ontinues to print money to meet its obligations it could well drive inflation into quadruple digits by year’s end. Manufacturing has shrunk by 51% since 1997 and exports have fallen by half in the past four years. Almost every major economic indicator has declined significantly since 2001. The investment and operating environment is dismal. Foreign direct investment has evaporated from US$444 million in 1998 to US$9 million in 2004.
Agricultural production – the mainstay of the economy – has collapsed under violent implementation of a necessary but badly thought through land reform. The government, or officials of government acting on their own authority, have continued to expropriate commercial farms without compensation and to distribute these farms in a non-transparent manner to ruling party insiders even though it formally declared the end of the process earlier this year. Not only the commercial farm owners have been affected. This misguided and ill-fated land grab also displaced over a million farm workers and their family members.
The human cost of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis has been extraordinarily high. The estimated proportion of the population living below the official poverty line has more than doubled since mid-1990s – it is now about 80 percent of the population. At least half the country faces food shortages. The country’s human development indicators, once the envy of Sub-Saharan Africa, have sunk to the lowest fifth percentile in the world. Well over a quarter of the population has fled the country according to the last national census
It was more than dismaying to read a paper published in July by the Center for Global Development in Washington on the Costs and Causes of Zimbabwe’s Crisis. It estimated that Zimbabwe’s economic crisis has set the country back more than half a century. The paper calculated that the purchasing power of the average Zimbabwean in 2005 had fallen back to the same level as in 1953 when the Confederation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was established. That’s an astonishing reversal of 52 years of progress in only a half dozen years.
The flood of economic bad news has been continuous. Most recently, the World Economic Forum published its assessment of the state of Zimbabwe’s competitiveness. Alarmingly, it ranked Zimbabwe as the least competitive of all 117 economies studied. […]
What has been the cause of Zimbabwe’s unprecedented economic descent?
The answer is really quite simple, as well as quite shocking: Neither drought nor sanctions are at the root of Zimbabwe’s decline. The Zimbabwe government’s own gross mismanagement of the economy and its corrupt rule has brought on the crisis.
The government-controlled press have responded by accusing Dell of being a sexual pervert, visiting “unseemly” areas.
Leave a Reply