Zimbabwe: From breadbasket to tragic basket case
Friday, December 5, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
UNITED NATIONS — The Grim Reaper is stalking Zimbabwe. Famine, disease and economic collapse have turned this once prosperous land into a morass of failed socialist policies, corruption, and entrenched authoritarian rule from which the only escape remains death or exile in neighboring South Africa. Now months following a presumed power sharing accord between longtime dictator Robert Mugabe and his political rivals, the country seems no closer to delivery, but much nearer to total collapse.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has voiced alarm that the fast-eroding humanitarian situation will worsen and nearly half the country’s population would need UN food assistance! While approximately six million out of Zimbabwe’s population will need foreign food aid, this grim statistic belies a wider point; Zimbabwe was formerly one of Africa’s agricultural breadbaskets, and a major food exporter to much of the continent. Today the breadbasket has tragically been turned into a humanitarian basket case.
Right now the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) is feeding four million people in the beleaguered southern African land. During October WFP distributed 29,000 tons of foods to vulnerable families, now for November the agency has doubled the number of beneficiaries but the available supplies will not increase significantly. This WFP will be forced to feed more people with fewer resources which naturally means a cutback in rations for the most vulnerable people. The group concedes that just to keep the humanitarian pipeline open, until the expected peak of the crisis in March, it shall require $140 million in funding.
The current crisis has been caused by a disastrous harvest, caused by both weather and indeed the catastrophically callous government policies during recent years. Among other things, Mugabe’s socialist regime has confiscated farmlands, many held by the minority white community, and has triggered a deepening food crisis.
Beyond shortages, hyperinflation of 231 million percent has made workers salaries and savings totally worthless thus forcing people to live on barter and scarce supplies of U.S. dollars. To illustrate the dizzying rates of inflation consider this; I’m holding a Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe $50,000,000 (million) dollar bill issued in April 2008. But I also have a Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe $50,000,000,000 (billion) dollar bill replacing it, issued on 15 May 2008 and good until the end of 2008. My $50 billion note , worth about six U.S. cents in its prime, has since become near worthless.As they say, do the math.
As the summer rains begin, a cholera crisis has deepened with 9,000 cases diagnosed so far; 500 people have died according to the UN. This epidemic which can rapidly spread, threatens the region given refugee flows. Moreover the societal decline has impacted education too; a UN relief official states that only 20 percent of eligible students are now attending school.
Last March disputed presidential elections saw longtime ruler Robert Mugabe returned to power. Yet after thirty years in control, since the independence of ex-British Rhodesia, the ruling socialist party Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) grudgingly agreed in September to power sharing with the democratic MDC opposition as to defuse an impending civil conflict. The agreement would allow Comrade Mugabe to remain President and Morgan Tsvangarai to become Prime Minister has yet to be implemented.
The political crisis has deepened and as Business Day newspaper of Johannesburg concedes, “This is why we concur with SA’s African National Congress president, Jacob Zuma, that Africa and the world must take drastic action soon to reverse Zimbabwe’s slide into anarchy. Inaction will be the continent’s and Zimbabwe’s greatest undoing. Africa cannot continue tolerating rapacious, intolerant and oppressive tyrants.” So true.
Neighboring countries such as Botswana have “upped the ante in its intensifying diplomatic row with Zimbabwe by urging regional leaders to squeeze President Robert Mugabe out of power to end the worsening political and economic crisis,” reports Business Day. Sadly for too long the South African government has maintained a misguided “African solidarity” with the regime in Harare. Now importantly Kenya’s Prime Minister has openly called for Mugabe’s ouster.
Though the United States and the European Union remain committed to democratic political change and humanitarian assistance for Zimbabwe, the real force for change rests with neighboring South Africa. Indeed with more than a million of its refugees in South Africa, and with a spiraling humanitarian and a deepening political crisis, Zimbabwe poses a dangerous destabilizing force for all southern Africa. While South Africa has mediated much of the political power sharing process, the Pretoria government could with the flick of a feather tip the scales. Given the humanitarian stakes, it must consider doing so.