Zimbabwe Absurdity

A lot of places closed this last weekend over the “voting” period. So I am catching up now with all the e things.

Last week I was cycling to work with Jenni to do some repairs on my truck when a police Landrover came the other way. He pulled onto the other side of the road as Jenni has no traffice sense at all. Nice person I thought. Then as he went past the driver shouted: “I will arrest you tomorrow”. Not so nice. I had never seen him before and he did not use my name so I took it as just being harassment. I was not arrested the next day.

The ruling party went to extraordinary lengths in the campaign run up. I guess a lot of it was on TV but I used the plug off mine for better things some years back. They also had published a very glossy brochure on 100 reasons to vote for Bob. I won’t bother reproducing it here but it was so incredibly childish and loaded with contradictions that even the most ill informed would have picked up. The really curious thing about it was that it was entirely in English, a language that is well understood in Zim but is certainly not the mother tongue of the targeted voters!

I was at friends for supper last night. Being a bachelor it is always great to be invited out for food. The best part of the evening was seeing Bob getting rattled at the AU summit in Egypt. Not his usual cocky self at all. It was also interesting that the South Africans who are usually very pro him are calling for a “transitional government”. Would it be premature to start hoping?

OK, I admit it, I have made a list of what to take if I have to make an emergency get-away. It does depend on me making the decision of when to go (rather than it being made for me) and assumes that I will be driving. Most friends with children are getting out of the country until things cool down a bit. Everyone is feeling rather insecure, but as I remarked to a friend it’s very difficult to know when you are being silly by staying and when you are being unnecessarily panicky. It is not as though I have nothing to lose by going; on the contrary, my business is actually surviving which by Zimbabwe standards is good though we can no longer say that we are here for the lifestyle which really was good.

There is also the issue of where to go and what you are prepared to leave behind. Obviously I want Jenni to come with me so that more or less precludes flying anywhere unless I send her on ahead. So if I want to take her I will have to drive and there is no guarantee that the roads will be safe if I wait until the last moment. On top of that there is still an air of “normality”; no burning tyres or chanting crowds, just the endless ZANU-PF “meetings” but quite why they need those now I don’t know. Apparently they are now saying that they will take people to vote farm by farm so that they can check on how they vote! I wonder what it’s like to live in a normal country where all you have to worry about is mortgage repayments and where to spend the summer holidays?

Chatting to my foreman this afternoon he was of the opinion that just about anything to stop the violence was a good idea. This of course carries the risk that the perpetrators are now of the opinion that intimidation works (which it has done) and can be resorted to at any time. He, the foreman, went to a rally on the weekend where they were instructed to write down the serial number of their voting slip and then would have to report to the local ZANU-PF Youth League (hired thugs) where it would be recorded so that they could check up on whom had voted and how.

On my list of things to take under “photo albums” is “stamp albums”. I have not collected stamps since I was a child so this actually refers mostly to my father’s collection made when he was a child. Some of the stamps are in excess of 120 years old though not, unfortunately, particularly valuable. I have just been sorting through my collection of First Day Covers, bought largely by my mother when I was at university. The earliest though is dated 2^nd July 1953 in commemoration of the Royal Tour of Southern Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then) and stamped on the Royal Train the single stamp is valued at 6d. When we metricated in the early 1970’s (I forget when but I think it may have been 1971) 6d became 5c and must have been quite a sum because I DO remember being allowed to spend 10c a week at the tuck shop (I was a border all my school life) and LOTS of sweets could be bought for that! In 1980 there was still a 1c stamp on the First Definitive Issue which was basically the Rhodesian stamps re-issued with Zimbabwe printed on them. Thereafter First Day Covers did not have less than 9c. The Second Definitive Issue in 1985 also had a 1c stamp though I cannot think it could have been used very much. My mother died in 1992 and the last First Day cover I have is dated 1994 on which the smallest denomination is 35c. I lost interest after that even though I occasionally spot the posters for new issues in the post office. They are inevitably for issue dates that have past because who goes into a post office these days? I don’t have much interest either in themes such as “Heroes of the Zimbabwe Liberation”. I used to use stamps to send out customer’s statements but we are cash only now and anyway, by the time I would be able to get the money back it would be less than the value of the stamp. Oh, and they don’t even bother putting the value on the stamp; there is just a “Z” and they charge whatever the current rate happens to be.

On the lighter side; a customer came in this morning to collect an order but could not pay cash as we require (cheques take too long to clear and devalue some 50% before we can use them). I said that I would take any asset as payment. He said what about a pig? I did not really want a live one. Ok, he would slaughter it then. So we struck a deal; 30kg of pork hind quarter for his order!

Chatting to a friend’s wife last night she mentioned that she’d been to a supermarket for some basic shopping and had to wait 2 hours to pay. The hold up was that no-one had cash so were using their debit cards. But the machine could only deduct 100 million dollars at a time so multiple swipes per purchase were necessary. The debit card print out of her purchase for six items ended up 7.5m long!

My domestic servant asked me this morning if she could go to a ZANU-PF (ruling party) “meeting” at lunchtime. I said yes as not going to these gatherings can be a bit detrimental to ones health. I mentioned this to my staff at work and immediately there was something of a panic until I pointed out that as far as I knew this was not “official”; nobody in authority had mentioned it to me. Anyway, I used it as an excuse to stay away from work and the farm over lunchtime as I had no particular intention of attending either. It could of course be an excuse for the maid to get the afternoon off but she knows that I will check up so I doubt it.

Jenni has been a bit off colour recently so I took her to the vet on Tuesday. It cost me all of 16 billion Zim dollars (about 8 of the US type) so I was not too upset. What did concern me though was that I heard another customer mention that dog food was becoming increasingly difficult to find because the manufacturer of the most popular brand could not find the sorghum to put in it. Now THAT could be a problem! Jenni is OK now and back looking for the jackals that got away on Monday evening. She has a scary turn of speed when she wants to and caught up with one very quickly. Fortunately it was a bit more agile and got away without a punch up. They frequently carry rabies. On the same run that I do with her there is a genet cat (lanky type of wild feline) but it is much quicker than her and wily to boot. It does not stop Jenni trying to catch it though and when we get near the area where she’s seen it I can see the adrenaline start to kick in.

I have just had an email from my ISP saying that they are not going to bother charging us this month as by the time they get the money it will be worth half of what we paid. Therefore they are withholding charges for the time being and trust that as loyal customers we will pay the final bill in full whenever it arrives! Wow, I am impressed!

“Quadrillion boost for agric” was a headline in today’s government newspaper, The Herald. A couple of days ago I was chatting to my bank manager Colin, about the use of such vague terms. It seems that we have adopted the billion as being a thousand million because I asked him if I could write a cheque for that amount. He seemed to think that nobody would know what it meant. Well here is my best guess on a quadrillion.
Million = 1,000,000
Billion = 1,000,000,000
Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000
Quadrillion = 1,000,000,000,000,000 which is less than a million US dollars.

I should have been pleased that I’d just got a trillion dollar order and looking at the invoice I did notice that the itemized line needed some more spaces to fit in the 12 zeros.  I looked at the cheques again (no, only 500 million allowed per cheque) to see that the first one was missing the “dollars” after the “five hundred million” and was unacceptable to the bank. The second (you can only write cheques to the value of 500 million and they must be banked on separate days) was post-dated by a week and therefore unacceptable to me. I should explain that. Cheques take about 5 days to clear in this country so these were going to devalue by at least 50% before I could access them and then the bank would only allow me to draw 10 billion in cash in any one day. Cheques? Well, few outlets are accepting cheques these days – for the very reason that I was less than impressed. From the customer’s point of view we were just too good to pass up. He was getting rid of money (not a huge asset in Zimbabwe dollars) to get seedlings that were only going to appreciate (in Zimbabwe dollar terms if not real money). We were going to be getting rid of assets in the form of chemicals, fertilizer and other necessities for the growing of seedlings to get nearly useless Zimbabawe dollars. Clearly things were going to have to change. So this morning we have stopped accepting new orders for anything but cash. Preferably real money but therein lies a poisoned chalice. It’s illegal to deal in anything but Zim dollars though just about anyone will accept real money if they think the supplier will not rat on them. The customer in question is coming to see me in an hour or so to sort out his cheques. We will see what happens…

I was talking to a black customer on Tuesday. He farms in the north of the country and though I don’t know him very well he seemed to trust me with his less than flattering opinion of the powers that be. He was telling me that if you are vaguely successful you are seen as being a member of the Opposition (MDC). Likewise if you don’t supply food to the government “agents” or if you don’t supply transport on demand. Last week mobs had descended on his workers’ compound and burnt four houses. The next day they wanted transport to go to a rally. I didn’t ask the obvious question. He admitted that he now slept with a loaded firearm by the bed. When I asked if he wondered if there was any point to all this he gave the now predictable reply: “What else can I do?”

How badly did I want this butter? Obviously badly enough to fork out the equivalent of 10 USD for a kg! I don’t use it that much but sometimes it’s really nice to enjoy a slice of fresh bread and Marmite! I cannot remember what the price was last time I bought but I do know it was much less in real terms. Actually the last butter I bought was in South Africa at the end of March so I reckoned I owed myself this treat.

Last week I had to go and get some inputs for the nursery. I suppose I could have paid in Zim dollars if I’d had them but the truth was I didn’t. I’d even had to “bring in” (I know someone who has cash here and I have money there so an arrangement was made) some of my hard saved USD just to keep the company going long enough to see through some seedlings that I’m pretty sure I can get USD for. It’s a gamble and if it doesn’t pay off I guess we will close. So, I took the figurative deep breath and went for it. On entering the fertilizer into the computer at work I noticed that the real (i.e. USD) price had gone up some 20% since I’d last bought fertilizer in December last year. I know that the onion seed that we use has gone up 25% in the last 6 months and diesel has gone up 50% since last November. We are no longer a cheap 3rd World country; we are instead like Zambia (which is expensive) but without the supporting economy. The catch of course is that most of us are earning Zimbabwe dollars which as of yesterday are worth about a billionth of a US dollar.

Yesterday I also had to make some more space on the invoices at work. Coping for billions is just not enough. I long ago removed the cents and all our prices are rounded up to the nearest million. It’s easily done as I wrote the software but I have not had much luck marketing it. Most companies prefer to just keep knocking 3 zero’s off and putting up a little notice at the checkout to that effect. The banks have had to resort to issuing new accounts once they get into the trillions (1×10 to the power 12). Oh Zimbabwe, when will it end?

It was cold this morning at 5. I really did not feel like getting onto the rowing machine but… But I had to. It’s a pact I’ve made with myself not to start something I am not going to finish and this is an ongoing thing. Once on the machine it was a little easier, but not much. There is a star visible in the north-western sky at that time of morning. I have been making a note to find out its name so that we can be on name terms. That’s the sort of thing I think of at that time of day. I could see a few lonely lights of cars on the Mazowe road some 15km away as they come up the hill past the dam wall. It’s piece of road I know well having travelled it many times in the days when we did lots of paragliding at Mtoroshanga. Fuel is too expensive to do much of that these days. I wondered if I was seeing the same vehicles every morning. I was battling. Mentally as much as physically. I pondered the I word. I for insolvency. I have been thinking about it a lot recently as I fail to see any real solution to the countries and my financial problems. Inflation is around 2 million percent and the dollar is losing 2% a minute as I type this. I looked for excuses to get off the rowing machine but my knee was holding up and the twinge in my hip could be ignored. After 20 minutes I was committed to finish and as I was a bit early I’d make some biscuits as I’d totally run out and Jenni gave me a reproachful look as I tried to explain that the metaphorical cupboard (actually a plastic sealable bowl) was empty. I slowed down and stopped at 40 minutes feeling, well, somewhat pleased with myself and relieved at the same time. Jenni knows when my session is over and comes over to remind me that it’s her breakfast time and get a bit of affection. Coffee, make biscuits. I was resigned to the rest of the day.

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Peter is an old boss of mine. Well, I guess I should qualify that; he was an owning director in the company where I worked so we didn’t come into contact that much but he did own the farm where I lived. More of a businessman than a farmer he is retired now and farming! Though it is more market gardening to keep him occupied.

He comes to the nursery on occasion to stock up on vegetables and glean information from me. Being the sharp businessman that he was (and still is I suppose) he is useful to me too. Yesterday he told me that the cash for cash rate (Zim dollars for US dollars) was around 250 million whereas the transfer rate (no “cash” involved) was at least 350 million and climbing as we spoke. I digested this for a while and decided that our pricing was way behind as usual but I needed to do something about it. A Zimbabwe solution was called for! So yesterday evening I pushed our non-cash (which in this country means cheques – cards are not that widely used) to the equivalent of 300 million to the US and put a discount of 20% for cash into the computer. It also helps get cash in as we need to pay wages next week. I must go and see how it is working out…