Zimbabwe's slow deathAs Zimbabwe's condition worsens, neighbors worry

We have written about the accelerating disintegration of Zimbabwe under the rule (rather, misrule) of Robert Mugabe — a disintegration which brings not only more misery to the poor citizens of the tormented country, but now threatens regional instability as tens of thousands of Zimbabweans flee the country so they can eat and receive medical attention in Zimbabwe’s neighbors.

We have to correct one fact we cited in a report last week as an indication of the deteriorating situation in the country: we wrote (10 December 2008 HS Daily Wire) that the annual rate of inflation in Zimbabwe was 11.2 million percent (11,200,000 percent). We were wrong — and wrong by an order of magnitude: the New York Times’s Celia Dugger writes that inflation officially hit 231 million percent (231,000,000 percent) in July, but that John Robertson, an independent economist in Zimbabwe, estimates that inflation has now surged to an astounding eight quintillion percent — this is an eight followed by 18 zeros (8,000,000,000,000,000,000).

Dugger provides other examples of the slow death of the country:

• Zimbabwe’s most fundamental public services — including water and sanitation, public schools, and hospitals — have sut down.
• Zimbabwe’s once promising economy, disastrously mismanaged by Mugabe’s government, has been spiraling downward for almost a decade, but residents here say the free fall has gained frightening velocity in recent weeks.
• Most of the nation’s schools, which were once the pride of Africa, producing a highly literate population, have virtually ceased to function as teachers, whose salaries no longer even cover the cost of the bus fare to work, quit showing up.
• With millions enduring severe and worsening hunger, and cholera spilling into neighboring countries, there are rising international calls for Mugabe to step down after twenty-eight years in power. He is only digging in, and his announcement last week about the cholera epidemic’s end came just a day after the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was grave enough to carry “serious regional implications.”
• Water cutoffs are common and prolonged here, but last week the taps went dry in virtually all of the capital’s densely packed suburbs, where people most need clean drinking water to wash their hands and food, essential steps to containing cholera.
• On rutted streets crowded with out-of-school children and jobless adults, piles of uncollected garbage mounted and thick brown sludge burbled up from burst sewer lines.
• The capital’s two largest hospitals, sprawling facilities that once would have provided sophisticated care in just such a crisis, had largely shut down weeks earlier after doctors and nurses, their salaries rendered virtually worthless by the nation’s crippling hyperinflation, simply stopped coming to work.
• In a country with the terrible distinction of having the second highest proportion of orphans in the world — one in four children has lost one or both parents — the closing of schools and hospitals is hitting these most vulnerable children mercilessly.
• Zimbabwe has one of the world’s highest rates of H.I.V. infection, and now a raging cholera crisis. The economic collapse is decimating revenues needed to run the country’s public health systems, so mortality rates among cholera victims here are five times higher than in other countries.
• Mugabe’s government — in its pursuit of power and money — has also contributed to both catastrophes. Earlier this year, the government jeopardized $188 million in aid from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by taking $7.3 million the organization had donated and spending it on other, unrelated expenses. Only at the 11th hour, under threat that the money would be withheld, did the government reimburse the Global Fund for the missing funds.
• Two years ago the government took control of Harare’s water and sewer systems from the opposition-controlled city council, depriving the local government of a crucial source of revenue to keep services functioning. The shutting down of these water treatment and sewer facilities was among the major contributors to the outbreak of the cholera epidemic.