Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s government has published regulations that freeze the prices of a huge range of retail goods, the state press reported on Saturday.
The state-controlled daily Herald newspaper listed a range of goods from typewriters and tractors to batteries and babies’ nappies in the Control of Goods (Price Freeze) Order published in Friday’s government gazette. It said the prices of the goods named could not increase until further authorisation.
These included all crop and livestock produce, agricultural machinery, crop and veterinary chemicals, building materials, vehicles and spare parts. Also listed were newspapers, explosives, textbooks, office machinery, drugs, electrical appliances, hardware, cement, paint, mobile telephones and sanitary tampons.
Price controls on basic food commodities were first introduced in October last year and have led to critical shortages of staples like maizemeal, sugar, salt, bread, milk and cooking oil.
The Herald said the new freeze was ”to curtail unjustified price hikes”.
Commentators said it was the government’s response to inflation, now running at 144%.
”It is not clear how the ministry of industry and international trade would monitor the price freeze throughout the country,” the report in the Herald read.
The regulations were published a day after finance minister Herbert Murerwa admitted in his budget speech that price controls had created ”shortages of critical basic commodities” and made them ”not accessible to the poor”.
”The beneficiaries of price control are the speculator and the dealers, and not the vulnerable groups,” he said.
He promised to draft ”a social contract” which would allow prices that ensured producers’ and retailers’ viability and also kept basic commodities within the range of the pockets of the poor.
Current shortages of basic commodities followed when manufacturers found that the controlled prices were less than the cost of producing the goods, and black market traders snapped up goods in shops and supermarkets and then sold them at much higher prices at township roadside stalls.
In order to stop the ”profiteering”, the government deployed members of Mugabe’s youth militia earlier this month in the townships where traders have allegedly been assaulted when the youths seized black market goods on sale.
The country is in the grip of famine and economic crisis that the World Bank and other international organisations have attributed to Mugabe’s ”Soviet-style” economic policies. – Sapa