(AFP) Zimbabwe to step up price blitz, slammed by US
Zimbabwe to step up price blitz, slammed by US17/07/2007 17:00 HARARE, July 17 (AFP)
Zimbabwe's government was set to intensify its pricing crackdown, despite being condemned by the White House on Tuesday as a reckless move that would further fuel inflation and exacerbate food shortages.
Nathan Shamuyarira, ZANU-PF's secretary for information and publicity, said a meeting of the party's politburo on Monday, chaired by President Robert Mugabe, had decided to extend the three-week old Operation Dzikiza (Operation Reduced Prices) as it had already shown to have brought prices down.
"We got a full report from the ministerial taskforce and the politburo was very impressed that prices were coming down," Shamuyarira was quoted as saying on the website of the state-run Herald newspaper.
"The politburo came up with a number of measures to tighten and intensify the process and these will be tabled before the central committee ... but we were quite impressed with the process."
The central committee's recommendations will then be "implemented by the relevant arms of government," said the Herald without giving further details.
Retailers and manufacturers, grappling to cope with an inflation rate now believed to be well over 5,000 percent, had been raising their prices several times a day until the government ordered prices to be cut in half on June 26.
Some 3,000 retailers and manufacturers have been subsequently arrested for violating the edict, most of whom have been slapped with fines.
Manufacturers have said the government-imposed prices mean they are unable to cover their costs and stores are fast running out of supplies, although the black market is prospering as a result.
With affordable food fast running, the United States government announced it would send 47,400 metric tons of additional food aid to Zimbabwe as President George W. Bush's spokesman delivered a withering assessment of the price blitz.
"The regime's reckless attempts to address self-imposed hyperinflation have resulted in the arrest of at least 2,000 businesspeople, widespread hoarding and profiteering by police and government officials, and shortage of basic staples," said Tony Snow.
"Its irresponsible economic policies will only worsen inflation, unemployment, growing food shortages, and poverty," he said, adding that more than four million Zimbabweans were projected to go hungry.
Snow said Washington would provide 47,400 metric tons of additional food assistance to ease the suffering of roughly half a million Zimbabweans, and that total US aid would feed about 1.4 million until Zimbabwe's 2008 harvest.
Mugabe, barred from the United States and European Union over allegations he rigged his re-election in 2002, has repeatedly told his Western critics to stop interfering in the country he has ruled since independence in 1980.
One of his most outspoken domestic opponents, Bulawayo Archbishop Pius Ncube, has previously called on outside help to topple Mugabe but his image as head of the Catholic Church took a battering Tuesday when state media published pictures that appeared to show him in bed with a married woman.
A lawyer for Ncube said the archbishop was challenging an adultery suit filed by the woman's husband.
Labels: ECONOMY, PIUS NCUBE, ZIMBABWE
posted by MrK @ 9:18 PM
1 Comments:
Tony Snow, professional lying scumbag and international media laughing stock, took some time out to condemn Zimbabwe.
"The regime's reckless attempts to address self-imposed hyperinflation
Self-imposed in Snow-speak means the Jesse Helms co-sponsored the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery act of 2001, which cut Zimbabwe off from foreign currency and loans.
We are killing you, but it's really your fault for making us kill you.
"Its irresponsible economic policies will only worsen inflation, unemployment, growing food shortages, and poverty," he said, adding that more than four million Zimbabweans were projected to go hungry.
Is this the same country, whose foreign debt is owned by the communist Chinese, whose leader lied his country into a war which has cost the people of Iraq hundreds of thousands of it's citizens lifes, and whose leader should be behind bars, if not hanged as a war criminal? As were the Nazi war criminals after world war two, for the very same offense of illegally invading Poland? Interestingly, the Polish invasion was considered the original crime, which enabled all the horrors that followed from it. What horror have flowed from the invasion of Iraq?
Is this from the country that gave us Abu Graib and 'rendition' to secret CIA prisons?
Is this from the government which has chosen to break every law known to man, and boast about it?
Are these not the people who are responsible for untold millions of deaths in Africa, South and Central America and Asia, when they were last in power under Richard Nixon. The people who came up with the "Domino Theory", secret prisons and rendition in Chile and Argentina? Of the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, which led to the deaths of at least 44,000 Vietnamese, mostly innocent villagers? Who started a war which killed an estimated 2,000,000 Vietnamese?
Apparently so.
One of his most outspoken domestic opponents, Bulawayo Archbishop Pius Ncube, has previously called on outside help to topple Mugabe but his image as head of the Catholic Church took a battering Tuesday when state media published pictures that appeared to show him in bed with a married woman.
Adultery isn't the worst of his sins - calling for foreign invasion and economic collapse would rank a lot higher in my book.
Still, this is what the people of Zimbabwe have to look forward to?
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