THE first time Knowledge Mbanda found a dead baby in the drains of Harare, he was horrified. “It is completely against our culture to abandon children,” he said. “I thought it must be of a woman who had been raped or a prostitute.”

But now he and fellow council workers find at least 20 corpses of newborn babies each week, thrown away or even flushed down the lavatories of Zimbabwe’s capital.

The dumping of babies, along with what doctors describe as a “dramatic” increase in malnourished children in city hospitals, is the most shocking illustration of the economic collapse of a country that was once the breadbasket of southern Africa.

Some of the corpses are the result of unwanted pregnancies in a country experiencing a rise in sexual abuse and prostitution. But others are newborns dumped by desperate mothers unable to support another child. Inflation has reached 1,000% and the government’s seizure of 95% of commercial farms has seen food production plummet.

The dead gutter babies are the most pitiful victims of a government that believes it can starve its people into compliance, or death, turning Zimbabwe into the only country in the region with a shrinking population.

So grave is the situation that even the government media have begun reporting it. “Some of the things that are happening now are shocking,” complained Nomutsa Chideya, Harare’s town clerk, to the state-owned Herald newspaper. “Apart from upsetting the normal flow of waste, it [baby dumping] is not right from a moral standpoint.”

Paediatricians contacted by The Sunday Times in the two main cities of Harare and Bulawayo said severe child malnutrition had doubled over the past year and hospital morgues were piled high with bodies people could not afford to bury.

“Children are dying off like flies,” said one surgeon in Bulawayo who, like most of those interviewed for this article, asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions by President Robert Mugabe’s police state.

Nobody knows the exact figures for malnutrition because the majority of victims cannot afford to reach hospitals. Moreover, according to the surgeon, the extent of the famine is being masked by the scale of the Aids epidemic, with more than a quarter of the population HIV-positive.

“Put simply, people are dying of Aids before they can starve to death,” he said.

A study at Harare hospital in 2003-4 showed that 55% of children admitted were suffering from malnutrition. The problem is believed to have intensified since last year because of the effects of Operation Murambatsvina — or Drive Out the Filth — the government campaign to demolish supposedly illegal structures.

The three-month operation, which began last May, left more than 700,000 people without homes or livelihoods and scrabbling in rubbish dumps to survive. On top of that, the government’s printing of money to appease the wealthy few has driven inflation higher than anywhere else in the world, making food harder and harder to afford for the poor.

“All we know is what we see and that is a dramatic increase in malnourished children,” said Greg Powell, a paediatrician from Doctors for Human Rights and author of a paper entitled Severe Child Malnutrition: An Unnecessary and Avoidable Crisis.

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