Robyn Dixon has been writing incredible, heart-breaking stories about the man-made crisis in Zimbabwe. In today’s Los Angeles Times, she describes the wide-ranging famine created by President Robert Mugabe’s corrupt and murderous rule.
In the countryside, “the economic crisis and its fallout is obvious,” she writes. She describes a scene out of a perverse interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (except the characters die of hunger at the end):
On top of a hill overlooking a magnificent mountain, a man sat on a broken hand-carved stool in the dirt. He had no interest in the scenery or even the future, because he cannot get food to fill the bellies of his nine children.
Siaviri Muleya, 48, and his wife had just finished a small bowl of mealie meal, the bland white paste made by boiling up ground maize. It was the last of their food. He wore an ancient pair of overalls, so worn they were almost shredded. And he was getting ready to sell his future.
He had a bag of sunflower seeds, which he had hoped to plant for a crop. But desperate, his only choice was to sell it in return for one or two days’ food. The family has been living on baobab and other wild fruit. And he begs for mealie meal from his neighbors, who have little to give.
Muleya gets an odd job several times a month, paid in food. But each job pays one day’s food supply. He has no goats, cattle or chickens, yet was left out of a recent World Food Program humanitarian registration.
“It really troubles me as head of the family,” he said. “I don’t even sleep well at night. I lie awake thinking, ‘How am I going to get food for my family?’ “
Journeyman Productions did a video recently that shows images of a country that looks like a looting army has just passed through — no fuel, no bread, no vegetables.
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According to the US State Department, over 80% of the population is unemployed, and private sector experts put inflation at over 60,000%, now the world’s highest by a huge margin. After seven years of severe economic decline one-quarter of the population has left the country, seeking better opportunities elsewhere, and more than one-third of the remaining population is food insecure. The UN Human Development Index shows that Zimbabwe’s score is lower today than it was in 1975.
I call it “Africa’s other genocide” since this slow-motion extermination of the Zimbabwean people seems just as intentional as any genocide. Yet it gets a fraction of the (albeit limited) coverage of the Sudan.
So what can be done short of invasion or getting rid of Mugabe? The US has sanctions in place and supports South Africa’s insistence on talks as a way to resolve the crisis. But human rights groups say that so far, this process has been too slow and ineffective.
Meanwhile, the main victims are Zimbabwe’s future, the children.