Shopping as entertainment

9 08 2008

I was half way around the very empty supermarket when I realized that the bottle of Scotch that I thought was a bargain was anything but at USD80! It’s always a problem knocking off the zeros; suddenly everything appears much cheaper when it really is not and the outlets know this and move their prices up. I was replacing the bottle when I was approached by a youngster asking if I was going to pay by cash which I was. He asked if he could pay part of the bill with his debit card and then take some of my cash. I was not really sure about this so I made some vague non-committal reply and he wandered off. I went back to the chore of shopping (I detest it at the best of times). Some things were halfway reasonable and I pegged the standard to a tin of baked beans which at USD5 I considered extortionate. I actually had a fair bit of cash on me from a customer who occasionally likes to deal that way so that he pays less tax. It didn’t really help. I am so conditioned to not being able to afford things that I found it difficult to say – what the hell, you have the cash and want it so get it. I guess the experience with the scotch has left me with post traumatic stress. There was little to choose from anyway and what little there was had been spread out along the shelves to create a pathetic impression of plenty.

At the checkout I was again accosted by a woman who wanted to get some cash if she could pay with her card. When I acquiesced (the supermarket staff gave no indication that it was a scam) she leaped to the card scanner and swiped her card before I could change my mind. I didn’t bother asking why she did not just go to her bank because I already knew; most had run out of cash and the queues were formidable. Yes, it did occur to me to charge for the privilege but somehow it seemed a bit of a grubby practice – I guess I am a lousy businessman!

The fun started when the checkout operator started to count my low (old) denomination notes which you might remember are a 10000000000 times the face value on the computer monitor. There was not enough so I added in some of the new notes. Then I needed change which I was given in old coins. I declined. There was quite a considerable queue by now but Zimbabweans are a patient lot (way too patient – we’d have got rid of this regime in any other country) and some were even a bit amused.

On the way back home I dropped in at the office. I’d ascertained earlier in the day via the grapevine that the cash exchange rate had run to 3.6 to one US dollar, up from the beginning of the month when it was 1.5 (the 10 zeros have been removed). I adjusted the price list accordingly. It seems we are well on the way to another useless batch of currency.


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Trading in the useless

8 08 2008

Janice’s ears pricked almost visibly when she heard that I had a 100 note bundle of the old $1000 notes. Not only were they mint but they were still in the RBZ wrapper. To give you an idea of their worth you should divide by 1×10 to the power 13. That’s best done in Excel as 1e13. Actually don’t bother because Excel will just leave it in that scientific notation. The real point is Janice had a use for them even if they were useless as currency.

It seems that Zimbabwe notes actually DO have a value to collectors on the internet. Janice has a lucrative little business trading them to collectors; preferably if they are new and in a bundle (like mine) or a complete set. There is of course nothing new in trading in waste products (the used peat moss that we use in the nursery as a growing medium is a good example)  the skill in Janice’s case is leaking just enough onto the market without flooding it. No, she was not interested in the bags of bearer cheques behind my desk that I was hoping someone would steal.


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Squirrel syndrome

6 08 2008

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.


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The day I missed being a quadrillionaire

30 07 2008

It was even on BBC radio this evening; Zimbabwe has knocked 10 zeros off its currency. As I was due to go and collect fictitious wages from the bank (I’d posted the withdrawl application on Monday) I thought it would be a good idea to find out what they knew as what we are told on local radio and what the bank are told don’t always tie up. Well, the 10 zeros (didn’t anyone tell them that currency works in thousands?) disappearing was true enough but what I didn’t know was that there is a plan afoot to use the old “real” currency until the new (without the 0’s) gets printed (probably by the Chinese as the German company that used to do it has come under pressure to stop). Colin, my bank manager, told me that today someone had come in with a box of the old currency (it pre-dates the current bearer cheques) for disposal. He suggested that he keep it. Nobody is really sure what this all means but it is possible that the old money that I have lying in my drawer is worth more than then 100 billion notes (which are now worth 1$) that I collected from the bank this afternoon. It is possible that there are people out there in the rural areas who kept hold of the old money because they missed the deadline to hand it in who are now very wealthy! I see too possible consequences; fed up with this confusion those who can are going to use a meaningful currency and in solving the problem of the zeros they are going to drive inflation to the point where today’s multimillion percent inflation will soon be a fond memory!

This morning an export company approached me to grow some seedlings urgently. Normally I’d insist on a 50% deposit up front but being something of an emergency I allowed them to bring the seed and we’d settle later. This lot are not the easiest bunch to deal with but I sensed a bit of an advantage. My book keeper knows the financial director so getting his personal number was easy. I gave him a call and mentioned that I’d had to print out the Zim dollar proforma on a laser printer that could accommodate all the zeros (it came to 88 quadrillion – 88,000,000,000,000,000) so he saw the reasoning to go for the US dollar payment of 816. It’s an offshore transfer but that’s a close second to getting it here. So I missed out on being a quadrillionaire – but just give it a few months!


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We have no shovels…

29 07 2008

On Sunday I was having lunch with Peter at his sister’s place in Mount Pleasant. I used to work with Peter in my Hortico days and he was en route to Kenya and Liberia from Australia for some consulting work so it was a chance for a visit to see his family still in Harare. Now Peter is something of a story teller so when he mentioned that his sister Gail had gone to a funeral the previous day and was asked to take along a shovel as the grave diggers had none, I was more than a little sceptical. Gail assured me it was true. The Catholic cemetery just outside town where the funeral was held indeed had no grave digging implements so a friend texted her beforehand and asked if she could bring along a shovel. So they had to wait while the gravediggers dug the hole. Ready mixed concrete was then poured in a slab over the grave (when closed) so that the coffin could not be stolen and sold for reuse. I kid you not.


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Connectivity

25 07 2008

It’s like – wow! Well sort of, until I consider the snail pace of the page loading. I suppose I do have to get a little bit excited about being able to connect to the internet at home again. After all it has been 6 months so I guess I can put up with pages that take 5 minutes to load and some that don’t load at all. For a while at least the novelty will last.
There can’t be too many places in the world where wages are determined by how much is in the bank account but that’s how I do it. There were mutterings on Wednesday when I paid wages that some were going to refuse to take their wages. I said fine, if you don’t want it, I can definitely find something to spend it on. That settled it; it was all well gone by Thursday and today I got an across the board request for loans to buy maize meal that was apparently on offer in the area. Tricky one that; we have very little in the way of cash coming in and I am only allowed to draw 100 billion a day in cash. I should put that in perspective; 350 billion will buy a Coke. There is a way around it though. I found out that I CAN apply to draw wages on a weekly basis provided I submit the usual list of people with ID numbers (a fair few of which I concocted) and the wages they are to draw first. Yes, you guessed it; I do double the wages to cover “eventualities”. There have to be some advantages to having to put up with a thoroughly unsophisticated labour force! Apparently the Reserve Bank is reviewing the limit on cash withdrawals but until then I just have to fiddle the system a bit.

I had to back-track on my policy of only accepting cash. I prefer to call it “business flexibility” of course but I’d not really appreciated the meaning of “cash flow” until I had none. Even if we are losing money (definitely) it is still necessary to have money in the bank for some purposes. We do charge a 100% premium on cheques, which is VERY cheap by Harare standards, but there has been a veritable deluge of paper money coming in. It’s not worth very much but it is nice to have.


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We’ll wait and see

21 07 2008

My foreman looked sceptical. I’d just asked him what he thought of the latest political developments i.e. the agreement to be signed in Joburg agreeing to talk between Mugabe and Tsvangirai (and their political parties). He seemed to think that most people did not really see what it was all about. I explained that according to commentators on the BBC that Bob was probably looking for a secure escape route (what, in AFRICA?) possibly as a figurehead president with Morgan as the power holding prime-minister. One has to bear in mind that Bob has to negotiate from a position of strength. He still looked sceptical.

But there is some encouraging news about if you look hard enough. My landlord’s wife, Gill, told me this morning that they’d been to Imire Game Park near Marondera over the weekend to see their son who is managing the game and lodge. A power that is had been recently to assure them that the negative publicity about Imire (slaughtered rhinos etc.) had to stop and actually saw off some “war vets” (hired thugs) whilst he was there. By all accounts the training camps for the youths who terrorized the rural areas before the last election have also been disbanded.

I must admit that this is the furthest down a negotiated settlement road that we have ever been but we have seen our hopes dashed too many times to get excited just yet. We’ll just have to wait and see.


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Supply and Demand

17 07 2008

Those of us who do not trade in essentials often complain that we are getting ripped off by those who do. It is true; not only do we have the world’s highest inflation in local money we also have the highest inflation in a convertible currency, in this case US dollars.

I have just been around to get my weekly milk supply and was about to get on my high horse about how Helen could hike her US dollar price by 50% while her Zimbabwe dollar price was not even related (astronomical to try and force people to use the green backs) only to find that the milk, which is sold on a first come first served basis, was finished. Oh well, she has hiked the prices because she can. So, in keeping with the trend I have had to increase my prices (we use a US dollar baseline) though 16% is hardly “hiking”. But I don’t have a queue of people waiting outside the gate to buy my seedlings!

I was chatting to a customer on Tuesday who turned out to be the re-insurance manager for a local bank. He was saying that he made more money out of his greenhouse tomato crop than he got paid as a salary which does not say much for his salary. Complaining about and discussing the financial situation he was firmly of the belief that we really are now in the “endgame”. He did say that the government was going to go after the bigger companies in the “Indigenization Programme” whereby indigenous Zimbabweans (i.e. not whites) must hold at least 51% of the shares and fully aware that a political deal is in the offing they are not going to hold back. My friend Dave called around this morning and mentioned that Bob has been speaking at various rallies urging people to take now as once he is gone they will not have the opportunity. Dave speaks good Shona so he is likely to be in the know. I said to my customer that I rather hoped someone would come and take my company. He laughed and said that the likes of Unilever Zimbabwe were more likely recipients of the unwanted attention!

Tuesday, July 14th was Jenni’s day. She featured on the Dog-a-Day Calendar published by Workman in the USA. I’d sent her photo in last year and was rather chuffed when it appeared. www.pageaday.com DOGS-8243259772


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Tightening the belt

12 07 2008

It’s been going on for some time now but this month I finally had to face up to not being able to afford my gym subscription. Well, I suppose I could afford it but it is no longer essential and what little real money I have must go into survival. I guess other people have different ideas of what essential means but for me alcohol and dinners out fell by the wayside some time ago. The cash flow at work is now a trickle that vanishes as soon as it appears. I guess we are at about 40% capacity which is not great but we have been there before. The difference then was that the cash had at least some value so was around a fair bit longer to allow it to be used a bit more successfully.

I have spent most of this week adapting the software that I wrote to take any currency. Yes, I am being a bit optimistic but not without cause. Real money is starting to trickle in and a few days ago I actually had to trade some to get some Zimbabwe dollars. The second-hand peat moss that we use as a medium for the seedlings is a by-product from a farm that exports African violets bare-rooted around the world and they wanted Zim cash to pay wages. I suppose it is preferable for them to sell a waste product for local money than to charge real money for it then have to find the local. Anyway, it did not hurt too much as I had bought the real money for local cash a while back so it had maintained it’s value and I still had a bit left over. Curiously local dollars are in demand at the moment as they are in short supply and the price has slipped a bit. I don’t know if the government printing presses are running slow these days or they are just not keeping up with inflation (not that they ever have, they just might have slipped a bit further than usual).

At least I don’t have to pay for the satellite radio station that is playing in the background as I write this. I don’t get all the stations of course but I do get the ones that interest me; BBC and Maestro (which is classical music). There have been two announcements of interest this morning; the veto by the Russians and Chinese of the Security Council resolution on Zimbabwe and Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday. The resolution was probably not of great influence either way but the gloating of the Zimbabwe government will be nauseating.

I have never really understood why so many people get dewy-eyed whenever Nelson Mandela is mentioned. What did the man actually DO except go around and be Nelson Mandela?  He has been disappointingly quiet on the Zimbabwe situation and I have just heard something about him being photographed with a whole lot of children. Yawn. Desmond Tutu – now there’s a man who has got guts and drive! He’s sounding a bit old these days which I guess is not surprising as he must be getting on a bit. I heard him talk way back when I was at university and the man was gifted and driven.

Essential – my internet connection which I can still pay in local currency even though I have had to deposit cash into my bank account to do so (horrors, you NEVER do that!) and dog food. The latter is still a problem.


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Wasting time (and money)

3 07 2008

I have just, come from the bank where I deposited 660 billion (about USD20) of the local dollars in mostly 50 million dollar notes. It took about 3/4 hour and the biggest challenge for me was staying awake. OK, so the teller was not the fastest around but I can not even guess how much it cost the bank to count the money; certainly less than its face value. Feeling in need of a cup of coffee and some sustenance I wandered around the corner to my local WiFi cafe that actually does good coffee and muffins too and anyway, I needed to check on the email. Walking past a notice board advertising air fares to London (and other places) I noticed that a business class fare to the UK was all of 15 trillion. I will save you the bother; it’s less than USD500! The catch of course is that the airline is Air Zimbabwe and is not overly reliable but my aunt recently flew to the UK and she said business class was fine but definitely don’t fly economy! I commented on the price to the proprietor of the cafe and he said just wait until Monday when it will be the equivalent of 200 US dollars as they are always slow to update their prices. A plan is forming here…


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