Zimbabwe’s annual inflation slowed down by a marginal 8,9 percentage points to 1 184,6% in June, the government’s Central Statistical Office (CSO) said on Monday.
Inflation, described by President Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s enemy number one, was pegged at 1 193,5% in May and remains the highest such rate in the world.
According to the CSO, the latest inflation figures mean crisis-sapped Zimbabweans were paying 13 times more for the same basket of goods and services in June as they did a year before.
The government data office said month-on-month inflation had also moved downwards, shedding 10,7 percentage points to 17,3% from the May rate of 28%.
In real terms, this means an average basket of goods and services for household final consumption that cost Z$100 000 in May cost about $117 300 in June.
Hyperinflation is one of many severe symptoms of Zimbabwe’s seven-year-old economic crisis that has also spawned shortages of fuel, electricity, essential medicines, hard cash and just about every basic survival commodity.
The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change and Western governments blame the crisis on repression and wrong policies by Mugabe such as his seizure of productive farms from whites for redistribution to landless blacks.
The farm seizures destabilised the mainstay agricultural sector and caused severe food shortages after the government failed to give black villagers resettled on former white farms skills training and inputs support to maintain production.
But Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since the country’s 1980 independence from Britain, denies mismanaging the country and says its problems are because of economic sabotage by Western governments opposed to his seizure of white land. — ZimOnline