| Submit your comments on this article |
| Africa Subsaharan |
| Zimbabwe: Sinking into the Past |
| 2005-12-03 |
| In Chitungwiza, a dormitory town home to more than one million black Zimbabweans, a breeze is a curse. It shifts the rotting rubbish in front of the tiny houses. And it laces the air with the stench of human waste, which drifts in thin dark rivers in the streets. âWe are sitting on a time bomb,â Misheck Shoko, the Mayor of Chitungwiza, said as he gestured towards a concrete pipe spewing thick brown effluent into a stream outside the townâs main sewerage treatment plant. The stream feeds the Manyame Dam, which supplies the capital, Harare, with its water. âItâs a miracle there have not been more outbreaks of disease.â Across Zimbabwe the scene is the same: townships that were once models for Africa have become stinking health hazards. The big cities are not much better. Zimbabwe is fast sinking into the past. The meltdown of one of the continentâs best infrastructures has been years in the making, the result of underinvestment and mismanagement. But the speed of the decline over the past few months has been astonishing. It has been driven by a crippling shortage of foreign currency. Since the seizure of white-owned commercial farms began in earnest nearly six years ago, agricultural output â the mainstay of the economy â has dropped 80 per cent. Without dollars the Government cannot buy the £70,000 worth of parts it needs to fix the sewerage plant in Chitungwiza, where dozens of people have already contracted dysentery. It also cannot buy fuel. Service stations have not had petrol or diesel for months. Fuel can only be bought on the black market â at more than four times the official pump price. Air Zimbabwe cancelled all its flights for a day last week because of a lack of jet fuel. Only 15 of the countryâs 175 railway locomotives are in running order. The state-owned Zimbabwe United Passenger Company, which runs Harareâs bus services, is broke with debts of £410,000. Demand for bicycles has soared. At Zacks Cycles, opposite the railway station in downtown Harare, Yossi Tal, the manager, said that he had sold thousands of heavy, Chinese-made single-speed bicycles this year to companies such as British American Tobacco. âConsidering the situation here, itâs been a good year,â said Mr Tal, one of the few businessmen who can afford to smile. The IMF has refused credit unless urgent economic reform takes place. Donor countries have long closed their wallets. Even China, to whom President Mugabe has turned with his Look East policy, has refused to bail Zimbabwe out. South Africa, which does not want its neighbour to collapse, will only loan money if there is political reform. Hospitals, receiving an increasing number of patients suffering from malnutrition, are creaking under the strain. Harare Central Hospital said that it may have to close because so many nurses were leaving â 30 over the past two weeks â because of poor wages and a lack of medical equipment. No more AIDS patients are being accepted for treatment because of a shortage of drugs. Thousands of soldiers have been sent on compulsory leave because there is not enough food and money. A shortage of seed and fertiliser â and money to buy them â mean next yearâs harvest could be one of the worst. Aid agencies believe that more than three million people will need feeding by March. The Government, in denial over the scale of the problem, is reluctant to let food relief in. The hardship is tearing at the social fabric of a country where the life expectancy is now just 37. The brutal police operation, known as Operation Murambatsvina (Sweep out the rubbish), left 700,000 without homes or work. Operation Hlalani Kuhle (Live well), meant to provide legal homes and formal markets, has barely begun, and the ban on vending is still being ruthlessly enforced. Newspaper boys selling mobile telephone charge cards are frisked and their stock is confiscated; women selling a few tomatoes and eggs are hauled off to police stations. In the state media â which now include the Daily Mirror, furtively purchased with public money by the Central Intelligence Organisation â the ruling Zanu (PF) party leaks stories of hope: that recent uranium finds will help to boost the rural electrification programme, that Zimbabwe can host the 2010 African Nations Cup, that a Stalin-type command agriculture will help to utilise idle land, that petrol will arrive âwithin daysâ. Most ordinary Zimbabweans, beaten down, despondent and dismayed by the infighting in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, seem to have accepted their miserable fate. Near Chivhu, a government stronghold in central Zimbabwe, Nicodimus Joni, 43, a farmworker in tattered blue overalls and sandals made of old car tyres, waited for a lift to work. Closing his eyes, and slowly moving his head from side to side, he tried to find words to describe what was happening in his country. âAh, Zimbabwe,â he eventually sighed. âZimbabwe is dead.â |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #6 At risk of being redundant, for anyone on the 'Burg who hasn't read it, I suggest Kim DuToit's article, "Let Africa Sink." Nothing can be done for those people from outside that will be truly lasting except recolonization. And that won't happen because no country in its right mind would want the problems that would come with an African populace. It's a Darwinian dilemma. |
| Posted by: mac 2005-12-03 23:00 |
| #5 One trillion dollars in aid to Africa has been pissed up against the wall since world war 2 and this is the end result!?....is it any wonder there's so much "compassion fatigue"?....They were a thousand percent better off under colonial rule. |
| Posted by: Malikrik 2005-12-03 22:42 |
| #4 There is no real opposition. The MDC tried initially, got dumped upon by the intellectual and cultural elite for not being 'sensitive enough', and is now in disarray. The intellectal and cultural elites themselves are blithering; they want change, have no stomach for revolution, and any change has to "not hurt the poor". |
| Posted by: Pappy 2005-12-03 20:41 |
| #3 arm the opposition - otherwise they'll die in a giant gulag. Bob and Grace and co. need to die untimely deaths...soon |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-12-03 13:13 |
| #2 Sounds like some of those Chinee 40 pounders that the Beard brought in during the special economic times. Very sturdy, a bike for me. On a level or downhill grade I was pure sleek momentum. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-12-03 12:27 |
| #1 he had sold thousands of heavy, (Chinese-made) single-speed bicycles this year Oh yeah - freakin' sign me up for one of those puppies. Alpe d'Huez, here I come! |
| Posted by: Lance Armstrong 2005-12-03 11:33 |