Zimbabwe's inflation is a maths education

People are always asking - What Zim is like at the moment? This is pretty much it!

From The Sunday Argus (SA), 16 October

Zimbabwe's inflation is a maths education


With the rate expected to be around 1 000% by Christmas, consumers are becoming adept at calculating the many zeroes


The worst thing about inflation is counting the money. In supermarket queues it takes ages for check-out attendants to count the money. A small plastic bag of groceries: a litre of milk, two quart beers, 250g frozen local bream, four lemons, and the cheapest bottle of local white wine added up to Z$520 000 on Monday. A man was so angry when this total showed up at the till, he abandoned his bag and stomped out. The rate in rands will have changed between writing this sentence and e-mailing it, but this pack of groceries probably cost about R40 on the black market on Monday. At the official rate it would be about R130. The highest denomination note, and it isn't actually a note it's called a bearer cheque, is Z$20 000, and they will run out before Christmas unless President Robert Mugabe allows the Reserve Bank's red hot presses in Bulawayo to print Z$100 000 or Z$1 million notes. Or Zimbabwe can do do what Turkey did last year by lopping off three noughts.


Hyper-inflation has been around a while, but it's different this time around because of the scale of the increases. Two years ago, when it hit 600% per annum, a Z$500 bar of blue soap was bad but not staggering. Now that bar of soap costs Z$66 000. Rather than try to equate prices to rands, it makes more sense to compare them with salaries; a teacher earns no more than Z$3m a month, a member of parliament gets Z$12m after tax. A single stop on a bus is Z$25 000, the same as a loaf of bread which costs eight times more than it did in July. Cooking oil, when available, is Z$70 000 for 175ml. The cheapest meat is about Z$138 000/kg, and mealie meal, when available, costs about Z$80 000 for 10kg. United Nations staffers are among the best paid foreigners in Zimbabwe and earn about R60 000 a month with allowances. They spend up to Z$15m on an average weekly shop which includes pool chemicals. They rent the plushest houses guarded around the clock at UN expense, buy South African wine and Liquifruit which has doubled in price in six weeks. They dine on kingklip, prawns, olive oil, South African cereals and Mooi River butter, not marge. They eat cheese, a rare treat for most.


But counting out Z$15m furrows the brows of even flush UN workers at check outs. Tellers have a common system. They count 20 brown Z$20 000 bearer cheques into piles of 20 and then put five piles together to make Z$2m. They count each pile at least twice and round off change to the nearest Z$500, which doesn't even buy matches. If six people venture out to dinner at any of the none-too-salubrious restaurants in Harare's northern suburbs, someone has to volunteer to stay sober to do the bill which takes ages of counting and recounting. The portions get ever smaller but a meal will set the group back about Z$12m if they eat meat, have a beer or a cool drink and maybe a bottle of local wine. The going rate last week for youngsters guarding the car outside the restaurant was Z$10 000. When the Reserve Bank gives orders from time to time to try to contain the black market, banks are restricted to Z$1 000 notes, then one needs a suitcase to carry enough cash to pay for a couple of burgers. Near-crumbling Chegutu, 100km south west of Harare, a cup of tea cost Z$65 000 at a grimy roadside inn owned by the Rainbow Tourism Group, more than double the cost in Harare even at tatty Wimpy's which held the record for the most expensive tea in the capital.


When inflation - which went up by nearly 100% in September to 359% - hits 1 000% per annum, as it probably will around Christmas, how will the tellers cope without money counters? One of the hardest aspects of living in billions, besides seeing gaunt young men able to afford only one slice of polony, is understanding value. When a house is advertised at Z$5 billion what does it mean? What does it mean when the government estimated in August it would spend Z$30bn on senate elections, which will be more like Z$200bn when they take place on November 26? Cellphone calculators say "out of range" when you try to work out how much an average UN worker earns in Zimbabwe dollars. But at least it's been a mathematical education. Until this year few of us knew that a billion has nine noughts, a trillion 12 and it needs a scientific calculator to work from hard currency to Zimbabwe dollars and those sums must be done twice to get both the official and parallel rate.


Imagine buying a full tank of black market fuel at Z$100 000 a litre on the side of the road and counting the money, note by note. A brick of Z$5m worth of notes is an ordinary amount to carry around. If one tries to live more or less legally - driven by extreme fear of a few nights in Harare Central Police Station's holding cells for illegally dealing in foreign currency - Zimbabwe is expensive. Some supermarkets take foreign credit cards and the debit shows at the official rate of exchange which makes the cost of groceries about twice what it would cost in South Africa. Another reason Zimbabwe looks increasingly drab is that it costs the equivalent of a teacher's monthly salary for five litres of lowest quality PVA. Although that was a week ago.