FYI:
This week on African Voices, Zimbabwean Finance Minister and human rights activist, Tendai Biti. http://edition.cnn.com/CNNI/Programs/africanvoices/
Tendai Biti, is a tough-talking, football-loving Zimbabwean politician, who rose to prominence as one of the public faces of the opposition party – the Movement for Democratic Change. Tendai Biti trained as a lawyer – and his fight against injustice has taken him out of the courtroom of Harare and onto the streets… and now into the hall of power.
A self-described revolutionary at heart, he spearheaded the negotiations for the opposition party the MDC – for a multi-party, power-sharing government. Over the past few years Biti has been harassed, jailed and beaten by President Robert Mugabe’s security forces. But despite still trying to deal with trauma of those experiences, he accepted the position of Finance Minister in the new powers-haring government between the opposition and Mugabe’s Zanu PF.
“We are going to turn Zimbabwe around, we just have to make the changes in stages.
Stage one is stabilization. We had inflation of 500 billion percent on the 30th of December 2008. We had unemployment of 95%. We had a total collapse and moribundness of the Zimbabwean dollar. Total collapse of our financial system.
“Today we are seeing buoyancy return to the system. We have adopted multiple currencies and since January 2009 we’ve brought inflation down from 500 billion percent to minus 2 percent. There is now food in the country, schools have opened, hospitals are functioning, people are now earning a salary. It’s US 100 dollars a month, which is nothing by international standards, but if you have been earning in real terms US 20 cents a month, it is something. So we are making things better.”
To hear more from this inspiring man tune into African Voices on CNN on Saturday at 13.30 and 20.30 CAT and on Sunday at 19.00 CAT.
http://edition.cnn.com/CNNI/Programs/africanvoices/
- Ali Merifield | Director Corporate Communications | africapractice