Zimbabwe is mired in inflation of more than 40 million percent. Bank customers wait hours in line to withdraw money.

By CELIA W. DUGGER

HARARE, Zimbabwe - Zimbabwe is in the grip of one of the great hyperinflations in world history. The people of this once proud capital have been plunged into a struggle to get by.
Like countless Zimbabweans, Rose Moyo has calculated the price of goods by the number of days she had to spend in line at the bank to withdraw cash to buy them: a day for a bar of soap; another for a bag of salt; and four for a sack of cornmeal.
The maximum withdrawal allowed by the government rose on September 29, but with inflation surpassing what independent economists say is an almost unimaginable 40 million percent, Mrs. Moyo said the value of the new amount would quickly be a pittance, too.
“It’s survival of the fittest,” said Mrs. Moyo, 29, a hair braider who sells the greens she grows in her yard for a dime a bunch. “If you’re not fit, you will starve.”
Economists here and abroad say Zimbabwe’s economic collapse is gaining velocity, radiating instability into the heart of southern Africa. As the bankrupt government prints ever more money, inflation has gone wild, rising from 1,000 percent in 2006 to 12,000 percent in 2007 to a figure so high the government had to lop 10 zeros off the currency in August to keep the nation’s calculators from being overwhelmed. (Had it left the currency alone, $1 would now be worth about 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.)
In fact, Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation is probably among the worst of all time, said Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economics professor at Columbia University in New York .
Making matters worse, cash itself has become scarce. Business executives and diplomats say Zimbabwe’s central bank governor, Gideon Gono, desperate for foreign currency to stoke the governing party’s patronage machine, sends runners into the streets with suitcases of the nation’s currency to buy up American dollars and South African rand on the black market - drying up Zimbabwean dollars that would otherwise go to the banks.
Economists say the only thing that can halt the inflationary spiral is a political solution that takes control over the country’s economy out of the hands of Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old president, who still maintains a viselike hold on power after 28 years in office. Mr. Mugabe, who lives in splendor here in a mansion hidden behind high walls, and the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, signed a power- sharing agreement, but they are still negotiating the terms of the deal.
Basic public services are breaking down as tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, garbage collectors and janitors have simply stopped reporting to their jobs because their salaries no longer cover the cost of taking the bus to work.
Tendai Chikowore, president of the Zimbabwe Teachers Association, a teachers’ union, said a teacher’s monthly pay was not even enough to buy two bottles of cooking oil. “This is a collapse of the system, and it’s not only for teachers,” she said. “At the hospitals, there are no nurses, no drugs.”
Money sent home by millions of Zimbabweans who have fled abroad to escape political repression and economic deprivation continues to sustain many here. But the deteriorating conditions are creating pressures for a renewed exodus .
Among those thinking of leaving is Fortunate Nyabinde, whose salary of $3,600 Zimbabwean dollars a month does not even pay for four days of bus fare to her job at Parirenyatwa Hospital .
Yet, for now, she keeps going to work, wheeling a trolley of cornmeal porridge from ward to ward, mostly because she can eke out an extra 20 cents a day by selling basic necessities to patients that the hospital usually does not have in stock: toilet paper, toothpaste, soap. “If they come to the hospital without anything, they will have to buy from us,” she said.
Zimbabwe’s economic unraveling has accelerated since the chaotic, often violent invasions of thousands of white-owned farms by Mr. Mugabe’s supporters began in 2000 as part of a land reform effort. The big farms now produce less than a tenth of the corn they did in the 1990s, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported in June.
And in a country whose education system was once the pride of the continent, the schools that Mrs. Nyabin de’s two children attend are now empty of teachers. So she sends them to Stella Muponda, a teacher who quit her job last year, for a couple of hours of instruction a day. The money Mrs. Nyabinde pays her is now worth only about 40 cents, enough for a bread roll. “I only wish I could get a decent job,” Mrs. Muponda said.