IN 2007 as inflation walloped the Zimbabwean currency, rendering it valueless, then 54-year-old Langton Musaigwa of Mataruse village west of Zimbabwe in Mberengwa district switched to cattle as his currency.
He wasn’t alone, scores of other villagers in his locality followed suit. In no time, cattle became a new currency as the Zimbabwean dollar went down the drain, pounded by inflation. “We had no choice.
It appeared cattle was the only money we could stare at and not the real Zimbabwean bank notes, which were now losing value every day as prices skyrocketed,” Musaigwa said.
Many villagers like Musaigwa, pummelled by inflation then, found the panacea in their livestock like cattle. The cattle, said Musaigwa, could be traded by villagers for any valuable goods or services. One such villager whose life was saved by her cattle is 67-year-old Neliswa Mupepeti hailing from the same village as Musaigwa.
“I fell sick very seriously and was no longer able to walk on my own. I had to use one of my cows to pay a local school headmaster to transport me using his car to Zvishavane to get medical treatment in 2008,” Mupepeti said.
Then, Zimbabwe’s inflation peaked at 231 percent. Zvishavane is a Zimbabwean mining town located in the country’s Midlands Province, south of the country. Fourteen years later, inflation has resurfaced in the southern African country, and cattle have again turned into a currency as people evade local currency.
But from 2009 to 2013, during the country’s unity government that followed the disputed 2008 elections, Zimbabwe enjoyed some currency stability because authorities allowed the use of the US$ and many other regional currencies.
Many Mberengwa villagers, like Musaigwa and Mupepeti, had been visited by inflation before, and they know the survival tricks. “We have just had to return to using cattle as our money. I can tell you I have recently managed to buy a cart and a bicycle using just one cow here because villagers can’t accept the local currency.
Many don’t have the popular US$, and cattle have become the readily available currency,” said Musaigwa. Zimbabwe’s inflation currently stands at 257 percent, according to the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, with the local currency falling against international currencies like the US$. As cattle turn into currency, just a single cow in Zimbabwe ordinarily costs about US$400.
In order to store the value of their worth, many Zimbabweans who can at least access US$, like Mwenezi district’s 67-year-old Tinago Muchahwikwa, whose children working abroad send him money for personal upkeep, have had to buy more cattle.
“Money, either US$ or any other currency — tends to lose value at any time, but cattle, for as long as they are well-fed and regularly treated for any diseases, remain with their value, and one can trade them off when a need arises,” Muchahwikwa said.
For Muchahwikwa, cattle are the currency he can trust rather than any money. Even for 40-year-old Admire Gumbo, a Zimbabwean based in Cape Town in South Africa, investment in cattle has become the way to go back to his village home in Mwenezi as Zimbabwe contends with an inflation-ravaged currency.
“Back home, the money I send is buying cattle because when I settle back home, I don’t want to suffer. As my herd of cattle increases, that also means the increase of my own worth in terms of money,” Gumbo said.
A worker at a grape farm in Cape Town, Gumbo bragged about owning a herd of 15 cows that he had bought back home. As many like Gumbo surmount inflation in Zimbabwe using cattle, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), has been on record saying livestock accounts for 35 percent to 38 percent of this Southern African country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Faced with a collapsing Zimbabwean dollar, cattle seem to have become a more stable currency than the local currency for many, like Gumbo.
“I have made sure my mother buys cattle for me and not keep the money when I send cash to her because of the risks faced by the local currency back home, which has kept losing value, meaning even if one changes money from rand to Zimbabwean dollars, it won’t make any sense as the manipulated exchange rate there would still mean one remains with nothing meaningful,” said Gumbo. — IPS
