Disheartened Zimbabwean businesspeople in the city of Mutare, some 270km east of Harare, on Monday described their prospects as “dim” as petrol price protests hit the country.
Traders and business owners told Times Select they would join the national stayaway called by a labour union, which led to clashes in Harare and Bulawayo two days after the devastating announcement that made Zimbabwe’s fuel the priciest in the world.
“Our business is no longer viable. This is the end for us. If we go at this rate for the next three months, most traders here will close shop. We have tried our best to look for ways to sustain ourselves, but we have run out of ideas,” said Lameck Simango, who operates a secondhand-clothes shop at the Sakubva flea market.
“We have no choice but to join the stayaway. Maybe that’s the only way the president [Emmerson Mnangagwa] can listen to our concerns.”
President Emmerson Mnangagwa hiked the petrol price by 150%. It went up from $1.38 a litre to $3.11 a litre for diesel and from $1.43 to $3.31 a litre for petrol. This is about R45 a litre in rands.
Mnangagwa’s decision to make Zimbabwe’s petrol the most expensive in the world was aimed at boosting fuel supply that has been curbed by foreign-exchange shortages, Bloomberg reported. The lack of dollars has caused food shortages and made imports difficult. Zimbabwe abandoned its own currency in 2009. A decade ago, it battled hyperinflation of about 500 billion percent.
Trader Daniel Mareya said Mnangagwa, who succeeded Robert Mugabe after the long-time ruler was ousted in 2017, did not seem capable of fixing the country’s economic woes. “We thought that Mnangagwa was going to fix the problems, but following his surprise fuel-price increment, things have gone from bad to worse. The black market rate has jumped from $280 to around $600 and $1,000 bond notes per every US$100. This has instantly killed our business because we cannot afford to increase prices because no one is buying,” said Mareya...