For nearly seven years Zimbabwe has been in economic decline. Now it is in freefall. With inflation now running at 1,281 per cent, and food production in crisis, estimates put the numbers living below the poverty line at 80 per cent of the country's 12 million population. Unemployment is running at between 70 and 80 per cent. There is a real danger of mass starvation.
Last week there was a cholera outbreak in Harare, the result of a breakdown of a power system that is on the verge of collapse. Already regional centres have lost power. The health and education systems are in crisis. The hyperinflation has bankrupted the government with pay completely unable to keep up. Prices of meat, cooking oil and clothes increased by 223 per cent in the last week alone. Doctors have been on strike for a 9,000 per cent rise. The government has fired them all and threatened mass arrests, but the strike is spreading to nurses. Teachers have also been out. The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions is planning a general strike.
Last week 82-year-old prime minister Robert Mugabe, now in power for 27 years, fired his finance minister, Herbert Murerwa, but there is no suggestion the move marks a shift in his disastrous economic policies. The 2005 "Operation Murambatsvina" to clear urban slums forcibly deprived more than 18 per cent of the population of homes or livelihoods. The government's expropriation of white-owned farms has led to a catastrophic decline in output, to the point where it is now having to put the policy into reverse. Despite good rains, Zimbabwe faces another bad maize harvest, according to the regional Famine Early Warning System, and will have to import grain for the sixth consecutive year.
Its management of the currency has been similarly inept. The official exchange rate of Z$250 to one US$1 is treated with derision; on the black market, the rate is Z$4,000 to one US$1, the result in part of last year's printing by the central bank of Z$230 million to pay international debts and sustain operations.
In December even Mr Mugabe's own party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), balked at a suggested constitutional amendment which would have allowed him to extend his term in office by two years to 2010. But, despite the emergence of some dissent in ZANU-PF, the opposition to the regime remains divided and weak. Mr Mugabe has described protesters as "deranged" and protests are brutally put down. His regime, built on sand and rotten to the core, may collapse under the weight of its own incompetence. It would not be a day too soon.