Zimbabwe
I feel sorry for the people of Zimbabwe, they have an economic moron as the leader of their country.
I’m not going to comment about Mugabe’s human rights violations and whether they did or did not happen.
But from a simple leadership point of view, when you lead a country there are a few simple rules that i’m going to break down to the most basic level I can.
- You need to make stuff. The more stuff your country makes, the more you can sell and the more money the employees, land owners and the government can make. Take Australia for example, we grow heaps of stuff, and we dig heaps of stuff under the ground THEN we sell it to people. We are a bit silly in some respects in that we let overseas companies dig metals out of the ground, refine it and sell it back to us at a higher price BUT it’s better than nothing.
- Fighting for the rights of your people is cool but not when it grinds the country to a stop. It’s true the black people got a shitty deal with the white people came to Zimbabwe and ended up owning all the farms BUT you’ve now kicked off all the white famers and there is no one to run your farms. So now you can’t make stuff.
- Now when your not making stuff and you have bills to pay, the last thing you want to do is print more money. It’s been done before and it doesnt work. So in your case, printing 21 million Zimbabwe dollars to pay the International MOnetary Fund is a BAD idea because it then becomes worth nothing.
And hence Zimbabwe now has a record 1594% inflation
