End looks to be nearing for Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe

Michelle Faul

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Zimbabwe appears to finally be reaching the end game, witnessing the last, desperate throes of a regime that has destroyed one of Africa’s few successful economies, plunged millions of people into grinding poverty and led to the deaths of tens of thousands from malnutrition and lack of medical care.

It didn’t happen last Saturday, when President Robert Mugabe celebrated his 83rd birthday with bubbly and cake at a $1.2 million party while hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans struggled to survive on bread and water.

And it probably won’t happen in the weeks leading up to April 18, the 27th anniversary of an end to racist white rule and Mugabe’s ascension to power.

But years of abuse and neglect are culminating in untenable crises.

“People’s anger is mounting,” said Zimbabwean political scientist John Makumbe. “They’re no longer afraid to go into the streets and I think the government is growing very afraid of what may happen.”

Hyperinflation that brings shortages of food, fuel, medication and electricity is spiraling out of control. Soldiers and police used to stamp out dissent could result. Opposition from Mugabe’s ruling party, which is divided over the timing of his succession and his successor, is mounting.

“Each and every individual on the upper echelons” is jockeying for his position, Mugabe complained in an interview on his actual birthday, Feb.21, broadcast over the country’s sole and state-owned television station.

But, he announced categorically: “There are no vacancies because I am still there.”

Mugabe blames sanctions, drought and former colonizer Britain for the collapse of an economy based on exports of a wealth of agricultural and mineral products.

Others blame land grabs in which Mugabe encouraged blacks to violently force out most of the 5,000 white commercial farmers who owned 40 percent of all agricultural land and produced 75 percent of agricultural output. White farmers had employed the country’s largest work force and their ejection led to the displacement of 300,000 families.

Today, the farms — most of which were given to Mugabe relatives, allies and cronies — lie fallow and Zimbabwe does not have the foreign currency to import food.

On Mugabe’s birthday, police announced a three-month ban on protests, following weekend clashes in which they fired tear gas and turned water cannons on opposition rallies.

The National Constitutional Assembly, a coalition of human rights, church and grass-roots organizations, in a statement last Friday said: “It’s not a crime to defend oneself from an unlawful attack, and if need be [people] should protect themselves from a partisan, violent police force that aims at perpetuating dictatorship and increasing the suffering of the ordinary masses.”

Mugabe is “at war” with the people, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai declared last week.

Opposition supporters wanted to protest the high cost of living and Mugabe’s plan to extend his term of office to 2010.

A rate of hyperinflation — running near 1,600 percent — that economists say soon will be represented by an upright line on a graph has the country in revolt. The number of Zimbabwe dollars that bought a three-bedroom house with a swimming pool and tennis court in 1990 today will buy one sole brick.

A lifetime public worker’s monthly pension can’t buy a loaf of bread. Charities have reported depression, suicide and malnutrition among retirees — including a type of vitamin deficiency affecting gums, bones and hair loss.

Doctors and nurses have been on strike since December and the rest of the civil service is threatening to join them.

The list of deserters on the walls of army barracks grows ever longer despite a 300 percent pay raise in January. The military wants a 1,000 percent increase. The police chief in the capital, Harare, has said in a confidential memo that he fears his constables will riot.

A hairdresser paid the minimum monthly wage of $30,000 said her bus fare to work costs more, but she went anyway to get the tips from clients that keep her and her daughter alive.

Political scientist Makumbe said a 16-year-old who broke his collarbone falling out of a tree has lain at home in pain for days because his widowed mother does not have the 1 million Zimbabwe dollars needed to have the bone set.

Makumbe said an estimated 70,000 people have died this year not because of the doctors’ strike, but because there are no drugs and because medical equipment like dialysis machines don’t work anymore.

Bread disappeared off the shelves this week after the government increased the price of grain sold to millers by 10,000 percent but did not increase the controlled price for bread.

Water shortages have brought a cholera epidemic that is killing people.

Children are among the first to suffer, with one in four Zimbabwean children orphaned and more than 2 million vulnerable to starvation, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The government tries to control inflation by printing money and setting the exchange rate. Last year, when half a dozen eggs cost more than a million Zimbabwe dollars and the poorest Zimbabweans were millionaires, the government simply knocked three zeros off the currency. The minimum monthly salary for a house cleaner went from $15 million U.S. dollars to $15,000. The official exchange rate is set at 250 to the U.S. dollar, but the real trading rate is 5,000 to the dollar.

Some Zimbabweans are getting rich off the misery. Party and government officials with access to foreign currency buy it at the official rate and sell it at the real rate.

The World Bank estimates it would take more than 20 years for Zimbabwe’s economy to return to 1980 levels.

(Associated Press)