Mugabe in denial about Cholera epidemic

NY Times:

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A ferocious cholera epidemic, spread by water contaminated with human excrement, has stricken more than 16,000 people across Zimbabwe since August and killed more than 780. Health experts are warning that the number of cases could surpass 60,000, and that half the country’s population of 12 million is at risk.

With cholera spilling into neighboring countries, there are rising international calls for President Robert Mugabe to step down after 28 years in power. But he seems only to be digging in and even declared Thursday that the nation’s cholera epidemic had ended, just a day after the World Health Organization warned that the outbreak was grave enough to carry “serious regional implications.”

The outbreak is yet more evidence that Zimbabwe’s most fundamental public services — including water and sanitation, public schools and hospitals — are shutting down, much like the organs of a severely dehydrated cholera victim.

Zimbabwe’s once promising economy, disastrously mismanaged by Mr. Mugabe’s government, has been spiraling downward for almost a decade, but residents here say the free fall has gained frightening velocity in recent weeks. Most of the nation’s schools, which were once the pride of Africa, producing a highly literate population, have virtually ceased to function as teachers, whose salaries no longer even cover the cost of the bus fare to work, quit showing up.

Water cutoffs are common and prolonged here, but last week the taps went dry in virtually all of the capital’s densely packed suburbs, where people most need clean drinking water to wash their hands and food, essential steps to containing cholera. On rutted streets crowded with out-of-school children and jobless adults, piles of uncollected garbage mounted and thick brown sludge burbled up from burst sewer lines.

The capital’s two largest hospitals, sprawling facilities that once would have provided sophisticated care in just such a crisis, had largely shut down weeks earlier after doctors and nurses, their salaries rendered virtually worthless by the nation’s crippling hyperinflation, simply stopped coming to work.

Inflation officially hit 231 million percent in July, but John Robertson, an independent economist in Zimbabwe, estimates that it has now surged to an astounding eight quintillion percent — that is an eight followed by 18 zeros.

The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that soldiers — Mr. Mugabe’s enduring muscle — rioted last week on the streets of the capital, breaking windows and looting stores, after waiting days in bank lines without being able to withdraw their meager salaries from cash-short tellers. A midlevel officer who participated in the mayhem, but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of prosecution, said troops were enraged that they could no longer afford to buy food or send their children to school.

“As we talk, children of chefs are in private schools learning while ours are playing in dusty roads,” he said bitterly, using the local term for the people in power.

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Mugabe is a disgrace to humanity, but he manages to hang on to his tyrannical power over this wretched country. He has done the impossible by making apartheid seem like the good ole days. While he may have some supporters still in positions of power and he may have some appeal to those who want to blame the US and the UK for everything that goes wrong, the fact is that Mugabe is one of the most incompetent rulers in the world.