Zimbabwe a shoppers' paradise for a select few

Mar 24, 2008, 18:54 GMT

Harare - Want to shop till you drop in shortage-riddled Zimbabwe? You can at a supermarket near President Robert Mugabe's retirement mansion.

The packed aisles of the Borrowdale Brooke Spar supermarket show none of the empty shelves most Zimbabweans have got used to in the months following last year's price blitz.

In this exclusive store set amid the rolling hills and huge mansions of the north of Harare, shoppers can choose from a selection of luxury goods unthinkable in the city's townships.

Luxury comes at a price though.

A jar of black olives costs 375 million Zimbabwe dollars this weekend, an entire monthly salary for a teacher. Mugabe promised teachers earlier this month that they would get huge salary hikes. But some teachers say they discovered last week that they had been paid just the same as last month: on average, around 370 million dollars.

There are tiger prawns for sale in this store, at more than one billion dollars a packet. That's the amount candidates for this Saturday's presidential election had to deposit when they were registering their applications to vote.

A chicken - rarely seen in shop freezers in Zimbabwe - costs 208 million dollars here. Reports say officers for the state Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) last month got paid just 10 million dollars per day.

The luxury doesn't end there. At an exclusive lingerie boutique in the same complex as Spar, shoppers can choose from Calvin Klein or Dolce and Gabbana designer underwear.

Not for wealthy shoppers the cheap Chinese clothes sold on city flea-markets or the second-hand goods smuggled into the country by the bale-full.

Borrowdale Brookes Western-style shopping experience is in stark contrast to a supermarket in Harare's central Sam Nujoma Street. Here, on Easter Monday, there's no chicken, no milk, no cooking oil, no cheese, no flour and - most worryingly - no sign of the staple maize-meal.

Borrowdale Brooke Spar franchise is reportedly owned by a top ruling ZANU-PF party official who appears not to have to worry about recent threats to jail those charging high prices.

It is in the same suburb as the blue-tiled mansion Mugabe and his wife Grace have been building, ostensibly as a retirement home for the 84-year-old president.

Mugabe evidently does not intend to retire just yet. He is standing in Saturday's polls against opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and independent candidate Simba Makoni, a former finance minister.

Analysts are warning that the dire state of the economy and the shortages of many basics could prove the longtime leader's nemesis in the polls. He has vowed the opposition will 'never ever' win and blames former colonial power Britain for the economic crisis.