I saw Nik of the www.twistedkites.co.uk blog in London today and he referred to the hyper inflation in Zimbabwe. So here is a picture for Nik – one bottle of beer and the four stacks of 500 Zim$ notes required to buy the one bottle! The beer cost 1 million Zim$ (about 17 pence) each stack of 500 Zim$ dollar notes is a quarter of a million dollars! However, all this was last week so you’d probably need a fifth stack of notes if you wanted the same beer today.

One bottle of beer is not normally enough for me and I suspect the effort of carrying enough money around to buy a few bottles would make me more thirsty. However, unless I saved up I couldn’t buy more than 5 bottles a day because 5 million Zim$ is the limit the banks put on cash withdrawls per day – they are printing the money like there’s no tomorrow (there probably wont be!) but can’t print it fast enough so there is a shortage of banknotes. Forget debit/credit cards, to all intents and purposes, they don’t exist in any meaningful way.

Saturday 8th December 2007

Dear Family and Friends,
It was a rare occasion this week when the electricity happened to come back on at the same time as the main 8 pm evening news on ZBC TV. Normally at this time of the evening the power still hasn’t come back on and we are grinding into the 15th or 16th hour of the day without electricity. The headline story and accompanying film clip on the local news was of President Mugabe and his wife at Harare airport preparing to depart for the EU Africa Summit in Portugal. Ministers, security personnel and VIP’s were lined up on the tarmac and formed a corridor of smiles and hand shakes and inaudible little comments.

In the same week as our leader and his wife and the official delegation were heading for Europe, Air Zimbabwe announced that one return air fare from Harare to London had increased to 804 million Zimbabwe dollars. To put that price into context is the recently publicised information by the Teachers Union saying that government school teachers presently earn an average salary of just 17 million Zimbabwe dollars a month.

The same week that our President flew to Lisbon, a couple of South African visitors invited me to tea at a local restaurant. I queued at my local bank but was again limited to how much of my own money I could withdraw and was allowed to take just five million dollars. Immediately I spent three million dollars buying one light bulb and one jar of peanut butter and so with just two million dollars left, I hoped I wasn’t paying for tea. At the restaurant three cups of tea, one waffle and one toasted sandwich were ordered. The bill came to 7.2 million dollars.

Back in Portugal President Mugabe and his wife didn’t have any waiting around when they landed. They were ringed by security men and hurried out of sight to their hotel. Meanwhile at home in Zimbabwe at least three hundred people stood patiently in a winding line to buy milk from a bulk tanker. Outside the banks the queues went into multiple hundreds and outside a virtually empty supermarket an enormous crowd, uncountable in size, pushed and jostled for a chance to buy a bag of maize meal. The day before a similar desperate queue had resulted in riot police, baton sticks to control the crowd and injuries.

This week as our President and his wife dine with 80 other world leaders in Portugal there are still no staple foods to buy in Zimbabwe’s shops. Our schools have just broken up for the Christmas holidays and the search for food and lines to withdraw pathetically small amounts of our own money from the banks are getting longer and more desperate by the day. Roadside vendors are selling pockets of potatoes for 11 million dollars; if you can afford them, it means a gruelling three days of queuing at the bank just to put potatoes on the dinner plate. If you are a government school teacher, they will cost three quarters of your entire monthly salary.

To put these figures into perspective, or perhaps not, this week the Minister of Finance presented a 7,8 quadrillion dollar budget for the coming year. None of us have worked out how many zeroes this is yet and calculators can’t help either.

Zimbabweans are facing an extremely hard Christmas this year but as always we look for hope. Many events are drawing closer and all hold the opportunity to bring relief to a battered and beaten country. The summit in Portugal will be followed soon after by the Zanu PF Annual Congress, then the result of talks in South Africa, then the MDC Annual Congress and then, in March next year, Parliamentary and Presidential elections.

I will be taking a short break to draw strength and calculate the quadrillions but wish all Zimbabweans, friends and supporters of the country a peaceful and Happy Christmas. I saw the first crimson Flame Lily of the season in the grass on the roadside this week and it heralds the end of another year and the start of what must surely be a better time for us all.
Until my next letter in the New Year, with love, cathy.

Dear Family and Friends,
On Friday morning in small town Zimbabwe the big ten-tonne trucks were visible soon after nine in the morning and they were filled to overflowing with weary “cheer leaders.” Men, women and youths who looked dusty, wind tossed and tired and theirs was certainly not a position to be envied. It was hard to know where all these people had come from but they weren’t familiar faces so they must have been collected from somewhere in the surrounding rural areas. Crammed into two open topped trucks, there were perhaps 50 people in each, sitting on the floor , squashed up against each other like livestock going to slaughter: without dignity or individuality – just faces, numbers to swell the crowd.

It only took a few seconds to work out what was going on when the vehicles turned into the local ruling party offices in the town. The trucks were from a well known parastatal and had the Zimbabwe flag wrapped around and tied onto bumpers and roll bars. These vehicles aren’t buses and undoubtedly don’t have permits to transport people but they have become very familiar to us in the past eight years, disgorging great crowds of people at ruling party rallies and meetings. When the worst of the farm invasions were going on, the big white vehicles with the red and blue stripes on the doors bought fear, dread and a feeling of finality to farmers and their workers. They trucks came carrying masses of people who would swarm over fields, camp outside gates, barricade roads and sing, drum and shout, throwing stones at walls, windows and roofs until the
occupants were beaten into submission and left.

Some of the people in the trucks on this last day of November 2007 were wearing clothes and head scarves adorned with the President’s face and that gave the game away. They were here on a brief stop over but were on their way to Harare for what had been advertised as the “Million Man March” – a show of support of President Mugabe’s candidature in the 2008 elections.

As I passed the loaded trucks, for a brief moment I tried to catch someone’s eye to see if I could spot political fervour, a dedicated zealot, even a believer in the cause but it wasn’t there. I saw weary images, lean faces, pronounced cheek bones – tired people, the same as the rest of us. Like everyone else they are also surviving with the bare minimum of food and money; their children are malnourished and many are no longer in school ; their hospitals and clinics have few staff and even fewer drugs and they are scratching out a living in hard, primitive conditions. So why then, after seven years of chronic decline would anyone willingly support a party which cannot even ensure basic food in the shops. Undoubtedly those big trucks would be empty if the ruling party had not taken such pains to ensure that as we went into the next election they had complete control over the supply, price and availability of food, seed, fertilizer, fuel, water, electricity and now even of bank notes. Until next week, thanks for reading, love cathy.