As teachers demanded higher pay, central bank governor Gideon Gono announced yesterday that official annual inflation had surged to a record 2.2 million percent, way lower than independent analysts’ projections but still the highest in the world.
Statistics made available to the Public Service Commission (PSC) by the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) as part of salary negotiations show that a lower income breadwinner in the first two weeks of the month of July needed $13.8 trillion to buy basic commodities.
An average employee in the country earns $100 billion, way below the poverty datum line.
The PTUZ told the PSC – the body responsible for paying teachers and other government workers – that the figures were computed and approved by the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe (CCZ), a consumer watchdog financed by the government.
A 2kg packet of bread-making flour, according to statistics, now costs over $260 billion – a 100 percent jump from last month’s price. A 20kg bag of mealie meal, which is the staple food in the southern African country costs $720 billion up from $300 billion.
Mugabe yesterday officially unveiled a programme which his government said would provide relief to ravaged consumers. Under the programme, basic goods like sugar, maize meal, cooking oil and flour would be sold at subsidised prices using a coupon system.
Previous subsidies have failed with the bulk of goods finding their way to the black market.
Zimbabwe is in the throes of an economic meltdown, and analysts said the crisis had worsened following Mugabe’s disputed and violent re-election in the June 27 presidential run-off which was boycotted by his challenger Morgan Tsvangirai over violence.
The teachers are demanding to be paid in line with inflation and want to be paid in foreign currency.
Basically the economy has been dollarised and because it is not centrally co-ordinated, prices have risen way above the income of an average Zimbabwean which is giving rise to the demands for US dollar salaries, John Robertson, a private economic consultant said.
The World Bank says Zimbabwe’s imploding economy is the worst for a country outside a war zone and is dramatised by shortages of food, foreign currency and unemployment above 80 percent.
Mugabe said yesterday his government would deal with businesses that continued to hike prices without justification.
The veteran Zimbabwe leader, now 84, has blamed some companies for working with his Western foes to hike prices as part of a bigger plot to force him out of power as punishment for his seizure of white-owned farms to re-settle blacks.
In launching this historic programme, Government is thus sending a very strong message to the corporate sector that the era of unjustified price increases has come to an end. Let them heed this message, Mugabe said yesterday.
But when the message is not heeded and those who now have to adopt the habit of exploiting the masses continue to so do, then we will say the message has not been heeded and other ways of getting the message heeded have to be employed behind closed doors, behind bars, he added. – ZimOnline
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