My Wet Coast Life

With all the issues happening in the middle east with Afghanistan's terrorism issues and Iran's nuclear ambition and censorship of it's people and then down to south east Asia with the Korean's shooting at each other both at sea and at the border and the Chinese retaliating at the US over arms deals with Taiwan. Africa has been left out of the spotlight.

You have good news such as February 11th, 2010 was the anniversary of Nelson Mandela's release. But then you also have what is occurring in Zimbabwe.

The politicians of Zimbabwe are quickly and blindly destroying that country. Now Zimbabwe has slowly gone down the tube since Robert Mugabe’s 'land redistribution’ policy, under which Zimbabwe’s white-owned farms have been brutally plundered and ownership given to black Zimbabweans. One white farmer, who received a serious beating after he petitioned a tribunal of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to rule against Mr Mugabe's efforts to seize white owned farms, even made a documentary showing the plight that Zimbabweans white farm owners were experiencing. The land taken from some 4,000 productive white Zimbabwean farmers, often with violent force, has been handed almost exclusively to Mugabe’s cohorts. A lot of his cohorts probably didn't have experience in farming so one of the countries best income generators was now being flushed down the toilet. Even with Zimbabwe's economy doing an epic fail, did Mugabe re-think the policy and change it to avoid Zimbabwe's economy from collapsing? No, why would it when he is getting rich from this and favors in all areas from manufacturing to military? And if push comes to shove, he can always flee with his riches. I bet most of his accounts are in US Dollars seeing the government considers it legal tender for there transactions.

Now he is taking it to the next level cause farms weren't enough. Mugabe is now demanding that all foreign and locally owned companies hand over at least 51 per cent ownership to black Zimbabweans.

Follow up:

51%!! Why would a company want to had over ownership to someone who doesn't know how to manage a company or earned the hard work of others? Owners who fail to comply could be jailed (and beaten based on what they did to the farmers).

Daniel Ndlela, Zimbabwe's most eminent regional economist said: "There will be no foreign investment into Zimbabwe. Why would anyone come into Zimbabwe with $100 and be left with $49? It sends a very wrong message and those who might have invested in Zimbabwe will now never come."

The one thing i know is if i want to become a multi-trillionaire, Yes trillionaire, is to buy Zimbabwe's currency. For less than $50 CDN, i can get Z$100 trillion Zimbabweans dollar note (In addition to the Z$100 trillion dollar note, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe plans to launch Z$10 trillion, Z$20 trillion and Z$50 trillion notes). Now that technically is a lot better than the previous 10 billion dollar banknote released in 2008.

Now i guess this was the solution for Zimbabweans as 1 trillion in single US$100 notes is a fair amount to carry around, let alone 100 trillion. But it gets worse, they then started accepting foreign currency and the government uses US dollars as legal tender. With an inflation rate in Zimbabwe 89.7 sextillion % (as of 2008), not 0.2% or 5% but 89.7 sextillion % and if you don't know what 89.7 sextillion % looks like, it is 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000%. Zimbabwe's currency is being battered and the government is not helping the situation. It used to be worth more than the US dollar, but that was over 30 years ago at Zimbabwe's independence in 1980.

Now to put it into context on how stupid, in my opinion, having this large of currency notes is it makes you feel rich having that kind of dollars in your wallet or bank account. But when you go to spend it, 100 billion would buy you 3 eggs (source: heraldsun.com.au) I can only image purchasing big ticket items like electronics, cars and homes...that'll be 500 quintillion for a new car....

One major commercial bank said its automated teller machines were not configured to dispense multi-zero withdrawals and freeze in what it called a "data overflow error".

What shocks me is the international community tends to be leaving Zimbabwe to dig there own hole and stay on the road to economic destruction. The UN and such have stepped in on other countries to stop or prevent this kind of destruction to a country and its economy but i guess they do not have enough valued resources worth saving to warrant an intervention. I guess they would need to find some decent oil reserves to get the worlds attention...

I guess it is only a matter of time before civil unrest over high inflation and worthless Zimbabwean dollar gets to a boiling point of riots and chaos and the world cannot ignore what it happening down there anymore and must intervene. But the longer it takes, the longer it will take to repair, if that is even possible...i guess only time will tell.