‘Zimbabwe is like a flipped coin in the air’

It’s summer and the purple flowers on the jacaranda trees have begun to bloom, but they’re little comfort to Zimbabweans in the middle of a dire economic crisis. You can tell it’s bad here because even the death of Ian Smith last month did not arouse much hostile comment. The domestic consensus is that Mugabe has managed both to follow in Smith’s tyrannical footsteps and to wreck the formal economy at the same time.

This is Africa’s breadbasket turned basket-case and though the first EU-Africa summit in seven years starts this week and there are presidential elections in March next year, no one sees much prospect for change. It’s true that Gordon Brown has done some macho posturing over Zimbabwe — chest-thumping over human rights abuses — but that has achieved precisely nothing for ordinary Zimbabweans and provided Mugabe with a treasure trove of propaganda material with which to lambast Britain and its ‘colonial’ ambitions — much like Smithy before him.

Many have banked on economic collapse as the surest way of bringing reform, but even that most depressing solution has been curiously elusive. Though the country has the fastest contracting economy in the world, down 12 per cent each year, and the highest inflation rate — 7,600 per cent — and though many commentators predicted long ago that the economy would simply collapse and take the country with it, Zimbabwean businesses have proved robust almost beyond belief, lumbering on like war-weary soldiers.

Recently, times have been especially hard. In a desperate attempt to contain runaway inflation in June, the government imposed price controls on all goods. Shops were ordered to halve their prices — which led to businesses being forced to sell at a loss. And of course because of the relative cheapness, commodities most Zimbabweans once took for granted — eggs, milk, bread, vegetable oil, sugar, soap and the national staple, maize — quickly moved out of the supermarket shelves and on to the streets where, once the supermarkets had run out, they could be sold illegally for many times their ‘official’ price.