Zimbabwe Absurdity

I went into my local bank last Friday to draw out the maximum in cash that I was allowed, 5 billion local dollars (about 125 US dollars), or so I thought. Nope, sorry the maximum has been reduced to 1 billion (we seem have to adopted the US “standard” of 1000 million to a billion). And no, the new notes were not available either. I have since seen the new 50 million note which looks a lot like the 5 million apart from the colour and the zeros which they have actually formatted: 50 000 000 which is much easier to read than 50000000!

We are in a curious situation in this country of going into a recount of the presidential elections without actually knowing the result of the first round. Note that this is different from going into a second round (which we were going to do) without knowing the results of the presidential election. It seems that this has all stemmed from the posting of the election results outside the polling stations as required by SADCC standards for a free and fair election (SADCC = Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference). Now I must admit that as far as I could see the actual polling process WAS free and fair. There were more observers in the polling station that I went to than people waiting to vote. It was all orderly and surprisingly low key. I can only think that the ruling party were so confident of a clear win that they thought there was no need to fiddle anything. Oops. Now of course they are in a corner and not at all sure what to do about it. If Africa is really serious about being taken seriously (permanent seat on the UN security council etc.) it should be serious about sorting out the whole sorry mess.

It seems that the nation is undergoing a collective holding of breath as getting anything done or committments made is just about impossible. Businesses have slowed right down and we seem to be on hold and event the parallel market currency rate seems to have stalled. We are all getting tired of headlining on the international news too. One of the farmers who shares my premises commented to me yesterday that he was so tired of seeing Zimbabwe elections on the various news channels that he was rather glad to have a power cut yesterday so he would not be obliged to watch!