Where has all the money gone
Dear Family and Friends,
Outside it’s gorgeous this winter: the grass is tall and golden, the aloes ablaze with orange flowers and the sky is a bright, dazzling blue. Night time temperatures are down into single figures and in the early mornings mist hangs in the dips and valleys. It’s spectacular to see swirls of mist lying along rivers in the early mornings, mapping out the twists and turns of the water course leaving you feeling quite serene.
But then the day starts and the absurdity begins.
It’s only been a month since the government announced they were going to introduce a Zimbabwe Bond dollar to trade alongside the US dollar and it’s unbelievable how quickly the US dollar has disappeared. After trading freely with the US dollar for the last seven years no one can understand how all the money’s just suddenly disappeared. In less than a month daily withdrawal limits have gone from a thousand US dollars to five hundred, two hundred, one hundred and even less. Many days the banks have hundreds of people in the queues and they simply run out of money altogether and tell you to “try tomorrow” and at all the banks the ATM’s are empty.
Individuals, workers, managers: everyone’s been stuck in the same nightmare for the last month, having to spend hours every day in bank queues in order to draw out enough of their own money to keep up with daily expenses; hours when they should be working. The loss of revenue to companies, organizations and the country in the last month is unquantifiable.