As Zimbabwe’s supermarkets rapidly continue to empty, Finance Minister Samuel Mumbengegwi has pleaded with shoppers not to hoard goods, reports said on Tuesday.
Shoppers have cleared supermarkets of most basics following massive state-ordered price slashes earlier this month.
Many goods are now only available on the black market, at hugely inflated prices.
Speaking in the southern town of Masvingo, Mumbengegwi said there was no need for people to hoard goods, the state-controlled Herald reported.
He said price monitors would now be a permanent feature in Zimbabwe, the paper added.
President Robert Mugabe’s government said it was ordering the controversial price cuts to protect consumers from greedy merchants intent on toppling the regime.
But businesses say they were only responding to soaring inflation rates. The authorities stopped issuing inflation figures two months ago as the rate soared to at least 4 500%.
Prosecutors in Harare, meanwhile, are urging magistrates to jail businessmen for overcharging, the Herald said in a separate report.
Eight businessmen were on Monday remanded in custody pending sentence for overcharging.
Prosecutor Patson Nyazamba told the Harare Magistrate’s Court the eight should be removed from society, according to the report.
The businessmen argued that they bought their goods at high prices from wholesalers.
Independent economists have warned the price blitz could see many businesses shutting down, bringing more misery to Zimbabweans already mired in their seventh year of economic recession.
‘Radical policies’
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s Parliament opens a new session this week to debate radical plans to nationalise foreign firms and a law empowering the house to name Mugabe’s likely successor without a national vote.
Mugabe, the Southern African state’s sole ruler since independence from Britain in 1980, will on Tuesday officially open the last session of the House of Assembly and the upper Senate ahead of general polls due by next March.
Political analysts say the proposed legislation before the chambers, including the constitutional Bill seeking to combine parliamentary and presidential elections and the economic empowerment Bill, could increase uncertainties about Zimbabwe’s future.
”On the economic side, we are looking at a government that is, in word and in deed, continuing with radical policies, which in respect of the farm seizures badly hurt the economy,” said Eldred Masunungure, a political science professor at the University of Zimbabwe.
”The nationalisation of foreign firms may have a similar impact if it is handled as badly as the land-redistribution programme,” he added.
Masunungure said the Constitutional Amendment Bill consolidating the electoral calendar, with clauses giving Parliament power to elect a new president if a vacancy occurred between elections, could give Mugabe an avenue to retire after the 2008 polls with room to influence who will succeed him.
”I know that the concept of a dignified exit for Mugabe has been dismissed by some people, and that there those who believe he wants to hang on to power for life, but I think Mugabe also knows that his future depends on creating enough space to manoeuvre,” he said.
”To me that Bill gives him space for some exit, but then politics is not a clinical game with predictable results.” — Sapa-dpa, Reuters