The article states:
"But the power struggle between Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, his old foe, has overshadowed daily hardships including food and fuel shortages that have driven millions of Zimbabweans out of the country and strained regional economies.Zimbabwe’s rival parties will meet with former South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is mediating, next week in South Africa to discuss the deadlock, the South African foreign ministry said.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) group of nations has failed to push Zimbabwe’s parties to settle their differences and get on with the task of rescuing the economy.
Regional power South Africa said it was disappointed to note that ”political interests have taken priority at the expense of the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans”.
”Cabinet decided that the approved R300 ($28.33m) will be retained for agricultural assistance to Zimbabwe,” said a cabinet statement.
”However, this money will be only disbursed once a representative government was in place and in time for the next planting season in April 2009.”
In addition, the article notes the failing of Zimbabwe's gold mining sector:
"The world’s highest inflation rate - above 231m per cent - has made life unbearable for Zimbabweans. And there are new signs of economic deterioration in what used to be one of Africa’s most promising countries.
Zimbabwe’s gold output, which accounts for a third of its export earnings, hit an all-time monthly low of 125 kg in October as economic woes forced more mine closures, a mining official said on Thursday.
The sector has virtually shut down as miners cannot fund operations, senior Zimbabwe chamber of mines official Douglas Verden told Reuters."
Meanwhile, the ZANU(PF)'s Herald newspaper in Harare reports that smuggling is to blame for the destruction of the gold mining industry. Like illegal diamonds, the illegal gold trade is one more indication of how the Zimbabwean economy has been "eaten" by insiders to the point were it has lost any meaningful way to attract the foreign exchange necessary to run the economy.
The Herald reports:
"Producers of the precious metal list their constraints as being largely escalating production costs, frequent power outages, shortages of critical inputs such as cyanide, explosives, spare parts and mining equipment.However, while gold producers moan over all these factors, many of them are guilty of big-scale smuggling.
The country has for sometime now been losing gold worth hundreds of millions of US dollars every month to smugglers.
Gold is one of the main sources of hard currency for the country, accounting for a third of its export earnings, but now very little of the precious metal is trickling in.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has regularly reviewed the local price of gold, in some cases awarding 10-fold increases, in a bid to curb smuggling and boost sagging deliveries, but this has apparently not paid off.
It means there is something wrong somewhere. Gold producers get 60 percent of their proceeds in foreign currency from what they deliver, but we understand that they have not been paid since March this year.
This is an area that needs urgent attention and against the background of escalating operating costs, it becomes imperative that the gold miners get the payment.
We believe and are confident that the central bank will honour its side of the equation.
However, the RBZ gets irked by the endemic smuggling, elements of indiscipline and side-marketing on the part of the gold producers, especially after they have received the support they need.
All the evidence of gold smuggling and the list of those responsible is there.
What is needed is to bring them to book.
There has been procrastination on arresting and prosecution of the smugglers of gold and other precious metals such as diamonds simply because there is big fish involved."
The Herald is not usually known for its use of understatement. But these are drastic times.
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