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Nothing to loose
I have just been into the largest wholesaler in Bulawayo. We are quite
large
buyers and the staff greeted me cheerfully. Then I collected a trolley
and
started to walk through the company premises - I came out in a state of
shock. Whole rows of shelving were absolutely empty - to the roof.
There was
no soap powder, no bath soaps, no cooking oil, no fats, no sugar and no
maize meal, no flour and no rice, no milk products of any kind and no
children's foods.
We walked out empty handed and I said to the floor manager that I was
shocked - he simply nodded his head and said, "what can we do?"
Frankly, I
find this situation very scary.
We need 36 000 tonnes of basic food imports a week, these will cost
about
US$20 million. One of my friends sat in a fuel queue yesterday for 13
hours
to get a tank of petrol. Most garages have queues outside their
premises -
even if they have no fuel. It has never been so bad as now. To top this
serious situation we have started to experience load shedding by the
State
controlled electricity utility.
When we had an economy to speak of, we used about 5,5 million liters of
petroleum fuels a day - I would guess that today we use about 3 million
liters. Even that will cost about US$700 000 a day - or nearly US$5
million
a week - so just for the basics we need US$25 million a week. In fact
we
earn about that from our exports each week but that leaves no margin
for
anything else.
Yesterday I saw the new Chinese fighter jets fly over - we have just
spent
US$400 million on these plus some Mig 23's, attack helicopters and
military
vehicles. Most of it from China. We have also just purchased two
Chinese
passenger jets for regional routes to augment the three remaining
aircraft
still flying for Air Zimbabwe.
These ill-advised purchases have flattened our foreign exchange
resources,
in fact I hear that we have sold 25 tonnes of gold forward (US$500
million)
and we have also sold our tobacco production forward. The main problem
with
these transactions is that we no longer can produce 25 tonnes of gold
in a
year and we have produced a very small and inferior tobacco crop.
Last year Gideon Gono was the local hero when he succeeded in herding
all
local foreign exchange resources into the coffers of the Reserve Bank
but in
doing so he has effectively spelled the death of the export industries
that
fed the system. His hope of harnessing the US$75 million a month that
comes
back to local families from Zimbabweans working abroad has flopped
totally -
after handling a mere US$45 million in the past year, receipts are now
virtually zero.
The election results and the aftermath have not helped - we remain
completely isolated, people have no faith in the future, capital flight
is
accelerating and the parallel market has taken off into the
stratosphere.
The fact that the Reserve Bank was going to devalue by nearly 100 per
cent
was leaked last week and there is a sudden frosty silence in that
quarter.
The first month of sales on the tobacco floors - always an important
period
in Zimbabwe, has yielded prices in Zimbabwe dollars below last years.
This
simply puts paid to any hopes of a tobacco led recovery this year, or
next.
The reaction of President Mugabe to these shocking facts was to hold a
"Silver Jubilee" celebration, which costs billions. Undertake a
spending
spree for the air force in a country where we have no external or
internal
threats and a vague promise by a muted Gono that a "recovery plan" is
being
prepared. Oh yes - they fired the poor GM of the Grain Marketing Board
and
kept that idiot Made (Minister of Agriculture) in an enlarged Cabinet.
We have had confirmation from official sources that the maize crop now
being
reaped is a disaster - our estimate of about 400 000 tonnes seems about
right. There is a flurry of activity going on to try and get a wheat
crop
into the ground before the 15th of May but it is unlikely they will get
more
than the 50 000 tonnes or so they grew last year. So we are now faced
with a
severe famine and no foreign resources with which to buy the food and
other
products we need. In fact, if we had the resources we could hardly move
this
volume given the parlous state of our infrastructure.
Official UN sources estimate that we have nearly 6 million people who
need
food aid - donors are feeding about 1 million people at present -
mainly
children. This leaves 5 million people at risk of starvation out of a
population of 11 million. The rest of us will simply have to fend for
ourselves - faced with rising prices, shortages and other problems. It
seems
to me that South Africa will have to step in and pick up the pieces, as
it
is very largely responsible for this sorry state of affairs.
The big question is what do we do about this situation. The one thing
that
sticks out a mile is that Zanu has no solutions and we simply cannot
let
things stand as they are. The MDC has put its own plans into action and
at
this stage they are saying: -
1. The MDC does not accept the results of the election.
2. The MDC now accepts that neither democracy nor the legal system here
offer any way forward at present.
3. The MDC demands the resignation of the new government and the
negotiation
of an interim administration to begin to resolve the immediate crisis
situation we are in.
4. The MDC demands the convening of a constitutional conference
involving
all civic groups to draft a new constitution for the country with fresh
elections to be held under the new constitution and under the
supervision of
the international community.
To back up these demands a broad coalition of civic groups is being
formed
and will be charged with taking mass action against the new government.
The
MDC will employ all forms of political action required to support the
efforts by civil society to rescue the country from the grip of a
small,
self-seeking elite that simply refuses to allow the people to select
the
government of their choice. It will call on the armed forces to support
this
initiative in the broader interests of the country and its people.
The Ministry of Defense has stated that it will "crush" any mass action
launched by the opposition or civic society. On Monday last week
thousands
took to the streets in Bulawayo after a football match on Independence
Day -
it took the Police and the Army 7 hours to stop the rioting. To local
observers the policemen involved had little heart for the activity they
were
involved in - next time it will be worse.
Eddie Cross
Bulawayo, 26th April 2005
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