How many people does it take to wreck a country?
Posted By Rob Millard - 1 Comments -
Zimbabwe has no oil and no strategically critical position astride a major trade route, so it is understandable that the world has other priorities right now. Which is a pity. The above graph (the red line) shows the country's GDP in 1980 Zimbabwe dollars, expressed as an index with 1980 at 100. This gives a reflection mostly of the depreciation of Zimbabwe's currency. Per capita GDP halved from US$754 in 1980 to $384 in 2005, mostly as a result of the wholesale and quite brutal dispossession of the country's farmers of their land by the State a couple of years ago. Many of these farmers have been welcomed with open arms by neighbouring Zambia and Mozambique, incidentally, and those countries are enjoying booms in their agricultural sectors as a result. In Zimbabwe, the once fertile farms are lying in neglected ruin.
These figures and those depicted in the graph are from the World Economic Outlook Database for April 2007.
As to the Zimbabwean currency itself, well as you can see it has devalued so much now that it can no longer be sensibly depicted on a graph. Inflation is running at somewhere between 4500% and 9000% per annum. With so chaotic an economy, it's difficult to determine an accurate figure. It's even more difficult to imagine that a couple of decades ago, the nation's currency was stronger than the US dollar, despite the liberation war and global economic sanctions. Today, it is estimated that there are about 3 million Zimbabwean refugees living illegally in South Africa. Given that many of these refugees are both destitute and desperate, their impact on South Africa's appalling incidence of violent crime is understandable.
What is absolutely and completely astounding to me, though, is that Robert Mugabe is still viewed by some other African leaders as a great and deeply admired statesman! (See Mugabe Gets Loudest Cheers At African Summit and Mugabe's Hold on Africans.) I try to steer well clear of politics in this blog, but this really is just too weird for words!
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Aside from the heavy human costs involved, I am quite fascinated by how closely the graph seems to approximate an exponential drop-off. It seems to point to some underlying/fundamental economic law that no amount of political rhetoric can break.
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