Right, before I launch into my tirade, I’d like to say that I’m one of the Zimbo’s holding onto the hope that this government of national unity we just got will be able to drag us out of the economic open-cast pit we are in. I was also taught that anything with two heads is, in all likelihood, a monster, so I’d really like to see how power is shared between the two men who would have loved to rule Zimbabwe on their own terms. I just hope they’ll be able to get us through these tough times. If you are unfamiliar with the steady decline of the Zim economy then you will find all you need to know at…um…the bottom of this pit, but remember this is a hard hat area – we hit rock bottom long back and we’ve been digging ever since. 
It’s not something our Central Bank would like to admit, but it’s a fact that, in recent months, our economy has been dollarising. The USD is rapidly becoming the de facto currency of Zimbabwe. It’s understandable given that our local currency is virtually worthless. The frustrating thing is that even though people have millions of dollars transferred into their accounts as salaries they have found it virtually impossible to spend it before it becomes useless. Banks only allow withdrawals of a whopping ZW$1000.00 a day. This barely covers peoples bus fares, so, in essence everybody queuing at the banks (and they pour from the aisles of the banking halls, out of the bank doors, onto and down the streets) is queuing to draw bus fare that will take them home and bring them back again. Minimum bus fares are at about ZW$500 and this usually constitutes one leg of the journey for most commuters travelling to work. Most buses go to and from town. The commuter then has to catch another bus to work. By this time the traveller and his $1000 would have said their tearful goodbyes and parted ways. So its back to the queue again and the wait could go on for an entire morning. So I gather that there is not a lot of work being done with half of Harare at the bank for up to 3 hours a day.
I finally managed to get a haircut today! Just a simple haircut; but I also took up their offer to wash the little hair I had left (after all, it cost me the equivalent of three trips to the bank!). Now here’s what I don’t understand about this particular salon; there is Ragga music blaring from the stereo speakers and the hair-dressers trying to compete with the noise by shouting their conversations across the room. So t gets quite noisy, especially on Saturday mornings. So here they are shouting across the salon, with the ghetto blaster just about popping my ear-drums with some Shaggy tune. And quite frankly the shouting was getting to me (they two ladies were on either side of me) and Shaggy just wasn’t cutting it, so I almost left in the middle of the haircut. This thought reminded me of a barber I went to some 15 years ago. Got there at lunch time on a Saturday afternoon and asked for a brush – cut. The place was getting ready to close for the weekend and I was anxious to get home. I remember the barber cutting exactly one half of my head to brush size and then the unthinkable happened – power went! It turned out that ZESA, the Electricity Company, was scheduled to do maintenance at 2pm and would shut down power at a nearby sub-station that provided power to at least 4 city blocks. They warned all businesses that they would shut down power at 2pm and this was not negotiable. It was 2 O’ clock and with half my head shaved I had a pretty hideous looking hairstyle. I still had to take a bus home! So I was quite desperate. It took 20 minutes to get them to switch power on for 10 minutes so the barber could just about Hoover the other half of my head. At one stage he suggested that I go home and, “…come back on Monday.” I nearly bit his head off.
So the US Govt has to step in to bail out the banks? It hasn’t been long since the Fannie Mae and Freddy what’s ’is name bail out, now $700 billion is needed. The question that comes to mind; Does this give the impression that when banks make huge profits, it’s theirs and only theirs and then when they start to haemorrhage money, the resulting losses are shared with the tax-payer?
