A Romanian in Africa

Africa in 30 Seconds

• This blog, now reconfigured as a personal blog, instead of a portal on current political affairs across the African continent, which has been moved to www.african-politics.com will soon be updated  on a daily basis. Next Monday evening I shall write my first post from one of my favorite African cities: Nairobi. For almost eight weeks I will be updating both websites from Africa. Starting point - Nairobi, Kenya. I will continue my journey through Africa by traveling to Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (only Goma, this time), Burundi, Tanzania and hopefully Zambia if I don’t run out of time. I will spend a considerable amount of time in Dar es Salaam. So stay tuned on both websites for more first-hand stories.

• I’ve started blogging just because I felt I need to order my thoughts before writing by BA in political science focusing on the impact of Chinese Investment on African countries. After 25 days of active blogging the results of this project are more than encouraging. This portal has received a total of 4839 unique visitors from exactly 100 countries, the two visitors from Jamaica who came yesterday on the blog scoring the 100th country added to Google Analytics. I am also extremely happy to see that most visitors read much more than one article, the average being 6 pages per visitor (a total of 29621 page views). I am also extremely pleased to see that 580 of you have returned to my blog more than 20 times. 106 people are subscribed to my Read Feed. For all of that I am extremely grateful. I also want to use this short message to announce you that starting the 10th of August I will be in East Africa for almost eight weeks. So I will be able to provide you with more first-hand news, not only op-eds on political affairs in Africa. Thanks again for visiting my blog and please return here as soon as you can. I assure you I’ll make it worth it.

  Codrin Arsene

• I have added a new section on the portal under Current African Affairs, called Book Reviews. This section is my way of replying to the Africa Reading Challenge launched by another blogger. Also, I moved the section called Weekly Op-Ed under Current African Affairs as well since this is the least updated section on the website. For those who are subscribed to my RSS feed, it won’t make a difference anyway.

• In a quest to ease the cash shortages that have become the most common of problems in Zimbabwe, the National Central Bank has introduced a $100 billion banknote, which is the equivalent of one dollar. The new banknote can only buy a bottle of milk or other products on that level. The bank started publishing large banknotes last December when they scored the then record of $250,000. In January the bank printed banknotes of $1, $5 and $10 million and in May it issued bills of $25million, $50 million, $25 billion and $50 billion. Since 2003, Zimbabwe has not had formal currency. Instead, people have been using bearer checks whose nominal value is expected to keep increasing every six months. Three years ago, when I last visited Zimbabwe, the official currency rate was US$1 dollar = Zim $25,000.

• Via BBC.co.uk I find that I’m finally….right. Since the beginning of last month I’ve been predicting that inflation in Zimbabwe has surged to more than 2,000,000% based on the reports I was getting from Zimbabwe. Now BBC confirms it: inflation in Zimbabwe has reached 2,200.000%, according to the official data released by the Zimbabwean government Few people, mainly Zimbabweans can still remember how beautiful and safe their lives were thirty years ago when the Zimbabwean dollars was worth just a little more than one US dollar. Times have changed, and now instead of paying 24 Zimbabwean dollars for one bread, as they used to do four years ago, Zimbabweans now have to use two 500 million bills to buy the same bread.