This must be the new Zimbabwe math. It would be impossible to fall more than 100% unless they were taking gold back rather than delivering it.

By the article's own numbers of 352 kg last year and 125 kg this year, gold deliveries only fell by 64.5%

Back to school! Oh that's right, they're all closed.

Where will Comrade Gono get the foreign capital to fund the ZANU-PF Congress?

If these figures are accurate, then Zimbabwe has certainly fallen off a cliff already.

If the nation produced 30,000 metric tones of gold in 1999, then the average monthly output was 2,500 metric tones. That's 2,500,000 kg per month compared to 125 kg for October this year. That means that in the nine years since Robert Mugabe decided to wreck the economy, gold production has actually fallen by 99.995%.

Wasn't gold mining supposed to account for 40% of all export earnings this year?

125 kg is equal to 4,409.2452 ounces. Today's price in NY was about $740US per ounce. That means that the entire industry only earned $3,262,841.45 for the month of October, down from $25,573,622,450.00 per month (or $306,883,469,400US annually) in 1999 at an average price of $290US per ounce.

Where did it all go to?

No wonder there's no money to feed the people; and no wonder Mugabe and those ZAINY-PF types are fighting so hard to protect their control of what's little is left.

If gold accounts for 40% of all export earnings, that means that the entire country will probably only earn about $100,000,000US in forex this year. That's probably 20% or 30% less then the NGOs spent last year. That means that he's being vastly outspent by the organizations actually trying to help the people.

No politician enjoys knowing that he is impotent, and Robert Mugabe most certainly is. The only way that he could increase his power over the population was to cut them off from any outside funding, as he did, and continues to do so.