Transcript from Minnesota Public Radio, July 3

Show: MarketPlace

David Brancaccio, anchor:

This is Marketplace. I'm David Brancaccio.

We've seen some pretty steep price increases for gasoline in the US during the past year. But in Zimbabwe in Southern Africa, price hikes imposed by the government three weeks ago have sent gas costs soaring 70 percent, and residents there say it is inflating prices of basic food supplies like bread and sugar. Today shops, banks, post offices and factories shut down in Harare, Zimbabwe's largest city, as workers there joined a two-day national strike to protest the spiralling prices. Amy Costello reports on how families there are struggling to make ends meet.

Amy Costello reporting: For a major grocery store in the middle of Harare, it's pretty quiet. As you walk through the aisles, you don't see customers filling shopping carts. Most are like Helen. She has her arms linked through a small basket. In it, there's a loaf of bread, cooking oil and some eggs. Compared to most of the shoppers here, her basket looks full.

Helen (Harare Resident): It's very, very difficult.

Costello: Mm-hmm.

Helen: This is too much.

Costello: Helen is complaining about the margarine she wants to buy. It's gone up about 20 Zimbabwe dollars. That's a 20 percent increase from last week. And her bread...

Helen: It was 25. It's now 30, 31, 33.

Costello: It's the same story everywhere in Zimbabwe. Inflation is running at 70 percent. Every day rising prices are forcing more Zimbabweans into utter destitution. Just to get a bus ride into Harare, residents are forking over almost twice as much as they did last month. More and more, people are getting up before sunrise and walking to work instead. Brian Raftopolous is with the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies. He says urban workers now spend 60 percent to 70 percent of their wages on transportation costs alone. After paying rent and school fees for their children, there's not much money left over for food.

Mr. Brian Raftopolous: There's a lack of predictability about life in Zimbabwe. It's very difficult to plan even from day to day how your family will survive. So there's a real sense that the economy is failing very quickly. And the real danger is that there is seemingly no plan from the government about what it's going to do about this.

Costello: And so people are quickly finding their own ways to survive. You can see their efforts along any major road leading out of Harare. Where trees grew just six months ago there are now stumps. James is one of many selling bundles of wood along the roadside. Some days he makes nothing, on a good day he takes in a little over $1. He's old and stooped over, but he keeps coming out every day because he's hungry.

James: That's why I'm cutting wood, to buy something to eat. I haven't got any - something to eat, I'm not working.

Costello: It's estimated that 60 percent of the country's work force is unemployed. A few months from now, those Zimbabweans who can still afford to buy food may find that there isn't any around. Commercial farmers have cut back their maize production by 48 percent this year, according to Vanessa McKay of the Commercial Farmers Union.

Ms. Vanessa McKay: We were known during the '80s to be the food basket of southern Central Africa. In the past five years, you could say Zimbabwe has become an importer. Because of poor government policies, there's been no incentive for the growers to produce maize.

Costello: That may mean shortages in coming months. Maize is the staple food of Zimbabwe, but many commercial farmers have decided that they just can't risk putting their money and resources into the soil anymore. Two thousand farms have been seized in the name of land redistribution so far, and many farmers fear their property will be next. President Robert Mugabe has supported the violent land seizures carried out by a militant group of presidential loyalists, or so-called war veterans. As the economy goes south and Mugabe's popularity tanks, the president has lashed out with more violence against the electorate, who he says have betrayed him. Again, Brian Raftopolous.

Mr. Raftopolous: The use of violence and force as a political weapon has reached a peak in Zimbabwe in my view, as a kind of diminishing returns on the use of violence now because the anger is so widespread and the increase in the national opposition movement that is continually getting stronger now.

Costello; In Harare, it's difficult to find anyone on the street who says they support the president. They're planning to cast their vote for the opposition, called the Movement for Democratic Change. The MDC is also making inroads into the rural areas, once Mugabe's stronghold. The international community has also come out against the president. Tourism is basically non-existent, exports are down, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have cut Zimbabwe off. Presidential elections are set for early next year, right around the time that the food shortages are expected to hit. Solomon Nkiwane is a professor at the University of Zimbabwe.

Professor Solomon Nkiwane: Hungry people are very, very angry people, especially if they know that this hunger has been due to political manipulations by the government. And come the presidential elections early next year, you can rest assured the hungry people of Zimbabwe are going to vote the present government out.

Here is a man who just a year ago was as powerful as their own president, and even more feared. If he could be deposed and called to account for his crimes then Mr Mugabe's days must be numbered, they argue.

But ask them how that might come about and you may be left with the impression that it has nothing to do with them.

The Movement for Democratic Change, which a year ago predicted the Zimbabwe president's imminent demise after it won almost half the vote in parliamentary elections, now says it is waiting for "the people" to lead the way.

But those of the people who want rid of Mr Mugabe, appear increasingly frustrated and bewildered at the lack of a strategy to unseat the ruler of more than two decades.

It is not as if there is a shortage of reasons to confront the government. Prices are spiralling, the economy is contracting and jobs are disappearing even faster than the emigrants are leaving.

The government has almost no foreign currency, even for essential imports, and a food crisis looms, thanks to the disruption caused by the occupation of white-owned farms by the "war veterans".

The finance minister, Simba Makoni, this week said the government has begun asking for foreign food aid. "I hope, notwithstanding factors influencing our relations with international donors, where human lives are affected we can find common cause," he pleaded.

The UN food agency says the land seizures will leave Zimbabwe short of 600,000 tonnes of wheat and maize in the next six months. Yet the opposition is less certain how to confront Mr Mugabe than ever.

It has abandoned any immediate prospect of calling street protests for fear of bloodshed after the military and security police warned that any demonstrations would lead to a bloody crackdown, a state of emergency and the detention of opposition leaders.

Instead, the MDC hopes to ride a wave of spontaneous public revolt. But if, when and how that will come is unclear.

Food shortages would probably galvanise public anger into action, as would a complete collapse of the economy. And then there is the presi dential election, due within the year, which Mr Mugabe may well have a hard time winning without fraud or massive intimidation.

This week's two-day general strike was indicative of just how far Mr Mugabe has outmanoeuvred his opponents.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions (ZCTU) ostensibly called the strike in protest at a 70% rise in the petrol price, but there was little doubt that the strike was a protest against all the shortcomings of Mr Mugabe's rule.

The MDC was notable by its absence from any involvement in the strike - even to the extent of failing to endorse it. That was mainly out of fear. And the ZCTU called on everyone to stay at home, so limiting the impact of protest.

The strike was successful in shutting down the major cities, particularly Harare, where about three-quarters of businesses were closed.

The official press claimed that people turned up for work but were locked out by white employers. That may prove to be another pretext for violent attacks on businesses that fail to support Mr Mugabe.

But the strike achieved very little, other than to register a passive protest against the government. It offered no real challenge to the administration's authority, or pressure on it to change its policies. It merely reminded Mr Mugabe of what he already knows: he is not popular in the cities.

The ZCTU yesterday said it would give the government a last chance to reverse the petrol price rise or it would call a "final onslaught": an indefinite general strike.

But for now, the only persistent challenge to the government is from the opposition press. The Daily News, which was bombed earlier this year, is serialising George Orwell's Animal Farm. The analogy works on several levels.

As a former cabinet minister, Eddison Zvobgo, put it last year, a once glorious revolution has been reduced "to some agrarian racist enterprise".

The more principled members of the government have been sidelined in favour of the sinister servants of Zimbabwe's Napoleon - principally the late war veterans' leader, Chenjerai Hunzvi, and the information minister, Jonathan Moyo.

Animal Farm is also close to the reality on the white-owned land occupied by the "war veterans". Farm workers were promised a better life and their own land, but have often found that they have less to eat and more violent masters.