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Death Rattle 24th March 2007 The graveyards of Zimbabwe are the only places blossoming under Robert Mugabe's evil gaze Martin Fletcher in Harare Teksure and Silibaziso Gumbo weep as they tell their story from the safety of a walled church compound in the township of Mbare in southern Harare. Their house was torn down when President Mugabe launched Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out Trash) in 2005 to raze slum areas that were opposition strongholds. Mr Mugabe then banned street vendors, destroying Teksure's livelihood. He no longer dares to sell groundnuts because, like his six-year-old daughter Sarudzai, he has Aids and cannot run from the police. The family lives in a tiny shelter fashioned from plastic and corrugated iron, and lacking any sanitation, on a patch of wasteland. Sarudzai desperately needs sustenance but her parents can give her little more than a daily bowl of sadza - the maize-meal porridge on which millions of people in this desperate nation now survive. They have tried traditional African medicines without success. They have taken her to the hospital five times, but are turned away for lack of money. They went to the social welfare office, but it had no paper to type up a hospital referral. "Obviously she will die. It's heartbeaking. It's so painful," says Teksure. Despite her suffering, this tragic little girl turns and waves goodbye to us as she leaves. Sarudzai's fate mirrors that of her country. The beauty of both has been corrupted by something evil. In Zimbabwe's case that evil takes the form of an octogenarian with outsize glasses who has destroyed a country that was once the envy of Africa. At first sight Harare still appears a modern, prosperous city. Potholes are appearing in the roads, verges are uncut and some traffic lights no longer work, but lush suburbs of affluent-looking homes radiate out from the city centre's shimmering high-rise office blocks and there are expensive cars on its broad avenues. It is an illusion. Zimbabwe is like a tree whose trunk has been hollowed out by termites, leaving only a shell. The world's highest inflation rate - officially 1,700 per cent but actually higher - has rendered the currency, salaries and pensions almost worthless. In the mid1970s £1 bought aproximately one Zimbabwean dollar: yesterday it was buying 38,000 - or 38 million had Mr Mugabe not recently lopped three noughts off; £100 gets you a wad of notes the size of a small brick. There are new SUVs and Mercedes on the roads only because saving is pointless: you invest in anything that holds its value, so even cars have become a form of currency. The economy is shrinking faster than any on the planet. Life expectancy has fallen one year for each year since independence in 1980, and is now the lowest in the world at 37. More than a fifth of the population has left the country - a rate of exodus that exceeds Iraq's. Eighty per cent are unemployed, meaning more Zimbabweans now have jobs abroad than at home. There are reckoned to be 4,000 more deaths than births each week. The grim statistics roll on. Agricultural production has halved since Mr Mugabe's thugs began seizing white farms in 2000. Commercial production of maize has fallen from 810,000 tonnes to barely 200,000. More than 350,000 black agricultural workers have lost their jobs. Industry is operating at 28 per cent of its capacity. Hunger stalks a land that used to be Africa's breadbasket. More than four fifths of Zimbabweans live on less than £1 a day, and two fifths are suffering from malnutrition. Many survive only on remittances from relatives abroad. These amount to somewhere between £12.5 to £50 million a month, but unfortunately they help the Government as well by damping down popular anger and providing hard currency. Aids is rampant. The official rate is about 20 per cent, but a senior doctor in Bulawayo, the second city, said it was 80 per cent in some rural areas and 90 per cent in some military barracks. The disease kills 3,500 a week, and a quarter of Zimbabwe's children - more than a million - are Aids orphans. The human suffering behind those figures is everywhere apparent: in the gaunt faces, in the rows of freshly dug graves in the Luvere cemetery in Bulawayo, in the pathetic piles of produce women hawk beside the empty highways, in the lines of people walking or hitch-hiking into cities because bus fares now exceed their wages. Some work for food or fuel, not money. From country roads you see great tracts of farmland reverting to nature, or parched fields of shrivelled maize. The corridors of Agriculture House, the grand headquarters of the Commercial Farmers Union, are almost sepulchral. More than 3,000 farmers used to attend the CFU's annual conference. Last year fewer than 100 did. The 500 or so whites still farming - of an original 4,500 - are still battling eviction, though Mr Mugabe has unwittingly highlighted just how critical they are to Zimbabwe's economy. The Bulawayo doctor said that the country's health service was facing a "desperate crisis". People could no longer afford to visit hospitals where items as basic as intravenous fluids were almost unobtainable. Eighty per cent of newly qualified doctors left immediately to work abroad, and standards were plummeting as the Government rushed to replace them. "I fluctuate between wanting to throw in the towel and thinking that if I do it will be even worse," the doctor said. Paupers' burials in mass graves are becoming increasingly common. In Mbare a broken young man named Leroy Manyonda told us, in barely a whisper, how he could not afford to bury his wife when she died of meningitis, so he fled with his two-year-old daughter. They lived on the streets until his daughter died of dysentery. He buried her in woodland by night. Oskar Wermter, a German Jesuit priest in Harare, says the destitute are taking dying relatives to hospitals under false names, and failing to collect bodies from mortuaries. That is remarkable because "in traditional African culture not to bury your relatives properly is monstrous and exposes you to enormous danger because the unburied person becomes an avenging spirit". Also in Mbare, Agnes James, 38, told us how she lost her house in Operation Murambatsvina and her husband died of tuberculosis. She now sells her body for Z$10,000 (less than 30p) a time to feed her two children. Many clients refuse to wear condoms. Some do not pay. She is ashamed, and terrified of Aids, but says: "There is nothing I can do." A pretty 16-year-old orphan named Tatenda Banda said she was selling herself to six men a day for the same price. In Hatcliffe Extension, another township razed by Operation Murambatsvina, I met a 75-year-old man who had lost four of his six children to Aids. He and his wife were raising 11 grandchildren in a one-room shelter. They slept on hard earth, ate one meal a day and survived on handouts. Just when we thought we could find nothing worse, we were taken to a vast, stinking rubbish dump outside Bulawayo where hundreds of people scavenge for food and rags. They live in makeshift shelters in the surrounding bush and get water from a stream. John Ncube, 55, is one of the skeletal inhabitants of that hellish, fly-infested place. He is raising four children in a shelter made from asbestos sheets recovered from the dump. He scours the dump for bottles, which he sells for Z$100 - a fraction of a penny. He finds a bottle every couple of days. His best find, he told us, was the filthy, ragged T-shirt he was wearing. It is not only black Zimbabweans who are suffering. Whites without access to foreign currency are also being reduced to poverty. One afternoon a 14-year-old girl named Kristy and her 11-year-old brother, Ray, walked up the drive of our Harare guesthouse. They were begging. Their family had been thrown out of their flat because they could not afford the rent. Another afternoon we drove about 40 miles out of Harare to a remote agricultural college to meet Dirk Buitendag and his wife, Maxi, so crippled with arthritis that she can barely walk. For more than 40 years Mr Buitendag ran a 930-hectare farm that employed nearly 200 people and was a model of its kind. He abandoned it in July 2002 after five attacks by Mr Mugabe's war veterans. "We decided our lives were not worth a farm," he said. The Buitendags gave their two sons their foreign currency so they could emigrate. They believed they could survive on their pension and savings, but both were consumed by inflation. Mr Buitendag once went back to his farm to find the house stripped bare, barns sold for scrap, trees felled and fields abandoned. "It's heartbreaking. They have destroyed everything." Now, at 78, he has gone back to work as the college's stockman. He earns Z$460,000 before tax - less than £7.50 - but the job comes with a tiny house and use of a vehicle. They use friends' cast-off furniture and rely on remittances from their sons for food. Their only indulgence is an occasional glass of whisky. Mrs Buitendag needs a spinal operation costing Z$16 million, and her husband has turned to the Farm Families Trust, which helps about 50 destitute former farmers. "It's the first time in my life we have ever accepted charity," he said. "We were well off once, but now we are beggars." Life and Death 85% probability of dying between 15 and 60 12% probability of dying before the age of 5 £23.50 annual government health spending per person 180,000 Aids-related deaths a year 160,000 children with HIV 1.1 million Aids orphans 8% of HIV-positive people receiving antiretroviral treatment Sources: UN, WHO The Times (UK) |