Female Inmates Bar Murderers Freed in Zimbabwe to Cut Costs
- Males under 18 pardoned regardless of crimes committed
- Males over 60 who served two-thirds of sentence to be released
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Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe granted amnesty to all female prisoners barring those on death row and serving life sentences as his government struggles to meet the costs of running a country where the economy has halved in size since 2000.
Government salaries consume 83 percent of revenue, according to Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa, while both the government and the private sector battle to meet monthly wage bills. Exports have collapsed because of a failed land-reform program, leading to widespread shortages of cash in a nation that abandoned its own currency in favor of the U.S. dollar and other international currencies in 2009.