Follow up on Zimbabwe

My sister works for a company that runs projects in various developping countries, including Zimbawe. I got this e-mail from her, here reprinted without asking anyone's permission. It is from her company's project leader. It gives an interesting insight into the state of play in Zimbabwe right now. It's a lot worse than most people realise....

Dear All,

Just an update on the situation here.

You may have seen news on the evictions and demolitions going on (called
restore order) here which have displaced somewhere around 250 - 300,000 people (conservative UN estimates) over the past 6 weeks. This has also had knock-on effects for many others as rentals have now soared in the high density areas. Nobody is quite sure what has spurred all this although many rumours and conspiracy theories abound.

The Gov. has announced about 2 weeks ago that they would also be scouring the residential areas and closing down all illegal offices. The suburbs north of the city are full of such offices, including ours and most of the NGOs we work with. I haven't heard of anyone actually being affected yet,so we just sit tight and hope other things occupy their minds. We are in a pretty quiet area, which also means it is highly unlikely that we would be amongst the early evictees. We should get reasonable advance warning when and if they actually get serious on this and start closing people down.

However. dont be too shocked if you hear one fine day that we are all sitting in the street. Rachel has started looking around for alternatives in "proper" office blocks just in case, but if it gets to that stage the competition will be somewhat fierce.

They have also announced a new campaign called "we will all live happily ever after etc etc", or some such bullshit, where everyone will get new houses, business places etc. So things (and people) are very confused.

Fuel has not been available in service stations for nearly a month now although long queues form on rumours of impending delivery. Many cars just stay in the queues as they are already out of fuel. We are OK so far because of our coupon system prepaid in overseas to Caltex. Official price of petrol was increased 300% to $10,000 per litre, and while this in theory brings the price somewhere in line with true prices, it doesn't solve the problem of lack of real money.

Scheduled power cuts have started in addition to unscheduled ones, although the schedules are also confused. So far we are not seriously inconvenienced, although sometimes we can't get fuel with our coupons because there is no power to run the fuel pumps. Water supply is bad in many suburbs, however again we are fortunate in being close to a major reservoir.

Next shortage looming is cash! again! We had this in 2003 when the largest note was $500. We have had $20,000 bearer cheques since then which solved the problem, but are now running out. Not sure why they are running out, lack of paper? lack of ink? another cunning strategy to undermine the black market? If there is no money you cant fuel the black market! You can't fuel anything! There is no fuel anyway! Crispen went to the bank to get $20 million for salaries etc last week and came back with a sackfull of $500 and $1,000 notes.

Ah well, life goes on and we can never complain about being bored in
Zimbabwe.

Regards

Terry

To give you an idea of the change in the decade since I was there, the Zimbabwe dollar exchange rate was Z$10 approximately to US$1. Now it is Z$9000 to US$1.