The story of Zimbabwe’s violent misrule and national degradation is not a new one. Mugabe, who is eighty-three, came to power in 1980 as a leader of the long and bloody liberation struggle against the white-supremacist regime of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, and he has always used his hero’s mantle as cover for terrorizing his opponents, real and perceived. He has murdered thousands of his people and deprived the rest of meaningful freedom. In the process, he has transformed one of Africa’s most prosperous and promising countries into one of the poorest and weakest on earth.
Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is already more than seventeen hundred per cent, the highest in the world, and the International Monetary Fund warns that it could exceed five thousand per cent by year’s end. Unemployment is around eighty per cent, and the average income is less than a dollar a day. With chronic food shortages and no medical system left to speak of, life expectancy has plunged from sixty years, in 1990, to less than thirty-seven years (the shortest anywhere), while the infant-mortality rate has increased by more than fifty per cent. Not surprisingly, as many as three million Zimbabweans—a quarter of the population—have fled the country. Yet last week Mugabe’s information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, declared, “There is no crisis whatsoever in Zimbabwe.â€
[update]The New Yorker link seems to be missing the actual text of the article. You can also read it here (scroll down).[/update]
Hey! DON’T scroll down! I have lots of extremely insightful stuff to say about Zimbabwe and Mugabe! Just because I never set foot in Africa is no reason to skip over it!
Anyway, glad I could afford a mirror for the very interesting New Yorker article, thanks for the link.
As you know, Zimbabwe’s hot in the news again, with the United Nations’ selection of Zimbabwe to chair the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development — over the shrieks of Europe and North America.
All your sad stats are important, but I should mention that I just stumbled on a very surprising and unusual stat, from Wikipedia:
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Zimbabwe has an adult literacy rate of approximately 90% … For comparison, rates for other SADC countries in 2004 were: South Africa, 86%, Zambia, 79.9%, Swaziland, 80.9%, Namibia, 83.3%, Lesotho, 81.4%, Botswana, 78.9%, Tanzania, 77.1%, Malawi, 61.8%, Mozambique, 46.5%.
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