For many in inflation-riddled Zimbabwe this year, Christmas isn’t quite what it used to be.
In a glitzy department store on Harare’s main First Street, there are no customers at the almost bare perfume counters. Upstairs in the toy department, Santa has disappeared from his grotto.
Outside, about 500 weary customers queue for cash at a bank. Cash shortages have increased the misery for millions already worn down by months of food shortages, power failures and water cuts.
Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Gideon Gono last week blamed cash hoarders for the shortages and said he was scrapping a high-denomination bank note in a bid to outwit those he called ”cash barons”.
Not everyone is convinced. ”It’s a decoy,” says an angry man waiting outside a bank in the central Avondale suburb. Next to him, people crouch on the kerb, read the newspaper in the sun, anything to pass the time. ”There’s no cash coming into the banks,” he adds. ”You can’t get anything out.”
Few have managed to get their hands on the new set of three banknotes introduced by Gono on Thursday, worth Z$250 000, Z$500 000 and Z$750 000.
Official media reported on Monday that the central bank had pumped in Z$20-trillion-worth of the new notes — but not one of them is enough to buy a loaf of bread.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) this weekend labelled Gono ”the biggest economic saboteur of Zimbabwe’s economy” and accused him of playing politics with a serious national crisis.
”Central bank takes the festive spirit out of Christmas,” the privately owned Standard newspaper said in an editorial. ”For the first time in the history of this country, the tills will not be ringing this Christmas,” it added.
For the privileged few, there are still Christmas luxuries.
Next to a queue of people patiently waiting to buy a loaf of ”cheap” bread — at Z$600 000 — a couple of well- dressed women browse in an exclusive clothes store.
The cost of a skirt: Z$360-million, about the equivalent of two years’ salary for a teacher.
It has been a bad year for many in Zimbabwe. Annual inflation has raced to more than 14 000% and a state-ordered price slash in July and August emptied stores and exacerbated already biting shortages.
Milk, cooking oil, butter and meats are still not readily available in many stores as shopkeepers fear the wrath of price inspectors.
In a letter published in the private press on Sunday, one writer made a list of Christmas requests to President Robert Mugabe, in power in Zimbabwe since 1980 and blamed — by the opposition at least — for the country’s disastrous economic downturn.
”I wish you and the First Lady … a soul-searching season of repentance as we suffer in peril because of your ill-conceived policies,” the letter read. — Sapa-dpa