Spare a thought for the enormity of the task facing Morgan Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe. He has been appointed “prime minister” and he is faced with the task of turning around an economy which has become the world’s most toxic. That would be a vast challenge if he had been given the power necessary to do the job; the challenge is even greater because he has been given very little power at all. “Uncle Bob” Mugabe continues to wield the big stick.
Tsvangirai has estimate that the costs of recovery in Zimbabwe will be “massive” – in the order of US$5 billion. That number seems somewhat on the low side to me, perhaps by a factor of ten. In any event, the recovery cannot start until the downward slide has been arrested. In other words, Zimbabwe needs to stop doing the things which have been causing poverty. Yet today’s papers are filled with more stories of farm seizures, presumably leading to even fewer agricultural resources in the future.
More than 80,000 people have been infected by cholera as a result of the country’s crumbling infrastructure, and the death toll is heading towards 4,000. Inflation has become so high that the local currency has become unusable and business must now be conducted using US dollars. Meanwhile the country’s new agriculture minister has been arrested and jailed for the crime of being white, because this implies that he has plotted to kill Mugabe.