Zimbabwe: How NOT To Run an Economy

in this video I'm gonna be giving away 10 trillion dollars to a random subscriber Zimbabwe dollars baby we are not gay [Music] first let's look at modern Zimbabwe sitting in the rump of Africa Zimbabwe is made up of these borders and sitting at a population of about 15 million on this rather boring piece of land the nation does not produce a whole lot of anything how do they make their money then for two-thirds of the country They Don't Really they just Farm usually at the sustenance level that means they're self-sufficient right no nation is really

self-sufficient not even you so the rest of the nation can trade to make up that difference but wait Zimbabwe is a landlocked Nation they need to get through both South Africa and Mozambique through these rivers in order to ship their goods off that is unless they move it by train still needing to rely on these two countries plus Zambia or Botswana now and African borders are notorious for corruption and usually a little extra side caches given to the officer when Crossing meh just think of it as a tariff this all leads to Zimbabwe having one

of the lowest rates of trading per capita on Earth and as you'll see later they didn't keep great relations with any of their neighbors although if you included smuggling in their trade the answer would be a lot higher what could they possibly be smuggling marijuana meth heroin nah more like flour gold and just a dash of cocaine you might have heard it's because Zimbabwe is one of the largest gold producers on Earth I mean it makes up half of their exports of course they produce a ton of it but no the gold production is relatively

small with only about 30 tons produced a year that's about the weight of a humpback whale or a dead humpback whale because they don't have any oceans in Zimbabwe real great exports huh what they do have instead is platinum chromium and some lithium mining is Zimbabwe's big thing it's the whole reason it was colonized in the first place pretty much every other industry is too uncompetitive for Zimbabwe to fight even its neighbors in so the export things like gold diamonds nickel and some tobacco for good luck and import things like everything at least everything you

need for a modern country food energy chemicals Vehicles clothes Industrial Supplies I don't want to go on especially since they still barely import anything this low level of trade makes them so vulnerable to swings in the domestic Market which means if times are good they're pretty good and if times are bad they get they get worse than most other nations do they can't minimize any shocks with outside trade let's get to the blunders then first mistake these guys look how friendly they are just imagine being posted up with the boys in a foreign land only

one issue there are still these fellas living here in the ballet so by the 1880s there is an old African standoff this is basically how it went the British said I want this land then the Portuguese came in and said I want this land then the Bowers came to and said I want this land and the delay said what the hell this is my land so the British told the king they'd give him guns and money if they could mine on the land and after some thinking and debating he said ah you know what screw

it what's the worst that could happen except the British didn't actually own this land one guy named Cecil Rhodes did and they didn't believe in him God did because now all of this land is called Rhodesia and he's ruined with his divine right to take all the goals from his land the mining operations actually failed at first but they still set up some Farms to tax food Rhodesia was a couple of things it was segregated it was unequal and it got a little more racist than the average late night gaming talk the whites ruled the

economy ruled the country and Ruled the Land seizing it from the Native Africans forcing most of them to live on reserves only one problem though unlike these countries where the Brits came in such large numbers they dominated the country the Brits were the vast minority in Rhodesia about 50 000 around the 1930s compared to African numbers in the millions leading to a country where a tiny fraction owned most of the Farms mines businesses land and dollar bills if you want to act like a pretentious political scientist you could say Rhodesia was an exemplary case of

extractive political and Economic Institutions set about by an external Force for their ad interim growth or instead you could say the Brits took all the nabella's things to make some quick cash whether from heavy taxes placed on Native production HUD taxes on every house or marketing boards set up who usually took a little bonus for their hard work Rhodesia was more unequal than a Nike Sweatshop in Bangladesh and as World War II started causing hundreds of thousands of natives to move to the cities for fancy new manufacturing jobs tensions only Rose between the two groups

the 1950s and 60s saw a rise of militant anti-government groups like The zappu and the NDP this NDP not the Canadian one as the groups grew and people kept urbanizing their open Coast to get rid of the Rhodesian system and when Yasha I mean nyasa land declared independence in the 60s and then Northern Rhodesia did two both under African rule the South wanted to join the party and declared independence from the UK in 1965 instead under a white minority rule it was inevitable the British Empire was seriously declining and the UK was distancing itself from

them but right after Boom the Rhodesian Bush were started and lasted for 15 years no not that kind of bush War it was the rhodesians versus the zimbabweans AKA whites versus blacks it obviously caused destruction countless deaths and embargo so when the war was over one by the zanu PF party the new Zimbabwe was one of the most broken places on Earth luckily there was one man who promised to fix Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe Mugabe the leader of zanu PF just kidding guys this man had no intention of making Zimbabwe a better place right after taking

over he killed about 20 000 political opponents and he got rid of the Rhodesian Senate he was just a tiny bit corrupt you know setting up Sandy PF allies to control newly made state-run Industries taking over marketing boards and heavily regulating traits so you had to buy from his party one could comb a businessman doing business but many others prefer the term crook instead of trying to get rid of these devastating ideas he wanted to be the man running them so obviously the old British colonists ran the hell away from this new country taking much

of the money and educated population with them some State they still had Farms mines and childhood memories here after all plus any type of foreign investment that wanted to come back to Zimbabwe was shoot away zainu PF wanted to fix the nation all by itself so any independent Zimbabwean businessmen trying to start up a shop selling I don't know uh plastic Lids couldn't from the heavy subsidies given to xano PF lead Industries high cost from the lack of imports and repression for genuine fear of zenu PF power being questioned by the 1990s this economic system

failed though after the Soviets collapsed it wasn't really cool to have a command-based economy anymore so they accepted loans from these guys to start a journey to the free market no said the zanu PF supporters who are the ones controlling all the state-led industries and getting a pretty nice paycheck for their work so they protested and unrest continued throughout the 1990s during that whole time there was an idea a break in case of emergency type idea what if he took all the land from the white farmers and gave it to Black Farmers nah that's too

crazy and the debate died down until 1998 in Zimbabwe went to fight in the second Congo War mainly to protect mugabe's investments in the country turns out that was an incredibly unpopular move and countries cut their aid to Zimbabwe they cut trade they cut political ties and most importantly their old Pals South Africa did all of this too they are a pariah on the world stage and it led to de-industrialization rise over Rising food prices War veterans demanding land and defaulting other loans in 2000. the 2000 election Zimbabwe was one full of violence fraud and

likely the most important in its history zenu PF won by only a slight margin With a Little Help from some certain gunmen so why not gain some popularity and maybe try that idea out by 2000 the government started seizing white-owned land to give to the War veterans but let's be honest to zanu PF Elites 2 over 3 000 of them in total and I think this graph shows the state of the economy best before 2000 growing somewhat stable after two thousand it really took a nosedive imagine you lived your whole life in the city and

then I grabbed you and threw you on this piece of land and said Farm Boy what would you even do my guess is you'd be a pretty lousy farmer and yeah with the lack of training and dismantling white equipment and businesses these new Farmers destroyed agriculture in Zimbabwe Food Supplies halved down 45 percent in the use that followed and they couldn't just import the rest cuz say it together everybody hates Zimbabwe remember this is a country that already lost its trade and Manufacturing all they had left was farming and that was collapsing now too it's

kind of like when Kanye lost his family all he had left was Adidas and then he became a Nazi and he lost Adidas too just replaced this interview with seizing white farms and that's the story of Zimbabwe businesses completely stopped investing in Zimbabwe when they realized the government could just snatch their investment from them and shut it down well imagine this with farms and factories instead and the US and EU put massive sanctions on Zimbabwe with one of the goals seriously being to make the people revolt and overthrow the Xander PF government food became unaffordable

there is violence and riots in the streets and the government ran out of money the only way to pay the elites and Veterans was to no don't look at that Zimbabwe you can do better production diamonds drug smuggling taxes I don't care anything but that oh but it's so tempting maybe just a little bit could do some good cause Swoosh the government became addicted to printing money at Peak printing in late 2008 inflation was around 80 billion percent monthly and 96 tillion percent yearly but honestly they stopped measuring it was so high that everyone was

just honestly making these stats up they printed so much money that the paper was printed on was way more valuable than the dollar itself leading to things like the 10 trillion dollar bill and the hyperinflation wiped out everybody's savings destroyed any businesses savings and obliterated the government's savings the black market was the only realistic way to buy food goods and to find any work with some bread reaching 20 billion dollars in the non-black market after the banks collapsed they had to switch to other currencies like the South African Rand and US dollar for any sort

of stability and if you think they learned from their mistakes wrong in 2013 these land-grabbing laws were extended to some white-owned businesses you can imagine how that went today less than 300 farms in Zimbabwe have been given back to White farmer members and in 2019 they brought back the Zimbabwean dollar this time only reaching 350 inflation in 2021 so hey kudos to them for improving food security is uncertain life expectancy is low and it's still very politically repressive not the best for running a country but whether it's Brits taking African land or zimbabweans taking white

owned land what I can say is they knew a thing or two about how to run an economy of course they knew how to run an economy which of the country has had as many trillionaires as Zimbabwe has none