The horror of a stricken nation waiting to die

From The Times
December 1, 2007
By Martin Fletcher

As the people of Zimbabwe are ground down by poverty and brutality, Robert Mugabe is offered a welcome at the international table

We knew Sarudzai Gumbo was still sick, but nothing prepared us for what we found. The seven-year-old was lying alone and neglected in a dirty sideroom in a Harare hospital.

Her head was a mass of septic wounds. Two large cancers were devouring the right side of her face. She had lost the sight of one eye and the other was gummed up. A filthy, blood-stained hat concealed untold horrors on her scalp – she screamed with pain when we tried to remove it. Flies hovered around her lesions. The stench of her putrefying flesh was overpowering. She weighed only 36lb (16.3kg).

The Times highlighted Sarudzai’s plight in March after discovering her in Mbare, a Harare slum. Her family was living on wasteland because its home had been destroyed by President Mugabe’s Operation Murambatsvina (“Clean Up Trash”). Her parents’ livelihoods had been ruined by the regime’s ban on street vendors. They both had Aids, as did Sarudzai, whose face was disfigured by open sores.

Readers sent in £7,500 to try to help her – funds forwarded to the Jesuit mission in Mbare – and Sarudzai was sent to an Aids clinic. But her mother died in April and her father took her away to the ancestral village and – fatally – interrupted her treatment. Sarudzai was transferred to Parirenyatwa Hospital just as Zimbabwe’s healthcare system was imploding.

As with every other hospital, the doctors and nurses who were there have left in droves for better-paid jobs abroad, their salaries at home rendered almost worthless by hyperinflation. There are no anaesthetics, drips, painkillers, antiretroviral drugs, blood for transfusions or even bandages. This is a shell of a hospital – a place where patients are left to die.

Sarudzai, whose father is also close to death, is a lovely, brave, affectionate girl. She never cries. She claps her hands when given something, waves when you leave. We brought two teddy bears that she instantly named Rudzai and Rudo – Shona for “Praise” and “Love”. Her condition was heartbreaking. We had her examined by a private doctor, who said it was the most shocking case he had seen. Within hours she was admitted to a private hospital. She has now been adopted by Kidzcan, a charity that helps Zimbabwean children with cancer, but her chances of survival are slim.

Sarudzai’s is just one of the legion of horror stories that Mr Mugabe seeks to conceal from the world by banning foreign journalists from Zimbabwe. She is one of millions of victims of his pernicious regime who will be largely overlooked when the octogenarian autocrat enjoys the propaganda triumph of being greeted as a legitimate national leader at the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon next week.

Over nine days spent travelling clandestinely around this beautiful, once-bountiful country, The Times found a nation where millions now struggle to survive on barely a bowl of sadza (a mealie-meal porridge) a day, the most basic services have all but collapsed and thousands die every week in a perfect storm of poverty, hunger and disease. Aids, like corruption, is rampant.

We found paupers’ burials, starving children with stunted bodies, orphans left to fend for themselves in the most brutal environments. It is a country regressing from commercial farms to vegetable patches, from the light bulb to the oil lamp, from the tap to the well. Feet – often bare – are replacing the wheel as the most common form of transport. Once Africa’s breadbasket, Zimbabwe can no longer provide its citizens with bread and water.

“This is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, worse even than Darfur,” said David Coltart, an opposition MP. “We lose more people a week to preventable illnesses than are lost in Iraq, but because there’s no blood on the streets, little attention is paid to what’s going on here.”

Zimbabwe, like Sarudzai, has deteriorated dramatically since March. It is closer than ever to complete collapse, according to the International Crisis Group. Inflation has soared from 1,700 to 15,000 per cent. Draconian price controls have emptied the shops because producers cannot cover their costs. Though millions are starving, farmers are slaughtering dairy herds because they cannot sell milk at a viable price. But those who still have money can buy almost anything on the flourishing black market.

Petrol is virtually unattainable without foreign currency. Power cuts are frequent because Zimbabwe no longer has the foreign exchange to repair its decrepit generating stations or buy electricity from its neighbours. Taps run dry for days on end, and when the water does flow – even in the capital – it is contaminated by sewage.

In Mabvuku, a township east of Harare that has had no proper water supply all year, we found hundreds of women gathered on a patch of wasteland, waiting with their buckets for tiny, muddy pools to form in the bottom of half a dozen 15ft holes. “Some of us get up at 4am because there is more water then and it is cleaner. Some of us wait the whole day,” Joyce Dando, 46, said.

Four of the five reservoirs serving Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, have dried up. Some districts have gone weeks without water. Sewers explode for lack of running water to wash away blockages. Mr Coltart, the local MP, accuses the regime of deliberately blocking new water projects for a city that is an opposition stronghold. Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube, the Mayor, agrees. He envisages Bulawayo being abandoned “on the lines of New Orleans”, and accuses the Government of urbicide.

Agriculture, the backbone of economy, was destroyed by land seizures (which continue, with 160 of the 500 remaining white farmers having recently received eviction notices). What remains of industry is being destroyed by inane economic policies. GDP has fallen to the level of 1953, coal production to the level of 1946, and gold production to that of 1907.

Like its health system, Zimbabwe’s once-proud education system has been crippled by a mass exodus of teachers unable to survive on a monthly salary of barely Z$11. An estimated 30,000 have gone abroad since January, many quitting in mid-term. The University of Zimbabwe has lost at least half its 1,200 lecturers.

The mobile phone networks are collapsing; only a skeletal train service survives; bus fares exceed most people’s wages. Even cash is running out because the Government cannot print money fast enough, pay to repair its German presses or buy enough chemicals and ink from abroad. John Robertson, an economist, estimates that it printed Z$372 billion in March, Z$5,648 billion in August.

The human consequences are desperate. A senior NGO official said that nearly half the population now needed food aid. In both rural and urban areas The Times found children with the distended bellies and swollen joints of kwashiorkor – a disease caused by severe malnutrition .

In one rural clinic, a 20-month-old boy lay dying of marasmus, another disease caused by malnutrition. He weighed 11lb. There was no hope, said the doctor in charge. The clinic treats hundreds of villagers who come from far and wide each day on buses, donkey carts or foot. More than 80 per cent are HIV-positive. Half are medically malnourished. That lethal combination has destroyed their immune systems and caused an explosion of other diseases such as TB, malaria, meningitis and pneumonia.

In a Harare cemetery The Times found five funerals taking place simultaneously. An official said the city buried 5,690 adults last year and expected to bury 8,000 this. Those figures exclude paupers’ burials: that morning alone 38 people had been dumped in an unmarked mass grave with no religious service.

A Bulawayo cleric took us to Kilarney, a desperate collection of shacks in the parched bush outside the city that house 500 families displaced by Operation Murambatsvina. There is no school, no clinic. The inhabitants have no jobs, no money, just a few cooking pots. They draw water from the shaft of an abandoned goldmine with a sign reading: “Danger – Cyanide Mining”. They survive on mealie meal provided by the church. Every few months the cleric gets soap which he divides into tiny pieces, one per family.

Nokhuthula, 24, a stick-thin mother of two tiny children, stood outside a shelter of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting held down by stones. A few rags were drying on a thorn bush. Her husband was a carpenter, but his tools were destroyed by Mr Mugabe’s thugs. She used to supplement his income by sewing, but could no longer afford needles and thread. The last time she ate anything but sadza was last Christmas when she had a bowl of rice.

“There’s no hope here. This is a place where people are lucky to reach the age of 40,” the cleric said. He then drove us farther into the bush and showed us rows of mounds in the red earth, each covered with thorny branches to keep animals away. This was where he buried his parishioners, their bodies wrapped in blankets, because their families could not afford proper funerals.

In Mbare, a southern Harare slum, church workers rounded up half a dozen destitute women for The Times to talk to – women like Chipo Holaza, 32, who lost her husband to Aids two years ago. She lives with her four children under plastic sheeting, and sells herself for as little as 20p a time. She is now disfigured by Aids herself. “I’m desperate. The children will have no one to look after them if I pass away. They’ll be street kids,” she said. One headmaster near Bulawayo said that almost all of his 300 female students, aged 14 to 16, were selling their bodies for food. A dental student at the University of Zimbabwe said several classmates were doing the same.

No country on Earth has such a rapidly contracting economy or plummeting life expectancy, but diplomats still believe Mr Mugabe will retain the presidency in elections due next March.

Boosted by Lisbon, he is certain to secure the Zanu (PF) nomination at a special congress on December 14. With the opposition Movement for Democratic Change demoralised, depleted by emigration and split into rival factions, with four million of Zimbabwe’s ablest citizens having fled the country and those that remain debilitated by suffering, Zanu (PF)’s superior political machine should ensure a Mugabe victory.

He is taking no chances though. In remote areas, far from the public eye, his thugs are at work. An activist from Binga in the far northwest said that 200 former members of Zanu (PF)’s youth militia arrived last June. Since then, pumped high on drugs and alcohol, they had systematically terrorised the poorest areas, burning homes, stealing goats and gang-raping as many as 300 women aged between 16 and 51. The activist described Zanu (PF)’s strategy: “If you’re not for us you are against us, and if you’re against us, you’re going to be broken.”