Drunk in Charge

Shortly before I left the UK a very good friend of mine – a chap I was at school with in Zimbabwe – presented me with a parting gift. It is a framed copy of a $100 billion note. That is Zimbabwe Dollars. Surrounding the crisp untainted bill behind the glass are the words: ‘In Case of Emergency Sell the Frame’. We had a good chortle about this and I thanked him very much, already picturing it above my imaginary bar, in my imaginary entertainment room, in my imaginary dream Australian home. No more imagining if it was Australian Dollars!

This denomination, although only recently introduced in Zimbabwe, is already out of date. Not even the most desperate of street vendors will accept it, and revealing a wad of these notes as a hawker offers cheap cigarettes and windscreen wiper blades at your car window is a sure way of ending the haggling. It is nigh on impossible for me to explain here the relentless descent of Zimbabwe’s economy. I don’t mean the reasons behind the collapse, those are obvious. I mean the actual numbers, figures, sums, and percentages. Let me put it as follows:

In the early 1980’s the Zimbabwe Dollar was level with the British Pound Sterling. At my Grade Seven school dance in 1989 (my final year of junior school) I was dropped off at the school gates with Z$20 in my pocket and a rather sturdy hockey player called Nicky on my arm. Around the year 2000 my parents left Zimbabwe for a round-the-world holiday taking in Australia, Britain and the USA. It cost them the same as it cost me to take my mother and grandmother for lunch in 2001. A mate of mine has given me Z$100 billion from 2008 as a keepsake, and on Friday January 19th 2009 the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe introduced a Z$100 trillion note. That about sums it up, doesn't it? In fact the front page of Zimbabwe’s Herald newspaper from that day summarises the current situation here quite well. It headlines with the release of this monopoly money and has a side column insert advising readers what steps to follow if they believe they may have contracted cholera. An effectively placed ad I thought, considering the majority of people will either be reading the paper whilst visiting the loo or indeed substituting it for toilet roll. Oh, and the price of this newspaper? Z$15 billion.

I suggested at the end of my previous post that Robert Mugabe had left for Malaysia on a one-way ticket. Well he’s back and the rumours are as rife as ever. Evidently a meeting was called between Mugabe and various heads of regional nations to discuss the crisis here. Whatever they discussed over the weekend, and subsequently failed to agree on, Zimbabwe has to be near breaking point. Schools were meant to open last week after the summer break, but have remained closed across the country at the government’s insistence. If you believe the rubbish churned out by government mouthpieces such as The Herald this is mostly down to a problem with marking exams from the previous school term. In other words schools can’t open until results are finalised. What is actually happening is that teachers across Zimbabwe, a lot of who are responsible for marking, are refusing to accept salaries in Zimbabwe Dollars. It has been suggested that a foreign donor agency is offering to pay these salaries in preferred US Dollars, but agreeing to this would essentially be an acceptance by Zimbabwe’s government that things are not working the way they are. Private schools, attended in large numbers by children of ministers, already pay their teachers in US Dollars but are also prevented from opening because it would quite simply look bad.

The problem is much greater. Teachers are only one part of the public service masses that Zimbabwe’s rulers have to attend to, and quick. Nurses and the armed forces are in the same boat. The latter being a potential time bomb, for if the government were to start shelling out foreign currency salaries to teachers and not those with the guns, the guns could very well start turning inwards, if they haven’t already. I have heard several accounts of assassination attempts on senior ministers this past week. There is also the question of where all this foreign currency would come from. Zimbabwe is, after all, not officially a ‘Dollarised’ economy. It is illegal to trade broadly in US Dollars without permission from the US. This was pointed out recently by US President Barack Obama who questioned the legality of Zimbabwe’s administration charging retailers a US Dollar fee for the right to sell their goods in that currency. In Borrowdale Village, one of Harare’s most popular shopping areas, I was perusing various clothing stores only to find panic-stricken managers flitting from door to door trying to find out when the government inspectors searching for unlicensed US Dollar traders were due to visit. The only factor in their favour was the absence of electricity making it difficult to see clearly what currency they were trading in. Grocery shopping in total darkness has been another new experience for me this week. The Zimbawean First Lady Grace Mugabe didn’t have to worry about shopping in darkness recently. She was caught by a British Sunday Times photographer in Hong Kong reputedly spending US$90,000 on her husband’s credit card. The photographer claims he was assaulted by the woman as her security held him back. It apparently wasn’t so much the strength of her punches as the raking marks caused by her many gold rings that damaged the journalist’s face. How something like this is allowed to pass unchallenged is beyond comprehension.

Last Monday night I had dinner with friends, drinking several beers and as many glasses of red wine. Driving home under the influence of alcohol is an unfortunately familiar experience for most Hararians with a car. On my way back home, with the remainder of the six-pack I took for dinner on the passenger seat, I encountered the usual police block on the main road. They stopped me and, seeing the beers on my seat, asked if I “had anything for them”. Unconcerned with whether or not I had consumed too many myself they were only interested in some light refreshment to see them through the night shift. I could very easily have said no and I am sure they would have let me pass. But as much as to attract their attention away from the fact I had been drinking as for the sheer intrigue of whether they’d accept, I offered them a couple of cans. The man doing the questioning peered back past my vehicle to check the people behind weren’t watching, and then hurriedly agreed. I passed him two cans and he waved me on my way. I was bemused by this experience for a day, but the following evening the same officer stopped me and asked the same question. I enquired whether he remembered me from the night before and only when I reminded him of my canned donation did he recall the meeting. At that point I heard a muffled scream coming from the trees and grass beside their barricade. I asked him what it was about. His smiled vanished, “It is a ghost. You may go.”

‘Go’ is just what I am doing tomorrow. Not out of Zimbabwe, but to the west of the country to the border town of Kariba. This town sits on the hills overlooking the vast man-made Lake Kariba, or Kariba Dam. Built half a century ago on the Zambezi River that separates Zambia from Zimbabwe, the dam is a place of extreme natural beauty. Simply image search ‘Kariba sunset’ on your browser to get an idea of what I am talking about. It holds so many fond childhood memories for me and these four days ahead should provide much in the way of sun, fun and relaxation. Fifteen years ago the shores of the dam were swathed in wildlife; buffalo numbering into the many hundreds; elephants lumbering through the grass and shallows. Although still beautiful the lake has lost so much over recent years. One can only hope it will bounce back better than ever when the situation here turns in a positive direction. Much of Zimbabwe will such is the resilience of the land.

Harare is a shadow of its former self. It will take longer for this once majestic city to return to the glory of its physical past. Socially speaking, I hope the future is bright and not far off. Wherever I drive I am filled with nostalgia and warm reminders of my childhood. I visited my engaged friends the other day shortly before they returned to London, only to discover they were staying opposite the house of the robust girl I took as my date to that Grade 7 dance all those years ago. Now that I think about it, my vague memory of that particular evening is perhaps not the fondest of my youth. I recall part of the evening involved a game in which the boys had to carry their dates piggyback to the other side of the school hall in a race that would clearly favour the lithe, speedy and agile. Between my date and I we exhibited none of these characteristics, leaning more towards a combination of loathe, greedy and fragile. Still, we weren’t ones not to join in the fun. She hoisted me up onto her back (the reverse we agreed was never going to happen) and off we went. We came third.