South Africa agriculture is a "mere" 4% of total GDP.
This shrinking profitability has resulted in consolidation, the creation of super-sized farms, improved farming techniques and productivity, as well as falling employment in the sector. Farms are able to produce more but, after being caught short with oversupplies that rot in their warehouses, have reduced production. They are being caught unawares once more by changes in the nature of demand.
