Zimbabwe's economic miracle...

Robert Mugabe is a genius!

Robert Mugabe wakes up to his 84th birthday today with a damning present from Zimbabwe's government statisticians - official inflation figures of more than 100,000 per cent.

With Harare's shop shelves bare of basic commodities and prices rising daily, it is a wonder that inflation can be calculated at all, but the Central Statistical Office's work is a marvel of precision.

"The year-on-year inflation rate for the month of January 2008, as measured by the All-items Consumer Price Index, stood at 100,580.2 per cent," it said in a statement yesterday.

The figure is an increase of 34,367.9 percentage points over December's 66,212.3 per cent, it added.

Independent observers believe the true figures are even higher. A single cigarette now costs Z$500,000.