Petrol is virtually unattainable without foreign currency. Power cuts are
frequent because Zimbabwe no longer has the foreign exchange to repair its
decrepit generating stations or buy electricity from its neighbours. Taps
run dry for days on end, and when the water does flow – even in the capital
– it is contaminated by sewage.
In Mabvuku, a township east of Harare that has had no proper water supply all
year, we found hundreds of women gathered on a patch of wasteland, waiting
with their buckets for tiny, muddy pools to form in the bottom of half a
dozen 15ft holes. “Some of us get up at 4am because there is more water then
and it is cleaner. Some of us wait the whole day,” Joyce Dando, 46, said.
Four of the five reservoirs serving Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, have
dried up. Some districts have gone weeks without water. Sewers explode for
lack of running water to wash away blockages. Mr Coltart, the local MP,
accuses the regime of deliberately blocking new water projects for a city
that is an opposition stronghold. Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube, the Mayor, agrees.
He envisages Bulawayo being abandoned “on the lines of New Orleans”, and
accuses the Government of urbicide.
Agriculture, the backbone of economy, was destroyed by land seizures (which
continue, with 160 of the 500 remaining white farmers having recently
received eviction notices). What remains of industry is being destroyed by
inane economic policies. GDP has fallen to the level of 1953, coal
production to the level of 1946, and gold production to that of 1907.
Like its health system, Zimbabwe’s once-proud education system has been
crippled by a mass exodus of teachers unable to survive on a monthly salary
of barely US$11. An estimated 30,000 have gone abroad since January, many
quitting in mid-term. The University of Zimbabwe has lost at least half its
1,200 lecturers.
The mobile phone networks are collapsing; only a skeletal train service
survives; bus fares exceed most people’s wages. Even cash is running out
because the Government cannot print money fast enough, pay to repair its
German presses or buy enough chemicals and ink from abroad. John Robertson,
an economist, estimates that it printed Z$372 billion in March, Z$5,648
billion in August.
The human consequences are desperate. A senior NGO official said that nearly
half the population now needed food aid. In both rural and urban areas The
Times found children with the distended bellies and swollen joints of
kwashiorkor – a disease caused by severe malnutrition .
In one rural clinic, a 20-month-old boy lay dying of marasmus, another disease
caused by malnutrition. He weighed 11lb. There was no hope, said the doctor
in charge. The clinic treats hundreds of villagers who come from far and
wide each day on buses, donkey carts or foot. More than 80 per cent are
HIV-positive. Half are medically malnourished. That lethal combination has
destroyed their immune systems and caused an explosion of other diseases
such as TB, malaria, meningitis and pneumonia.
In a Harare cemetery The Times found five funerals taking place
simultaneously. An official said the city buried 5,690 adults last year and
expected to bury 8,000 this. Those figures exclude paupers’ burials: that
morning alone 38 people had been dumped in an unmarked mass grave with no
religious service.
A Bulawayo cleric took us to Kilarney, a desperate collection of shacks in the
parched bush outside the city that house 500 families displaced by Operation
Murambatsvina. There is no school, no clinic. The inhabitants have no jobs,
no money, just a few cooking pots. They draw water from the shaft of an
abandoned goldmine with a sign reading: “Danger – Cyanide Mining”. They
survive on mealie meal provided by the church. Every few months the cleric
gets soap which he divides into tiny pieces, one per family.
Nokhuthula, 24, a stick-thin mother of two tiny children, stood outside a
shelter of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting held down by stones. A few
rags were drying on a thorn bush. Her husband was a carpenter, but his tools
were destroyed by Mr Mugabe’s thugs. She used to supplement his income by
sewing, but could no longer afford needles and thread. The last time she ate
anything but sadza was last Christmas when she had a bowl of rice.
“There’s no hope here. This is a place where people are lucky to reach the age
of 40,” the cleric said. He then drove us farther into the bush and showed
us rows of mounds in the red earth, each covered with thorny branches to
keep animals away. This was where he buried his parishioners, their bodies
wrapped in blankets, because their families could not afford proper
funerals.
In Mbare, a southern Harare slum, church workers rounded up half a dozen
destitute women for The Times to talk to – women like Chipo Holaza,
32, who lost her husband to Aids two years ago. She lives with her four
children under plastic sheeting, and sells herself for as little as 20p a
time. She is now disfigured by Aids herself. “I’m desperate. The children
will have no one to look after them if I pass away. They’ll be street kids,”
she said. One headmaster near Bulawayo said that almost all of his 300
female students, aged 14 to 16, were selling their bodies for food. A dental
student at the University of Zimbabwe said several classmates were doing the
same.
No country on Earth has such a rapidly contracting economy or plummeting life
expectancy, but diplomats still believe Mr Mugabe will retain the presidency
in elections due next March.
Boosted by Lisbon, he is certain to secure the Zanu (PF) nomination at a
special congress on December 14. With the opposition Movement for Democratic
Change demoralised, depleted by emigration and split into rival factions,
with four million of Zimbabwe’s ablest citizens having fled the country and
those that remain debilitated by suffering, Zanu (PF)’s superior political
machine should ensure a Mugabe victory.
He is taking no chances though. In remote areas, far from the public eye, his
thugs are at work. An activist from Binga in the far northwest said that 200
former members of Zanu (PF)’s youth militia arrived last June. Since then,
pumped high on drugs and alcohol, they had systematically terrorised the
poorest areas, burning homes, stealing goats and gang-raping as many as 300
women aged between 16 and 51. The activist described Zanu (PF)’s strategy:
“If you’re not for us you are against us, and if you’re against us, you’re
going to be broken.”
