People scavenge while fatcats get fatter

could fix the situation are the ones who are making a fortune out of it,” said Harare economist John Robertson.
President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party elite and their business associates control much of the hugely profitable black market in goods and hard currency. Meanwhile, nearly half of the population will need food aid this year to fend off starvation, according to the UN World Food Program.
Desperate citizens here have become dark-of-night scavengers of coffins, copper electrical cable and even aluminium street signs, now in such shortage that finding an address is a trial.
Zimbabwe’s nights are dark indeed: here in Harare, downtown street lights are turned off for hours on end for lack of foreign currency to pay South African and Zambian power suppliers. If the nights are black, the days often exude an eerie surface calm.
In regular stores the shelves are bare. On the thriving black market, the handful of “dealers” remain bustling and full of goods, though prices rise so fast that any three bottles of Mazoe Orange Crush are likely to bear three different price stickers.
The black market fuel sells for four times the government’s fixed price. It keeps the traffic moving in Zimbabwe at $1,5 million for a 5 litre gallon of diesel.
In a nation that exported beef and wheat only seven years ago, four million people – one in three – now subsist on foreign food donations. Four in 10 children are stunted or wasting away from malnutrition, according to the UN. And they have not eaten meat for months now since the government edict to slash prices. And bread remains in critically short supply with 36,000 tonnes of imported wheat docked in Beira because government cannot pay for the supplies. A better measure of life is the fenced-off compound of the British and South African Embassies in Harare’s suburbs, where crowds of Zimbabweans camp out nightly, hoping to be first in line when visa offices open the next morning.
At 7 a.m., a half-block-square area outside the South African Embassy is jammed with hundreds of applicants. The crush is so great that South Africa now requires Zimbabweans to post a staggering R2,000 for a mere two-week visa, a sizable sum intended to guarantee their return.
“I haven’t had a job in two years – nobody here has a job,” said 27-year-old Moses, a school leaver. “I’m going to Tshwane to find anything.”
With Zimbabwe’s increasingly worthless money – the central bank printed a $200,000 bill last month – many here now prefer to keep their cash in hard currency.
“This country is truly in a crisis,” said Collin Gwiyo, the 42-year-old first secretary general of the Zimbabwe Coalition of Trade Unions, a locus of opposition to Mugabe’s government. “It’s a political crisis, leading to an economic crisis, feeding a humanitarian disaster.”
Sam Makwangudze, A student at the University of Zimbabwe said it was “unbelievable that Zimbabwe was once one of Africa’s most prosperous states”. But it is prostrate today, its vital signs flickering, asphyxiated by ever-tighter governmental curbs on the economy and basic freedoms. Driven by desperation, greed or simply a sense that the end is nearing, the ruling elite is methodically stripping the country of its assets. – Chief Reporter