Zimbabweans are shopping like there’s no tomorrow. With police patrolling the aisles of Harare’s electrical shops to enforce massive government-ordered price cuts, the widescreen TVs were the first things to go, for as little as £20. Across the country, shoes, clothes, toiletries and different kinds of food were all swept from the shelves as a nation with the world’s fastest shrinking economy gorged itself on one last spending spree.

Car dealers said officials were trying to force them to sell vehicles at the official exchange rate, effectively meaning that a car costing £15,000 could be had for £30 by changing money on the blackmarket.

With screaming deals like that how can this plan fail?

Mr Mugabe has accused business interests of fuelling inflation, running at about 20,000%, to bring down his government. A hotline is in place to report “overcharging”, and retailers who flinch at slashing prices are being dragged before the courts. Several thousand have been arrested for “profiteering” over the past week, including the chief executives of the biggest retailers in the country, some of them foreign-owned.

Economists say the price cuts will only deepen the national crisis, leaving many shops bare because they will not be able to afford to restock while official retail prices remain lower than the cost of buying wholesale or importing. Mr Mugabe has dismissed such warnings as “bookish economics”.

Looking at the paradise that is Zimbabwe today I just thank God that we had that lion of foreign policy, Jimmy Carter, in the White House when Mugabe was elected. Who knows how much worse things could have been if Carter hadn’t been busy legitimizing every Marxist who came along.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 9:09 pm by Chad and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.