'The streets of Harare were littered with money'

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In November 2008, Johns Hopkins University calculated Zimbabwe’s year-on-year inflation rate as 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000% – one of the worst cases of hyperinflation in history. Professor Gift Mugano was a government economist at the time. He tells Vicky Farncombe what it was like to live through those times when wages were worthless and there was no food to buy in the shops. “It was a very painful period. It is a year which one would not want to remember,” he said. (Photo: Harare shoppers in an almost empty supermaket. Credit: Desmond Kwande/AFP via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Vicky
0:10.2	Fankham.
0:11.2	I'm taking you back to 2008, when Zimbabwe's annual inflation rate hits 89.7 6,000,000
0:20.0	per cent.
0:21.0	These are the pictures Robert Mugabe doesn't want us to see.
0:27.0	Children so malnourished that they're beyond the point of rescue.
0:31.0	In what was once one of the richest countries in Africa, people are dying for want of food,
0:36.0	medicine, water.
0:38.0	About the only growth industry here is funerals.
0:43.0	The screws of Aladdin were lit at it was a money.
0:48.0	You would go and take a product, and when you are walking to the shop, it will take three
0:53.0	tons.
0:54.0	At the main point, when I stopped going to the ATM to withdraw my money, it was equivalent
1:00.0	of 50 cents, US dollars.
1:03.0	And when I took it from the ATM, I threw it on the road because it was useless.
1:08.0	And Zimbabwe wouldn't remember it, it would tell you that the money was over on the
1:12.0	road.
1:13.0	You know, you will see if there's no point of keeping it.
1:15.0	That's Professor Gift Mugano.
1:17.0	In 2007, fresh out of university, he's working as an economist in Robert Mugabe's government.
1:24.0	The country's finances are a total mess.
1:28.0	But to understand why, we need to go back to 1997.
	...

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