In an earlier post I remarked on how the Zimbabwe dollar had devalued hugely on the parallel market in the run up to Zimbabwe’s ‘harmonised’ elections.

Who wanted foreign currency badly enough to pay hand over fist for it? The businesses and organizations whose foreign currency accounts (FCAs) had been robbed by Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank at the end of 2007? Hardly likely as there aren’t enough of these local businesses operating at sufficient capacity to finance a jump from paying 4.75 million to 65 million Zimbabwe dollars for 1 US dollar, in 8 weeks.

Funny how there was suddenly farm equipment galore to give away in the weeks before the election. And plenty of helicopter trips for Mugabe to address the nation at uncountable rallies before the March 29 elections. Seems there must be a connection.

Straight after the elections were held, the rate ‘plummeted’ for a week – down to 30 million to 1 US dollar.

Today, the rate is 85 million to the US dollar and rising fast.

So, what’s driving it back up again?

My feeling is that the regime is spending quadrillions on preparing the nation (especially the rural areas) for a runoff. Beating the rural population doesn’t come cheap. That kind of deployment requires fuel for transport, food for militias and army responsible for the beatings, extra wages – who would commit this kind of violence on their usual pay cheque?

Fuel & food are in short supply in Zimbabwe – but Zim dollars are easy to print – so our illegitimate government is the most likely to be driving the rate up.

Oh and don’t forget the innumerable times our one and a half jets have flown to and fro above our heads in the past week. That’s an expensive exercise in a country without foreign currency inflows.

I haven’t begun to talk about the reserves of tear gas they’ll need to be building up to ‘manage’ everyone when they wrap up their final subversion of the ‘harmonised’ election through re-counts and a runoff.

We need to put our heads together and work our how to starve the beast that beats us.

This entry was posted on April 16th, 2008 at 12:08 pm by Brenda Burrell and is filed under Activism, Elections 2008, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.