Zimbabwe: still not open for business
Disastrous policies suggest Emmerson Mnangagwa is not up to the job
In little more than a year, the man who promised to open Zimbabwe’s economy for business, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, has managed to shut it down. At the time of the coup in November 2017, Robert Mugabe warned that Mnangagwa was not up to the job and that the change in government was cosmetic. He has been proved right. President Cyril Ramaphosa, the British government and the EU are left with egg on their faces. The promised three-day shutdown sparked by Mnangagwa’s ill-conceived 150% fuel price hike last weekend brought the long-simmering crisis out into the open. The government, which for the past five years borrowed recklessly at home and abroad while printing increasingly worthless local currency, published distorting data to prove to the naive that the economy was on the mend. It began to fall apart in October last year, when the "local currency", which the government still insists trades at par to the US dollar, collapsed to $14c in the parallel market. It has recovered to $...
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