Robert Mugabe is deploying heavy artillery to enforce his order to cut prices in half.  Armed police are searching stores and business premises for overpriced or "hoarded" products.

Over 1300 businessmen and women, including 33 senior company executives, have been arrested and charged.  The shop owners have been fined and released, but the executives remain in custody awaiting court appearances.

The price rollback was ordered as Zimbabwe's inflation rate continues into the stratosphere and economic production falls ever lower.

A major driving force behind Zimbabwe's hyperinflation has been the central bank's printing vast quantities of currency with reckless abandon.  In a surprising development, Gideon Gono, Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and a hitherto-dependable Mugabe partisan, has publicly disagreed with the president over price controls.

[I]n his first act of open defiance since his appointment more than four years ago, Gono opposed the campaign which has resulted in empty shop shelves across the country.

Gono is a fierce Mugabe loyalist and the president's personal banker. Up until the past week's rift, which has left the ageing Mugabe increasingly isolated, Gono was one of a few people in the country who still had direct access to the president and was touted by some as Mugabe's choice as heir apparent.

Gono last week warned Mugabe that the price war, which is politically motivated and aimed at wooing voters in next year's critical elections, will drive the final nail in the coffin of Zimbabwe's already crumbling economy.

If Mugabe fires Gono, whatever confidence Zimbabwe retains among foreign investors would be destroyed.

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