Zimbabwe Absurdity

It’s common to most Zimbabweans; squirrel syndrome. After all you just never know when that completely useless, non-functioning old shock absorber from a car that ceased to be made 25 years ago might become useful again! So I was not at all surprised to see a woman at the checkout counter of a supermarket with a very large bag of old coins that had become useful legal tender again after some, oh, four years or so. She and the teller had counted out a good 500 dollars and were still going strong. Hey, it had face value again which means it was worth 5,000,000,000,000 of the old notes which are also still legal tender.

The new notes are out and I have actually seen some though the bank had run out of everything this afternoon so I had to check some out at a local cafe. They are real money too, not these Bearer Cheques that we have had to put up with for so long. The biggest note is $500 which makes it, oh what the hell, you add the 10 zeros of the old denomination! There are even some coins too. One of them, I forget the denomination, has the head of a Cape buffalo on it though it looks more like a cow with big horns. Well, somebody must have had an awful lot of faith to go to this expense (ok, ok, somebody made a lot of money too). Me? I give it three months at the outside to become worthless again.