A company with links to a U.S. government contractor is enabling Robert Mugabe's despotic rule in Zimbabwe by printing bank notes. In the past month, these increasingly worthless notes have been used to bribe officials in the public sector, army, and other public-security services to curry votes for the Mugabe regime.
In the weeks prior to the March 29 election, with Zimbabwe’s economy collapsing and inflation already running at 100,000 percent, a German company called Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) ran
its printing presses at maximum capacity, delivering 432,000 sheets of banknotes to Mugabe’s government each week. The money, equivalent to nearly Z$173 trillion (U.S. $32 million), was then dispersed among targeted voters.
Despite the Mugabe regime’s efforts — illegal as well legal — independent observers say the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won the election. But the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has not released the results. The MDC is fearful that Mugabe is maneuvering to steal a potential run-off contest between the top two candidates (which Zimbabwean law requires within 21 days of the original election if no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote in the first round), or may be tampering with the original vote to fabricate a majority that will ensure his victory. In the meantime, his security services have banned rallies, beaten up MDC politicians, briefly arrested two foreign journalists, and forbidden any EU or U.S. election observers.
Mugabe has also used currency printed by G&D to pay thugs to squat on some of the few white-owned farms remaining in the country. According to one local I spoke with, Mugabe wants “to continue the myth that Northerners are only interested in Zimbabwe because white farmers are being harmed.” As if to demonstrate the point, at the same time that regional leaders met in Zambia to discuss the crisis, a column in the Herald, Zimbabwe’s state-run newspaper, decried the idea that “African leaders are supposed to do the bidding of the white West. . . . to pressure Zimbabwe to abet the regime change agenda.”
G&D has directly contributed to a meltdown. According to the Sunday Times of London, the company is receiving more than $750,000 a week from the Mugabe regime “for delivering notes at the astonishing rate of Z$170 trillion a week.” Inflation caused by this reckless currency printing has destroyed once-sustainable food markets and stymied business investment, and has contributed to thousands of deaths a week from malnutrition and disease. The black market value of the Zimbabwe dollar has dropped by 70 percent against the U.S. dollar since the mass printing of bank notes began recently (official exchange rates are now irrelevant).
The international community would just like the issue to disappear. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken a rhetorically strong stance against the Mugabe regime, and has supported EU travel and banking sanctions against its cronies. But her government says that G&D’s involvement in Zimbabwe is a private matter.
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