Dear Family and Friends,
Early in the morning a trail of brand new one dollar notes lay in the dust on an out of town dirt road. There were about a hundred of them and they hadn't been there the day before. Aside from the dampness of the dew that had fallen on them, the $1 notes were obviously new; they were clean and unblemished as if they'd come straight from the printing press.
The notes had watermarks and silver security strips and the place and date of issue was Harare 2007. These brand new one Zimbabwe dollar notes are absolutely useless now but they invoked a sense of macabre nostalgia.
None of us want to remember hyper inflation, economic meltdown, empty shops and hunger but lately the state of things in Zimbabwe is giving us a very strong sense of déjà vu. You don't have to look hard to see that we are a country in deep trouble.
Our government is completely broke, our 91 year old President has spent $US 10 million on foreign travel in the last three months and the political squabbling inundates every facet of our lives. In recent weeks there has been a growing tide of unrest. Inmates at Chikurubi Maximum Prison in Harare embarked on a violent food riot which ended up needing prison officers, police, support unit, fire brigade and tear gas to quell the hungry rioters and later armed men on horseback hunting for possible escapees.
At least three people died in the incident which had been brewing for weeks. The Deputy Commissioner of Prisons caution a few weeks earlier had fallen on deaf ears: "We are only getting US$300 000 from Treasury monthly, yet our institution needs at least US$1,5 million to sustain operations." When it was all over a parliamentary committee looked into conditions and said they had found that "prisoners were living like rats."