Thousand-dollar shopping in Zimbabwe – Moneyweb

On the shortest day of the year (21 June) Zimbabwe gave us her incredibly greatest: blue sky, sunshine and golden grass. It was beautiful out there in the bush, aloes in flower, streams still trickling and mist nestling in the grass very long after sunrise. For the previous two months of June we also had the rare prospect, which evidently only occurs after in a century, of observing the five planets which are visible with the naked eye lined up in an arc under the waning moon.

Every single early morning at 05:00 I went exterior into the chilly and looked for the arc, cloud and mist not supporting. But on the fifth morning I last but not least bought a very good view. My horizon was not very low plenty of to see Mercury, but Venus was in and out of the mist and Mars, Jupiter and Saturn superbly crystal clear with the waning moon at the best of the arc. By the next night time the likelihood of observing it once again experienced long gone because a cold front moved in, thick cloud and mist, rain and an icy wind reminding us that this is winter season following all.

We need to have to seize the splendor and tranquility at each individual option that arises in get to get via these hard moments in our country all over again.

It is turning into a exhausted litany to generate that nonetheless once more in the very last fortnight fuel went up for the second time in a month from US$1.78 to US$1.88 litre. Toll gates went up once more from Z$500 to Z$700 and food stuff prices immediately followed match. We have promptly absent back to the days when all the basics on our tables have turn out to be luxuries and I went grocery searching to see what I could obtain for much less than a thousand Zim pounds.

It was not a pretty photo these are some of the conventional, frequent grocery things most men and women obtain:

10kg maize meal: Z$5 329
2l cooking oil: Z$3 299
2kg flour: Z$1 199
Sugar: none to acquire
375ml peanut butter: Z$1 099
500g jam: Z$1 199
100 tea baggage: Z$1 499
500g Cerevita cereal: Z$2 199
1kg oats Z$2 199

On the very first day of the month, just immediately after folks experienced been paid out, the large grocery store was virtually empty, the indicator, if everyone essential it, that individuals can not pay for the thousand-dollar food items in the supermarkets any longer.

Exterior in the vehicle park the money changers stood flicking piles of notes and sitting in the freezing cold wind. Future to them sat an old man in a wheelchair I typically attempt and assistance with a loaf of bread or packet of sweet buns. When I bent down to give him a packet of buns currently he was shivering and my eyes crammed with tears. Why? Because he’s an aged guy who’s experienced a stroke, just can’t chat, is paralysed and this is what his lifestyle has come to.

Chatting to a man this week about all the design that is going on in Harare and the wealth and opulence that oozes out of driveways in the northern suburbs of the cash metropolis, it did not acquire very long to concur on how some people today are turning into right away millionaires once more in Zimbabwe on a scale we previous saw again in 2008.

Here’s how it operates:

If you have connections superior up in govt you can acquire a person US dollar for Z$365 at the formal lender amount, you can then go out on the street and offer that 1 US dollar for all around Z$700, doubling your funds in a few minutes. Extrapolate that one particular US greenback to 100 or 1 000 and it does not acquire lengthy to come to be a millionaire. Anyone is aware of it and yet it carries on in plain look at with no interception.

Meanwhile, conveying why the authorities is only building ‘token payments’ to the country’s financial debt which has now soared to US$17 billion dollars, the government explained it was contending with ‘protracted challenges’ to deal with Zimbabwe’s ‘gruelling economic disaster.’

Hmmm, we imagined, but who made this gruelling financial disaster and who is it that has missing their salaries, pensions and lifetime savings and is sitting outside supermarkets in the freezing cold hoping anyone will support them?