Robert Mugabe’s Regime & Zimbabwe’s Dirt Poor Billionaires

Wallets and money clips just went out of style in Robert Mugabe’s regime & Zimbabwe’s Dirt Poor Billionaires. Zimbabwe’s currency went down diving in a bottomless pit, losing value where monopoly money probably have more value than their millions of dollars and soon even their denomination in billions will get overtaken by monopoly money in value. A check with currency converter, a Zimbabwe dollar ZWD 500 million has a conversion rate of US$ 0.02401 as of 7/16/08. You can be a billionaire in Zimbabwe except their billion dollar is a measly equivalent of just almost five cents in US dollar that will not even but you half a banana. Geez hope people in Zimbabwe especially Robert Mugabe’s hooligans even know how to count at the rate their money devalues. These hooligans of security forces and militias organized by Robert Mugabe are terrorizing people to support his regime while brutalizing those who are identified with the opposition.

Robert Mugabe is one moron extraordinaire; his country is on a brink of a financial collapse that can be traced to the collapse of its major export industry, commercial farming, after Mugabe's controversial land reform program early in the decade. Having no economic production and starved of foreign exchange his government kept on spending. To sustain his regime and pay for his loyal liberation veterans and youth militias whose primary function was to terrorized people into voting for him printed money on frenzy as if it was monopoly money.

Things seems to go “smoothly” until the German company supplying bank note paper stopped the flow due to concerns over Zimbabwe's recent violent presidential election, widely seen as fraudulent by international observers.

Two-thirds of the 1,000 strong Fidelity Printers & Refiners, the state-owned company that tirelessly churns out bank notes for the Robert Mugabe regime, was ordered to go on leave. There will definitely be chaos out on the street once the population feels the effect of the shortage of their valueless dollar notes. Will this be the end of Robert Mugabe’s regime? It is a possibility judging from this LA Times article which I quote:

As hyperinflation spiraled last year, Fidelity printed million-dollar notes, then 5-million, 10-million, 25-million, 50-million. This year, it has been forced to print 100-million, 250-million and 500-million notes in rapid succession, all now practically worthless. The highest denomination is now 50 billion Zimbabwean dollars (worth a U.S. dollar on the street).

Despite the recent currency shortage, the Zimbabwean dollar has continued to slide against the U.S. dollar and shopkeepers are still increasing their prices steeply. The price of the state-owned Herald newspaper has leaped from 200,000 Zimbabwean dollars early this month to 25 billion now. Before the crunch, a beer at a bar in Harare, the capital, cost 15 billion Zimbabwean dollars. At 5 p.m. July 4, it cost 100 billion ($4 at the time) in the same bar.

An hour later, the price had gone up to 150 billion ($6).

Apart from the paper crisis, the real fear inside Fidelity is that its software license for the European bank note design technology that it uses could be withdrawn because of new sanctions threatened against the Mugabe regime, the staffer said. The design department is crucial: It must constantly conceive new notes as those on the streets are rendered worthless by hyperinflation. "If that happened, that would be it," the staffer said.

I saw Robert Mugabe on BBC sometime back during the African nation summit and you could really see the kind of monsters this person is when his bodyguards rough up the BBC crew to stop them from covering their boss. I also stumbled upon this really funny Robert Mugabe's Love Tips blog, hilarious indeed you may want to check it out. Seriously, I don’t think he will be missed by the Zimbabwe people if he is ousted, especially when people are quitting their job because of literally skyrocketing cost of transportation that is more than what they are earning…….

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