The price of meat, cooking oil and clothes went up 223% – since last week. It’s one of the symptoms that may herald the end of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. The country is in meltdown and it’s worsening fast. Inflation stands at 1,200% annually and it’s picking up fast.
Zimbabwe’s doctors have been on strike for weeks. They want a raise – a 9,000% pay hike. Now the country’s nurses have joined them.
Civil servants and police got a 300% raise last week but 70% of the work force is unemployed and destitute. Now the country is beginning to suffer a cholera outbreak. The sewage treatment plant in the capital, Harare, has broken down and has been dumping raw sewage into the city’s reservoir.
Over the past eight years the country’s poverty rate has shot up from 30% to 80%.
Believe it or not, worse is coming. The country faces a severe agricultural decline. Large tracts of farmland awarded to Mugabe loyalists sit fallow.
The accounts coming out of Zimbabwe over the past year keep getting worse and worse. Each time it becomes harder to imagine how Mugabe clings to power. Even his Zanu-PF party wants him gone.
The country is clearly at the breaking point. Robert Mugabe’s days in power may end very soon and it’s unlikely he’ll have a soft landing.
The Mound of Sound 
February 8, 2007 at 1:51 am
It’s a really sad decline that has occured in that nation. It may not have been the best situation, but the “rich white farmers” who Mugabee threw off the land were at least keeping the nation fed.
February 8, 2007 at 2:36 am
There’s no doubt that agriculture and civil order have headed steadily downhill since Ian Smith handed over control of Rhodesia. The West has had to watch the carnage mount, unable or unwilling to intervene. These are, after all, blacks and they don’t have any oil. Romeo Dallaire can explain what that means.
Unless something miraculous happens soon we’re going to have to deal with a humanitarian disaster, one that needn’t have happened.