WITH his torn shirt and tattered trousers held up by a piece of string, Barons Chikamba is an unlikely millionaire.

His life is a daily struggle despite the seemingly astronomical prices that he charges for even a short hop in the battered car that he uses to ferry visitors around Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.

Even his lowest fare is more than a million Zimbabwean dollars. It may sound a lot, but in a country where even the official rate of inflation is nearly 1,000 per cent — by far the highest for a country not at war — it is really less than £6.

Visitors arriving at Harare’s smart, modernistic airport quickly become millionaires simply by changing $10 at the official rate of Z$101,000 (55p) to the US dollar. The black market rate is roughly double that. “Yes, I am a millionaire — a millionaire who can afford nothing at all,” Mr Chikamba says. “Zimbabweans are all millionaires today.

We are a country of millionaires, but it goes nowhere and no one has anything.”

Mr Chikamba chuckles at the thought, but for him and millions like him, Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation is no joke. Last week the basket of essential basics that an average lowincome family needs for survival rocketed to Z$41 million a month in a country where more than 60 per cent of the workforce is jobless and others earn as little as Z$4 million a month.

With the highest denomination banknote, Z$50,000, it can take almost as long as a taxi journey itself to pay the fare.

That is nothing, however, compared with eating out. A takeaway chicken and chips cost The Times Z$1.8 million last week. A curry with friends at a down-market Indian restaurant came to Z$13.6 million.

When restaurant bills arrive, people sit like Las Vegas high-rollers with great stacks of money in the middle of the table. “You have to add on another half hour to allow for the restaurant to count the money,” an Indian businessman said. “I went to pay some local taxes the other day and it took over an hour for them to count out the Z$41 million I owed. It’s crazy.”

That explains why some of the hottest commodities in Zimbabwe today are money-counting machines. State-run newspapers are full of advertisements for heavy-duty banknote counters made in Japan or Singapore. They range in price from Z$345 million to Z$1.2 billion. One businessman said that he had stopped using a calculator because it simply could not deal with the number of zeros, and had reverted to using an old slide rule.

Zimbabwe’s smallest denomination banknote is Z$500. That is a fraction of the price of a roll of lavatory paper at Z$150,000, leading to inevitable jokes about how to express one’s point of view of Robert Mugabe’s regime.

Supermarkets post new prices daily. Items such as bags of sugar or rice have layers of price tags stuck one on top of another. Peel them back and it is possible to trace the increases, which can be as high as

80 per cent in a week. People stand in shops with two bags, one full of money, one with a handful of food. At one of the favourite watering holes for the dwindling number of expats, a white man walked in and slammed a brick on the table. He had just bought 15 of them for some repair work at a cost of Z$300,000. “The bloody house only cost me Z$200,000 in 1990 — and it has a swimming pool and tennis court,” he shouted.

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