Suddenly, people are starting to wake up to the disaster happening in Zimbabwe. Southern African leaders are gathering to find ways to address the issues. ZANU-PF, the main goon party of Zimbabwe is meeting to figure out what to do with President Mugabe, Kleptocrat-in-Chief, who is currently running his country into the toilet and keeping it there. The anti-imperialists are all up in arms about how the western imperialistic powers (read the United Kingdom) are against the anti-colonial strength of Zimbabwe. The African Union is debating what to do with Zimbabwe. A brief murmur was even heard in the United Nations, which was quickly squelched.

Everybody is talking about the bungled takeover of the white-owned farms, the destruction of shops and homes, the endemic corruption, the rapid emigration, the breaking of the skull of Morgan Tsvangirai and the arrests of the opposition party.

People are also mentioning the inflation rate (which is near 2000%) in passing. But at this moment, it's this inflation rate which is the biggest killer. If you work in the financial markets or are connected in any shape or form to economics and business, you will know about inflation. You will know how governments panic about inflation. There is an amazing amount of human brain power aimed at managing inflation. For the great majority of people, though, inflation is known as "price rises".

At this moment, I won't be exaggerating if I said that inflation makes more people excited than all the gods and religious leaders combined. Inflation, in a nutshell, is the constant reduction in the value of your money. A Dollar/Pound Sterling/Won/Rupee of today is worth more than a Pound tomorrow. A bit of inflation is good for a whole load of economic reasons, but this column tries to keep away from economics and sticks to politics and international relations.

As I mentioned, every government under the sun, irrespective of the political persuasion, worries about inflation and tries to control it.. If they lose control, they are dead. The price of basic things is so core to people's existence that if they are unable to feed/clothe/shelter themselves and are priced out, they will revolt. Look at what the USSR tried to do. They kept the price of bread and basics steady for decades on end, but ultimately fell foul of the laws of economics.

Even now, most of the USSR's successors are suffering badly from bad economies, because of their lack of inflation management skills. India, the biggest democracy in the world, is deathly scared of the price of onions and basic foods, as the populace harshly treats anybody who is in power during a time of price rises. The gasoline price inflation is a gigantic bug bear in the United States of America, with the price increases being one of the biggest political talking points. House price inflation is an equivalent debating point in the United Kingdom, and the long suffering phlegmatic Englishman was forced to do a very polite revolt when the fuel price escalator went beyond control.

But all these are small bits. These examples are for inflation which rises maximum between 2% and at the most 50% annually. Don't think that inflation going the other way is bad. Japan had a decade of deflationary behaviour. What it means is that a yen of today is actually worth less than a yen of tomorrow. Weird, no? What does it actually mean?

Well, because of frankly silly economic policies, demand collapsed. So to encourage demand, Japanese companies kept on reducing prices. On the other hand, if this is the case, you won't buy today preferring to wait till tomorrow, when you know that the price is going to be lower. This takes the entire economy into a tail-spin. To simulate demand, Japan had interest rates at near zero for years, but again, it is now showing signs of breaking out and inflation is coming back into positive territory. Another factoid to know is that in Switzerland interest rates turned negative once. So if you wanted to invest in Switzerland, you had to PAY! Go figure!

I am not talking about normal inflation or even deflation. I am talking about hyper-inflation, an economic condition which is terrible when it occurs. Hyper-inflation is a horrible animal, it rips apart the basic structure of a state and ruins it down to its core foundations. It breaks the relationship between a citizen and the state, the citizen and the state institutions. Again, I don't want to go too deep into the causes, but basically it's because of serious and disastrous economic mismanagement where absolute nincompoops are running the economic policy - total criminals, people who are basically mentally deficient and have gone beyond the pale.

If you print off too much paper money, then it gets devalued dramatically. How much devaluation? Well, I have used the word "gazillion" in these essays in jest, but consider two famous cases of hyper inflation in pre-war Germany, which issued a note worth 100,000,000,000,000 Marks or the Hungarian 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 Peng. By the time you count to the end of the zeros, you have run out of breath!

Give the chap his due, Robert Mugabe did reasonably well (with some exceptions like a tiny spot of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Matabeleland with the notorious Fifth Brigade) in the initial days in the 1980s and early 1990s. But ever since the white-owned farms issue bit him, he has turned into a strange creature. He has unceremoniously turfed out and cleaned out hundreds and thousands of shops and houses in urban areas. All material export industries have collapsed, except the export of people, as people started emigrating in a flood (estimated three million Zimbabweans have emigrated in the past few years, mostly into South Africa). Because of the wholesale destruction of the commercial farming industry and the utter and complete imbecilic treatment of the agricultural sector, most of the food needs to be imported into what was previously the bread basket of Africa.