Denford Magora's Latest Zimbabwe News Blog

The Manica Post is published in the mountainous Eastern Province of Zimbabwe by the government. Itt is one of the major papers in Zimbabwe This is just disgusting. Tendai Biti, the MDC-T minister of finance in this Zimbabwean Inclusive Impediment to People's Hopes, charges 60% tax on all imports of fuels and motor oils into the country. As you know from my previous articles on this blog, fuel costs have risen so much in Zimbabwe over the last couple of months that they are having an impact on inflation, as prices of goods and services rise in order to chase transportation costs. What this means is that 60% of what a Zimbabwean pays at the pump when they fill up their car goes directly to Tendai Biti, since fuel companies simply adjust their prices so that the buyer pays that tax cost in the end. While this is going on, you have the same MDC-T, through its Minister of Energy, telling the fuel companies what to charge (fixing prices, a la ZANU PF) and threatening them with all manner...

Teacher protesting in Harare late last month. The Inclusive Thingy is broke, Mugabe is calling US diplomats "idiots" and Prime Minister Tsvangirai says all is well and people should just "listen to me." Just as I warned you all a few weeks back, Zimbabwe is now in the grip of an inexplicable shortage of fuel. True, it is not as bad as the days when there was not even a drop in the whole country, but queues have started to form again at service stations. And they are long queues. (You will recall that I told you that an importer was telling me that "there just is no money in the country" to import fuel and that some importers were shipping in consignments as small as 2000 litres and these were being snapped by by companies like Caltex, which is supposed to importing fuel itself. The problem is that, ideologically, the MDCs and ZANU PF are cut from the same cloth. Hence Tendai Biti had no compunction about putting penalty duties on fuel that is brought into ...