Zimbabwe’s finance minister responded to the country’s worsening economic crisis last week by blacking out inflation statistics for the next six months, boosting the price of the little power that’s available five-fold and admitting what the International Monetary Fund told him in April: the economy will contract for the first time since 2008.
At the same time he spoke of fiscal surpluses and plans to abolish a requirement for local control for projects in the key platinum industry.
This all happened in a country with daily power cuts of up to 18 hours and shortages of everything from bread to motor fuel.
People are receiving food aid in cities for the first time and a drought has necessitated the import of hundreds of thousands of tons of corn.
Bloomberg