(This article was published in May 2014 only got around to uploading it now!!! prompted by this article which boosts my soothsaying credentials)
In case you missed it Zimbabwe is in danger of falling into
a recession, a situation when economic output declines and the economy
contracts for two consecutive quarters.
You have to feel for the people of Zimbabwe.
The economy was just beginning to grow again after eight
years of contraction and bringing their hyperinflation under control. I don’t
think Hyperinflation describes what Zimbabwe went through. It is estimated that
inflation peaked at 500 billion percent in 2008. This means that average prices
in the once food basket of southern African were rising at least 150 times a
second!
"So between the time you punched the amount you require from your ATM and the money actually being spat out it would have become literally worthless...
It comes as no surprise that in the darkest days of the
Zimbabwe economy the largest denomination note was for the
Z$100,000,000,000,000 or a hundred trillion Zimbabwe dollars – that is 14 zeros
for you!
The situation got so bad that the country was forced to
abandon the Zimbabwe dollar and adopted a basket of currencies including the
South African Rand, US dollar and Chinese Yuan as legal tender in the country,
which was ironic because President Robert Mugabe always want to make out as the
bastion of anti-colonial resistance.
Well using other people’s currencies to run ones economy is
the ultimate capitulation to the “colonialists” and their evil schemes to take
over your economy.
So how did a revolutionary leader sell his country down the
river like this? How did a once vibrant agricultural and industrial economy
come to this?
Mugabe came to power at the head of a struggle for majority
rule in Zimbabwe. The grievances of the people were the usual clamour for the
right to self-determination and a need to redress wealth inequalities, which
meant mainly land redistribution.
With black self rule in the bag came the sticky issue of
land redistribution. Sticky because the white owners had raised the
productivity of the land to the highest probably on the continent and it would
not do to destabilise that part of the economy.
As often happens early land distribution was hijacked by the
“revolutionary” which meant the majority still had little or no access to land
while a new class of black middle class or super rich emerged.
So the white farmers went on with their business while for
the new black nouveau rich life had never been better and the black everyday
man wondered whether what they had signed up to by supporting the
“revolutionaries” as their collective lot had not improved, and in many cases
even deteriorated since 1980.
Fast forward to 2000 and the government decided to give
tacit approval to the landless to forcefully takeover the commercial farms of
the white farmers.
In Uganda we need no explanation to what came next. The
blacks unable to sustain the commercial concerns – I don’t think they even
tried, regressed into subsistence farming and that was the end of Zimbabwe as a
net exporter of food.
Lowered productivity affected tax collections and donor
inflows forcing government to print money to sustain itself and meet its
obligations – a clear recipe for inflation. Inflation happens when there is too
much money – government money printing presses were working overtime, chasing
too few goods – production had collapsed.
"So to redress the issue the revolutionaries had to swallow their vomit, ditch their currency and adopt foreign currencies, as this column had predicted they would in 2008 ( we take no credit for that, it was the inevitable conclusion to Harare’s total disregard for basic supply-demand economics)...
This had two immediate effects one, it meant inflation had
to drop because Harare could not print the foreign currencies even if it wanted
to but the other consequence was that it became harder and harder to find the
money to make critical imports of medicine, fuel, plant and machinery needed to
jumpstart the economy after all exports had collapsed.
Which brings us to the current threat of recession.
How does Zimbabwe punch its way out of this downward
economic spiral?
For beginners the politicians need to put a lid on this
uncalled for talk of indeginisation of foreign companies. There is a strong
case for increasing the equity holding in these immensely profitable companies
but there are structured ways that this can be achieved without affecting the
long term economics of the company. Of course seeing how the government treated
the white farmers capital is not going to wait around to see how Mugabe and his
cronies will go about redistributing these company stakes. The proof of this is
that factories are closing.
Zimbabwe needs to produce and export to earn the foreign
currency that will jump start the economy.
Zimbabwe is a 21st century test case of what
happens when bad politicians come up against the economy. We should take heed!
