Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

Now, lawyer Listener Marvin Muttingara, who comes from Zimbabwe, recently emailed us with this question.

Can sanctions on a few select individuals create an economic crisis for an entire nation?

The reason I asked this question is that I have heard from various members of our government in Zimbabwe

that if those sanctions on these few select individuals are dropped, that our economy will recover and not be as bad as it is now.

So we decided to look into this. Marvin seems correct that politicians are blaming things on sanctions.

Here's the country's president and leader of the ruling party Zanopief, Emerson Manangaguah.

Zimbabwe has these sanctions now for nearly two decades.

And as a result of those sanctions, our economy was collapsed. Our current collapsed.

First, let's try and understand what these sanctions are and what or who they affect.

And then we'll look at whether they're having an impact on the country's economy.

The sanctions Manangaguah was talking about were imposed on Zimbabwe by the United States and the European Union in 2001 and 2002.

Tony Hawkins is an economist and professor from the University of Zimbabwe in Harari.

The sanctions worked sanctions in the sense that you read about them now for Iran or something like that.

They weren't sanctions on exports.

In Zimbabwe's case, the sanctions are financial restrictions on individuals and government entities,

mainly made up of politicians, military officials and state-owned banks.

And these are mainly instigated by the US.

Shanghai and Yokeh is a journalist who's lived in Zimbabwe for most of her life.

She works for the BBC in Harari.

With the US sanctions, about 141 individuals and companies that government and some of these individuals are linked to are still affected.

So you have state-owned companies, for example, like AgriBank, which is one of the major banks which finances farmers here.

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