Zimbabwe Absurdity

Giving blood has never been a problem for me; I started when I was 18 and having been drafted into the army we all had to go and give blood. It’s been a regular thing ever since. The local blood transfusion service is run by pleasant staff who actually do remember me when I appear every three months or so. This morning the power was off so they could not use the computer to access my records. Not a problem, we did it the manual way. After the usual checks for blood pressure and density and personal questions about my non-existent sex life it was off to the couch and donate.

With all the scares about HIV in this country I do make a point of checking that nothing is reused and I have never had to quibble. I have almost given up on trying to embarrass the staff when they ask about “girlfriends”. I guess they have heard it all before many times. Curiously I was asked how many “girlfriends” I “have” to which my reply is “none” though I suppose other whites might reply “one”. I pointed out to the nurse that in my book at least, “girlfriend” implies some sort of fidelity i.e. a relationship. She was asking how many sexual partners I might have had since the last donation. I suppose the blacks in this country view the term “girlfriend” a little differently.

Chatting to the sister (that’s a term for SRN here) who took my blood I discovered that the NBTS is only partly government funded and relies on NGO’s and others for funding; it is essentially a welfare organization. Of course the blood products are price-controlled by the government! The usual challenge of power outages requires them to store blood products at various other institutions which causes them some concern as they can no longer guarantee that the cold chain remains unbroken. As a donor I am not paid but I do get some biscuits and tea and a sticker with the title of this post on it!

The other topic of conversation was the issue of the new denomination bank notes announced earlier in the week. Nobody had seen any and on my way back to my bank to check out the status of my wages requisition of some ZW$450m I noticed long queues of people waiting outside other banks. I needn’t have bothered – there was nothing available. Now they really are cutting this a bit fine. Saturday is a holiday which only leaves Monday to do shopping and get to where one wants to go. That leaves tomorrow to get all the money out and distributed. The new denominations are even more of a mystery. They are $250000, $500000 and $750000 and all the current $200000 will become invalid at the end of the year. I think the logic may be something like this and I use the term “logic” loosely so please bear with me.

According to the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Gideon Gono, the shortage of cash is due to speculators holding onto mainly $200000 notes in order to drive the rate against the US dollar down so that they can corner the market (the cash rate is very low at the moment – $1.5m to one US$, compared with the transfer rate which is six times that). I find that a bit difficult to believe as the cash rate has never gone much over 1.8m to the US so if speculators were buying local dollars for that in order to cause a shortage of currency so that the price would drop so that they could buy US back at a cheaper rate they would have had to have bought truck loads of the local stuff. Nope, I don’t think so. But I do concede that a number of the supermarkets are not banking their daily cash takings as legally required and are holding them back to buy imported produce “off the street”. Whatever, we spend a fair bit of idle time trying to guess what the next economic antics will be when there is no logic on which to base one’s guesses. It’s a hopeless cause.

Having done the wage calculations for paying this Friday I entertained myself in a small way by plotting the nett wage bills for this year on a chart and then fitting a curve. While the wages definitely do not keep up with inflation the result was nevertheless illuminating. Unfortunately I cannot find out how to display it here but maybe you can envisage this; January it was $881,000, June $13,100,000 and this month it is $504 million. Equation of the curve; y = 294816e to power 0.602x. The fit was 0.9883. Truly exponential!

Lunchtime today I consoled myself with a mug of coffee and a muffin at a local café. I’d phoned a local hardware store to find a kettle element for the urn that perpetually heats water at work for the labourer’s tea. They don’t perpetually drink tea – the urn is just perpetually on. I don’t know the reason. Eventually the element gave up and after a fair bit of searching I was assured that the hardware store in question had one. It did not. Somebody was telling me what I wanted to hear as is so often the case in Africa. Anyway, the muffin was good. And they gave a 30% discount for cash, notes. The Reserve Bank has assured the restive population that they will make up the shortfall of cash i.e. print some more, before Christmas, but I have my doubts. The queues in the banks have gone; there is nothing to queue for. I have put in a requisition to the bank to draw wages on Thursday and have been assured that I will be able to get it. I really hope so. Not that there is much for the labour to spend it on but I will have done my bit.

I have a request. This is for my next lifetime. Amongst other things, like teflon knee joint padding instead of cartilage, I want to be good at maths. This is not just so that I can understand quantum theory but so that I can understand the Zimbabwe monetary system. Perhaps I have used the wrong tense there as I am hoping that the nonsense will be long past by then.

Maths is such an elegant subject; one can prove or disprove so much with the most basic form. Once upon a time I was listening to Radio Caroline on my satellite receiver and being a Sunday, someone had bought some time to do a bit of preaching. He said that contrary to popular belief there had been not one but TWO great floods in the history of the Earth (or rather Bible). Incensed at this affront to my intelligence I gave it the basic maths treatment. I won’t delve far into it here but it centred on dividing the depth of water involved by the amount of days rain and coming up with an INcredible figure! Not to mention barriers, erosion, the fact that the earth IS a sphere (so where did all that water go – think of depth and circle radii?) and how did the koala bears get to the ark without in time and without being eaten? (I have seen koalas move and they are not quick). Then there is the very silly internet myth about Rod Stewart and some boys that I will not go into here.

In 2000 I was living next door to my cousin in the suburbs of Harare. He sold his house then for ZW$5m (m is a million here). Both my current landlord and I were impressed; he was very lucky to get that.

Current value of 5m is 5000 – not worth picking a note of it up off the pavement.

A 1kg bag of coffee beans locally produced is now 40m (about US$10).

A 25kg bag of potassium nitrate fertilizer is $390m.

The daily cash withdrawal limit from corporate bank accounts has now DROPPED to 20m.

Houses are not sold in Zimbabwe dollars any more.

Maths is discovered not invented.

While I was away in South Africa last week, the new budget for 2008 was announced. I am told it holds the world record in terms of numbers ($7.84 quadrillion forecast expenditure – go work it out for yourself!) but definitely not value. My next door neighbour tells me that the biggest single item was allotted to the election next year, some 220 trillion Zim dollars. That’s $220,000,000,000,000. I doubt that it will be used to organize a well run free-and-fair election but more of a let’s-win-at-any-cost sort of election. The unit used – was the trillion.

Oh, divide by 1.6 million to get the cash to US dollar rate and 3 million to get the transfer rate. That’s valid for the next day or two only.

I got back from a week in South Africa late on Friday night. I don’t think I’ll be tempted to drive at night for quite some time. There were no near misses but it was very tiring. Often there were no road markings, about 10% of oncoming vehicles could not find the dimmer switch, vehicles had a variety of headlights in a variety of working conditions, and there were no lights on in the towns en route to show me where I was which I found very disorientating. On arriving in Harare I had to guess where the centre of the road was. Fortunately it was not raining which would have made it even worse. It all drove home just how far we have slipped in this country. We seem to live in a cocoon and with no outside reference it’s difficult to see just how far we have fallen. Suffice to say it’s a long way.

I could only afford to take one week off which was not really enough to forget all the stresses but I just had to do it for a break and to do some shopping. Time was when we used to go “South” to shop for luxuries but now we do it for essentials. Amongst other things my shopping list read:

1. Flour (to make bread)
2. Yeast (ditto)
3. Sugar
4. Light bulbs
5. Breakfast cereal
6. Borehole pump
7. Vehicle spares
8. Toilet paper
9. Cooking oil
10. Olive oil
11. Marmite (essential!)

And it can all be got easily, and ALL the groceries are available under one roof, the only difficulty being deciding which brand to get! Definitely easy foraging.

For some truly absurd reason one is only allowed to take ZW$3m out of the country. It’s certainly not exchangeable and anyway, the truth must have sunk in because no-one was remotely interested. I took out a lot more than that and got a good bit of humour giving out $200000 notes with the explanation that our biggest note was (past tense intentional, it’s already changed) worth all of 70c South African. There was a good bit of incredulity but most people believed me, I think. On the way back the touts were out in force at the border post “helping” to clear one through customs for a bit of real money. I was carry a good bit over the duty free limit and it was hot so I succumbed. I was through the border in all of 10 minutes for R100 (about US$15) and a wad of Zim dollars. Oh well, it IS Africa I guess (what happened to all those high principles I used to have?). Impressively enough my declaration of goods purchased was rewritten in about 2 minutes flat for a fraction of the original value. The customs official was suitably uninterested (did she recognize the handwriting?) and I was waved through.

On the way down I managed to not take a critical turning and ended up some 30km off route heading towards Pretoria. I stopped in a “location” (black settlement area) and asked for directions. It was the sort of situation on which bad movies are made; you know, “White man takes wrong turning and ends up in wrong part of town and is murdered/raped/stoned/beheaded for his silliness by sullen, angry blacks”. Except that as far as I could see, no-one was the slightest bit interested. What did interest me was that right “next door” to this heavily populated and not obviously poor area is the distinctly wealthy white farming area of Groblersdal. I was told by my hosts that Mbeki (the SA president) has already made comments on this too. I wonder how long it will take…

There is a South African cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro who is adept at skewering the local politicians. This cartoon is thanks to him and more can be found at the South African Mail and Guardian homepage.

The income tax (PAYE) lower limit is at the moment ZW$4m a month. Officially, i.e. using the official exchange rate of 35000 to the US dollar, this amounts to US$114 a month which is a bit of an insult to say the least. The reality is that ZW$4m is actually worth US$2.85 and I really cannot think of a polite adjective for that.

I’m not sure if this cartoon is a reference to a South African situation that I don’t know about. I suspect not. Price fixing in Zimbabwe was exactly this though; an excuse for those with paws in the black market to get filthy rich. It seems to have largely fallen away as I found out yesterday in a supermarket.

It was my birthday so I thought I’d go out and see what I could find as a way of a treat. Hey, look, butter! Now that would be nice with some home baked bread (South African flour, South African yeast) and there was no way I was going to join the bread queue – yes the price of some things are still controlled. Well, let’s just check the price. Hmm, 10.25m a kg. Well that makes it close to R50 a kg (may as well use South African currency as I’m using South African flour even though it’s local butter). That’s what I call ridiculous and somewhat above the minimum tax bracket. Put it back and see what else is about. OK, some of Jenni’s favourite “breakfast” dog food. She’s a difficult dog to bribe but she really does like the South African (we are on a theme here) dog food, largely because it smells good I suspect. Now that’s clever marketing; make the dog food actually smell like the label – “Beef & Mutton”. I have tried it and am not sure that it IS actually “Beef  & Mutton” but what the hell, she likes it.  A packet of 1.75kg is the same price as the butter, I guess she’ll just have to do with a bone instead, and anyway, it’s just another day to her!

Simon is a big man, tall and just, well, BIG. He is also my GP or general practitioner -what might be referred to as family doctor elsewhere. He is a genial fellow and not at all opinionated as the older generation of medics in this country can be. He has just moved into his very own practice of which he is justifiably proud. It’s been a long road; he moved here in 1977 just  before it all went pear-shaped and since then he has moved from partnership to partnership, locum to locum but now it’s all his. Not without a bit of borrowing from wealthy siblings in his native Jersery (Channel Islands).”I could not have afforded the garage in Jersey”, he told me when I asked him the obvious question. “Here at least I have a nice house and a quality of education for my children that I could not contemplate over there”.

That was a while ago and today, when I questioned his common sense, the reply was a little more succinct; “When the education fucks up I’ll go”. He’s a good doctor so I hope he’ll stay, not just for the education and the practice he’s waited so long to acquire. There are not many doctors in this town who’ll give you their cell and home number!

“So this is the shotgun approach”, I commented as Simon wrote the script for my infected leg.
“Yes”, he enthused, totally missing the cynicism. “This one is for gram negative bacteria, this one for anaerobes and the third will take out anything else as we don’t know what’s causing the infection”. I looked in awe at the list and not without a bit of trepidation; I have taken so many pills in my life that I am a little bit tired of it. Not that there was an alternative, the infection that I have could clear up (doubtful) or spread to the rest of the body. No thanks. Chatting about the usual things that Zimbabweans chat about these days, i.e. foraging, I mentioned that I’d forgotten that it was milk day. He told me that one of his patients was very ill with what they suspected to be Listeria or Brucellosis, either of which could have come from contaminated and unpasteurized milk. I guess we are starting to pay the price for unregulated suppliers making a quick buck on a very desperate public!

I duly drove over to the pharmacist who greeted my by name (at what price fame?) and collected and paid for the script. I noticed that food was an integral part of the treatment procedure so wanting to hit the nail on the head walked to the bakers (next door but one to the closed butcher) and bought some rusks (bready biscuity things that are popular in this part of the world) and two current buns. Sooo, the costing looks like this:

Doctor’s consult:          $6.6m
Antibiotics and aspirin as blood thinner: 97 and 100 items respectively – $9.7m
Food to take the above: $2.2m (of course I will use other food too but this illustrates the point)
Maths: divide by about 1.3m to get US dollars but this is NOT my point.

So what IS the message here?
a)      It’s cheap enough to keep you alive if you can afford the food to take with the antibiotics?
b)      Food is disproportionately expensive (in this case uncontrolled price) or medical supplies are still very cheap (regulated price)?