Obert Gadzi reports that ‘people in the countryside can barely feed themselves as crops fail for the sixth successive year’. This article for Africa Reports states that ‘according to aid workers, the shortage is worst in rural areas where vulnerable people are eating less than one meal a day on average, and schools are appealing for food for their hungry pupils’.

The blame can be placed on the Mugabe’s ZANU PF government’s notorious Fast Track Land Reform Programme, which when it began in 2000 involved the mass invasion of commercial farms by so-called veterans of the 1970s liberation war and landless peasants, marked also the beginning of the agricultural industry’s collapse.

After more than 4,000 commercial farmers were driven from their properties, the initial invaders were themselves pushed from the farms, which were redistributed to members of President Mugabe’s family, government ministers, top ZANU PF party officials, senior army, air force and police officials, and compliant judges and journalists.

Few of the “new farmers” are producing crops. In a rare admission of government failure, Deputy Agriculture Minister Sylvester Nguni said they lacked the skills to produce on what he called a “commercial or even subsistence level”.

Associated Press writer Angus Shaw offers lurid details of life in Harare as the Zimbabwean economy continues to erode.

The smell of sewage and rotting garbage wafts into homes. Acrid smoke hangs in the air where families have tried to burn household waste. Dysentery, food poisoning and diarrhea break out. With no foreign currency for gas and equipment, garbage collection is the latest casualty as Zimbabwe’s economy crumbles.
(more…)

Tererai Karimakwenda, of SW Radio Africa, reports that on November 20th and 21st, human rights activists from across the Commonwealth met in Valletta, Malta, for the second Commonwealth Human Rights Forum. Their meeting was just days prior to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on November 25th to 27th and they made several recommendations for the heads of state to consider. Zimbabwe was one of 3 countries discussed specifically for its human rights abuses, along with Uganda and The Maldives.

The participants recommended the Commonwealth continue dialogue with the Zimbabwean government, as it did in Nigeria and South Africa during their suspension and withdrawal periods, and not
abandon the people of Zimbabwe. They urged that Heads of State of SADC countries in particular demand greater adherence to human rights norms by the Zimbabwean government.

From This is Zimbabwe.

The Zimbabwean Pundit posted this Quote of the Week from a former liberation war hero Wilf Mhanda

“The MDC leadership totally underestimated Mugabe. They believed the struggle for democracy would be hard, but they never understood he was prepared to destroy everything — them, the economy, institutions, infrastructure, the whole country and everything in it to survive.”

Andrew Meldrum in an article for The Guardian reports that Deputy Agriculture Minister Nguni, speaking to the annual congress of the Zimbabwe Farmer’s Union, conceded that the main cause of the current massive crop failure was that formerly white-owned farms were given to “people without the faintest idea of farming”. This admision was to an organization of skilled black farmers largely left out of the land redistribution.

“Zimbabwe’s inflation has soared to an annual rate of 359 percent, one of the highest rates in the world. There is little chance that the government can reverse the trend of hyperinflation without extraordinary measures.” This Voice of America report goes on to say: “Economists say the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) recent prediction of 400 percent annual inflation by year-end will be outstripped, and one-thousand-percent is more likely.”

Marko Phiri, a freelance writer from Zimbabwe, reports in an article for the National Catholic Reporter that while “according to the Labor Ministry, unemployment stands at 9 percent, independent economists and labor bodies, such as the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, put unemployment at more than 70 percent and insist jobs still are being lost. The Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe’s main opposition political party, puts unemployment at 80 percent. Out of a work force of 3.5 million, some 2.7 million may be unemployed.”