Queues of angry people continued to crowd the pavements around Harare’s banks for a fourth day on Saturday as the troubled country’s latest shortage — banknotes — pushed Zimbabweans’ frustrations to new levels.
Two flustered private security guards were trying to calm down shouting people outside a building society branch in Harare’s Avondale shopping centre on Saturday morning.
Nervous clerks peered from behind their counters as the crowd of about 300 outside forced the locked glass doors towards breaking point.
”This confusion is terrible,” said teacher Josiah Garabwa as he abandoned the queue. ”The money arrived late and they are only giving out a maximum of ZD5 000 (US$3,50). With that I can buy two loaves of bread and a couple of beers. I’ve got to pay rent, school fees, transport. We can no longer live.”
Police had to fire tear gas in the shopping centre on Friday to disperse the crowds when the banks ran out of cash and closed their doors. In the city centre, riot police also struggled with queues, many of which started at 4am.
On Wednesday an unidentified woman in a branch of Barclays Bank in Harare began stripping off her clothes in frustration after she was turned away from a teller, said an official who asked not to be named. The woman assaulted staff who tried to restrain her, he said.
In the eastern city of Mutare a crowd burst through the doors and plate-glass windows of a bank on Friday but were beaten back by riot police, reported the independent Daily News.
Banknotes have been growing increasingly scarce over the last three months as inflation, now running at 365%, created a surge in the demand for cash.
ZD500 notes, the biggest denomination, are in critical short supply, so banks manage by paying out in smaller denominations — which shoppers have to carry around in swollen bags.
Bank officials say the central bank is supplying them with 10% of their requirements.
The dwindling supply of cash has created a sudden big demand for cheque books — so big that banks now take a month to provide a new book that would normally take 24 hours to be delivered.
In the country’s worsening economic crisis, Zimbabweans have endured severe shortages of basic commodities like fuel, bread, milk, sugar and salt — items that are now unaffordable to most ordinary Zimbabweans.
The government has said it would soon start printing ZD1 000 notes to ease the problems. But the drying-up of exports in the world’s fastest-collapsing economy has caused the near-disappearance of hard currency earnings, which means there is no hard currency to import the special ink and paper needed to print banknotes.
Economist John Robertson said this week it was obvious that the state’s printing works could not print notes quickly enough to keep up with demand.
”They need to print over a million ZD500 bank notes a day,” he said. ”The problem is they can’t do it. This is just the beginning, and it’s bound to get worse. We had ZD100-billion worth of notes and coins in circulation in December. Prices have doubled since then, so we need ZD2-billion now. And that’s impossible.” ‒ Sapa