Al Jazeera:

"Last week when we paid civil servants there was $217 (left) in government coffers," Biti told journalists in the capital Harare on Tuesday, claiming some of the workers had healthier bank balances than the state [of Zimbabwe].

"The government finances are in paralysis state at the present moment. We are failing to meet our targets."

Zimbabwe's economy plummeted at the turn of the millennium, after President Robert Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms.

Yes, this is what happens when you have a large rural population that doesn't know jack. Mugabe's voters were not in the cities but in the rural areas. And those farms he so heroically reclaimed for the blacks were not owned by the whites; they were owned by the banks, and the banks were owned by the blacks. You could not remove the whites without creating a deep banking crisis. The banks depended on the payments white farmers made on their loans. If you took their farms, you also had to take their debts. This did not happen, and so Zimbabwe is where it is.