It seems like Zimbabwe is rapidly going to hell in a handbasket.
Last week the government was begging retired nurses (most of them older than 60) to re-enter their former field because of a dire shortage in healthcare workers:
Zimbabwe will rehire retired nurses to help ease a critical staff shortage in public hospitals caused in part by the exodus of health care workers to Europe and Australia, the health minister said on Thursday.
Zimbabwe’s public hospitals have a shortage of about 3 000 nurses. With an estimated unemployment rate of more than 70 percent, the majority of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people rely on public health care, which is considerably cheaper than private facilities.
Read that again – unemployment is at 70%.
And the same article says that 24.6% of the country’s adult population is infected with HIV – that is 1 in 4.
Meanwhile the Zim government owes the IMF more than $300 million and has no way to repay it as the country is running out of money. If they default on their loan, they could be expelled, meaning they won’t be eligible for future aid.
Because of this, the Zim government has asked the South African government for a massive loan just to buy fuel, food and seed.
The good news is that the South African government might finally use this loan as leverage to get the Zim gov’t to stop their mass expulsion and shantytown destruction program. And later this week the United Nations Security Council may pass a resolution condeming the same.
But the state-controlled Sunday Mail says that university students are next in line for a crackdown:
Harare University students could be the next victims of Zimbabwe’s controversial clean-up campaign, the state-controlled Sunday Mail newspaper has reported.
A shortage of accommodation at the country’s top higher education institution, the University of Zimbabwe, has led many students to rent rooms and cottages in the nearby suburb of Mount Pleasant.
But now police and officials have ordered residents of high-income suburbs like Mount Pleasant to demolish all illegal structures.
Meanwhile the inflation rate has gone up 19.9% in just one month alone, now officially at a staggering 164.3%:
In other words the average “bundle” of goods and services, normally purchased by households for domestic use, that used to cost $100 000 in June 2004 are now priced at $264 400.
Luckily the price of bread has risen “only” 54.9% this year.
And lastly, the dictator president Mugabe has ruled out any talks whatsoever with the opposition MDC party:
There is no way that Zanu-PF can have talks with the MDC unless the opposition party becomes nationalistic in outlook, President Mugabe said yesterday.
“The MDC is different from other opposition parties because this is a creature put in place by the British,” he told journalists.
Sadly this is how Mugabe gets away with everything – by blaming the British and Americans. But it’s not just the west trying to get Mugabe to engage with the domestic opposition:
During the just-ended African Union summit in Libya, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo launched a fresh bid to restart mediating talks between President Mugabe and MDC leader Mr Morgan Tsvangirai. But the Government indicated that its position on talks with the MDC had not changed and it would engage the opposition in Parliament.
Let’s all keep the ordinary, regular people of Zimbabweans in our thoughts because it’s going to be a long, cold winter there…
Pax
Thanks, Soj. Aren’t the U.N. and Amnesty also on the shanty tear-downs? I’ve gotten bulletins from them, but haven’t read them all.
How old is Mugabe? (Susan hopes he’s old and has an advanced case of syphilis.)
He’s quite old and yes the UN is on the case. As I said in the Diary, the UN should be doing something significant about it this week.
Mugabe was born in 1924 making him 81 years old. Click here to read all about the former freedom fighter.
Pax
You know, at the height of the War of Independence Ian Smith offered Mugabe a joint stroll, hand in hand, through the slums of Salisbury. Smith was confident that only he would come out alive.
Whether that was true or not, it would definetely be so now.
Which, 25 years after Independence, is kind of sad.
The whole story of Zimbabwe is very sad after the first couple of years of independence.
I very vividly recall waking on that March morning in 1980 to hear the radio news and current affairs programmes playing excerpts of the ceremony where the British flag was lowered, the new flag raised, and Mugabe sworn in as Prime Minister. It was one of those occasions, like when Nelson Mandela was sworn in as President of South Africa, that brought tears to the eyes of those outside southern Africa who had supported the liberation struggles.
Free at last (to borrow Mandela’s phrase)! So much hope, so much optimism, so much promise, and it was all so easily lost.
Quite so. I wrote about it here and here.
Thanks for pointing to those two diaries, Sirocco. Very informative. Don’t know why I missed them at the time.
Those numbers are simply mind-boggling.
You would be justified if you were to remove the first 3 words of your story.
At that time, there was still a bit of hope. Zimbabwe had been making timely payments on its debt, inflation was modest and there was a healthy tourist trade. There was still a free press, with quality internet versions of the country’s top journals, and a vibrant opposition party.
But in less than a decade, Robert Mugabe has driven Zimbabwe’s economy into the ground out of personal greed and inflated ego. Rather than stepping aside and letting a new generation take leadership from the revolutionary era elders as has happened in South Africa, Mugabe decided to arrest opposition leaders, rig elections, use land redistribution as a ploy to reward to friends and punish enemies, crack down on civil liberties, dabble in the Congolese War, and he’s ostracized Zimbabwe from the rest of the world.
Now I’m all for land reform as a part of any revolution. The white farmers could not have reasonably expected to stay on the prime land forever. However, Mugabe’s land ‘reform’ was nothing more than handing out deeds to family and cronies who let the fields go unproductive so that now Zimbabwe imports food and has a hunger crisis whereas it was once agriculturally self-sufficient.
If Mugabe was so concerned about the vestiges of colonialism, he could have started by renaming Victoria Falls.
Couple more from the Zimbabwe Standard [ZS]
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LACK of adequate financial resources seriously compromised the operation of Harare City Council last year, virtually reducing what was once the “Sunshine City” to a “fly and rodent city”, says the latest report by the local authority. ZS
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National Pastime :: Cricket
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THE GAMES MUST GO ON!
Zimbabwe crisis
USA WELCOME: Make Yourself Known @BooMan Tribune and add some cheers!
I have also written diaries both here and on Daily Kos about Zim. The explusions are a continuation of the anti-MDC program Mugabe had embarked upon in earnest just before the General Election. My Daily Kos diary at the time describes the background.
You will note that even before the elections which were described by independent observers as unfair, Mbeke had given them a clean bill of health. There are suggestions that Mbeke’s motives are not only concerned with avoiding further huge influxes of Zimbabwean refugees from a civil war. One possibility is that there were dark deeds done by SA and Zim soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo during “peacekeeping” operations and that Mugabe knows where the bodies are buried (perhaps literally as well as figuratively).
Mbeke is also very much a lame duck as he nears the end of his terms of office. He has recently had to sack his deputy for involvement in corruption and his new probably successor is a political rival.