In Zimbabwe, It’s Crisis as Usual

“Major factors in the sharp economic decline include government corruption, a horrific drought, and rampant inflation and cash shortages after the reintroduction of a Zimbabwean dollar (ZWL, colloquially called “bond”) following almost a decade under a multi-currency system.”

“The first Zimbabwean dollar originated in 1980 after the country, then called Southern Rhodesia, fought and won a guerrilla war for independence against its British colonizers. As white settlers made up 1 percent of the population but controlled the majority of arable land, former freedom fighter and new government leader Mugabe put into place a moderately successful “resettlement” program, which compensated landholders and redistributed their property to black Zimbabwean farmers. In 2000, Mugabe’s party amended the constitution to allow the legal seizure of farmland without compensation. The mismanagement of that program contributed to severe famine, according to a report by the U.K.’s Africa All-Party Parliamentary Group. The food instability in Zimbabwe today is an ongoing symptom of this.
During the global recession of 2008, the Zimbabwean dollar saw inflation hit 500 billion percent before it was abandoned in favor of the multi-currency system. In its original incarnation, Zimbabwean bill denominations reached 100 trillion—not even enough to buy a loaf of bread. (Ironically, those bills are now sold on eBay for around $40 U.S.)

“The light at the end of the tunnel in 2008–9 was dollarisation,” wrote University of Zimbabwe economist Tony Hawkins in the Zimbabwe Independent last year. “Inflation came to a shuddering halt, the economy returned to positive growth for the first time in a decade and a financial sector, ravaged by hyperinflation, recovered strongly.”

A national shortage of the U.S. dollar starting in 2015 prompted the government to mint “bond,” a substitute currency that acted as a placeholder for foreign cash, according to Al Jazeera. When bond devalued swiftly, thanks to the black market, the government attempted to integrate it into a new Zimbabwean dollar and banned most use of foreign currencies.

“De-dollarisation in 2019 has turned the clock back towards hyperinflation without achieving its basic objective of providing a viable alternative to the United States dollar, trusted by the community,””

” The quashing of political dissent has been more profuse under Mnangagwa’s government than even under the iron-fisted Mugabe, according to Roselyn Hanzi, director of the group Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights. In 2019, during protests over a government-imposed fuel price hike of more than 100 percent, more than 1,000 protesters were arrested within two weeks. Some were dragged out of their homes by police after the fact, tortured, and prosecuted without legal representation. “That has never happened [on this scale], as far as I can remember,” Hanzi says. “Every other day [activists are] getting attacked by the police…brutally and arbitrarily.””