The Zimbabwean dollar has plunged to a new low: One US dollar now costs 25 million Zimbabwean dollars.  Only four months ago, US$1 was equivalent to Z$1 million.  The inflation rate has topped a mind-boggling 100,000 per cent.

Going out for a few groceries

The cash needed to buy groceries weighs more than the goods purchased.  Stores have taken to weighing bundles of bank notes rather than counting them out.  Forty pounds of Zimbabwean currency is worth about US$100.  Also, credit cards and cheques are no longer accepted because, by the time transactions clear the bank, price increases have more than wiped out sellers' profits.

The madcap economic policies of Robert Mugabe’s government are largely responsible for the mess.

On Monday, the government made it illegal for Zimbabweans to own more than 500million dollars (£10) to stop the hoarding which it claims is fuelling inflation.

Strict government price controls to combat the hyper inflation mean it is uneconomic for traders to produce local goods and food, so they don't bother.

That means expensive imports fill the gap, but they are out of the reach of ordinary Zimbabweans who rely on the black market.

Mugabe contends that businesses want to raise prices in hopes making him unpopular so he will lose the election scheduled for later this month.  It’s all about him!

"They keep raising and raising prices, and we wonder whether they want to raise the prices until the prices reach heaven," Mugabe told thousands of villagers at a campaign rally in Mahusekwa, about 70 kilometres (about 43 miles) south-east of the capital Harare.

"Some are doing it for the elections saying: 'Let's make life hard for the people so that they cry and blame it all on Mugabe's government.

Meanwhile, the government is bringing in freshly minted Zimbabwean currency by the planeload.

Documents obtained by The Sunday Times show the Munich company Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) is receiving more than €500,000 (£382,000) a week for delivering bank notes at the astonishing rate of Z$170 trillion a week.

“The regime is surviving by printing money,” said Martin Rupiya, professor of war and security studies at the University of Zimbabwe. “At this stage there is no other way.”

According to a source at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, G&D delivers 432,000 sheets of banknotes every week to Fidelity printers in Harare, where they are stamped with the denomination. Each sheet contains 40 notes and the current production is entirely in Z$10m notes.

Simon Makoni, Mugabe’s former finance minister, is running against him, but the chances of a free and fair election are somewhere between slim and none.

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