Bjórá 49

11.3.2008 | 01:40

Þar sem allir eru milljónerar, en flestir eiga hvorki til hnífs og skeiðar.

Það má líkja því við að móðuharðindi hafi gengið fyrir Zimbabve, móðuharðindi af mannavöldum. Þetta land sem áður var nokkuð blómlegt, er nú því sem næst rústir einar og sogast æ dýpra niður í hyldýpið.

Í helgarútgáfu Globe and Mail mátti lesa afar fróðlega grein um efnahagsástandið í landinu.

Þar mátti m.a. lesa:

"Harare, the Sunshine City of the tourist brochures, sparkled as recently as a decade ago. A bracing, healthy 1,500 metres above sea level on the stunning highveld, it was an intentional, sturdy metropolis of commerce and finance, trade, manufacturing, government, upmarket shops and professional services.

The sun remains but the shine is gone. Harare stinks. Sunshine City turned sewage farm, as Zimbabwe's Financial Times, one of the country's very few independent news media voices, put it. Although sewage farming is just not the right wording.

There's a theft pandemic of sewer, telephone, electrical and water-supply equipment. The public nuts and bolts, the cables and pipes, of this city of nearly three million people are literally vanishing alongside the flawed management of what infrastructure remains. Think about this: People selling phone wires for food."

"Officially inflation is 100,580 per cent. Unofficially (and probably more accurately) it is more than 150,000 per cent. In any event, there are too few retail commodities to make any kind of measurement accurate.

All surgery at Harare's Parirenyatwa Hospital, the biggest in the country, has ceased because of a shortage of anesthetic, functioning equipment and medical specialists. Nurses and other workers refuse to come to work because their bus transportation costs are greater than their salaries. With the Zimbabwean currency this week falling to a record low of $25-million for a single U.S. dollar, bus fares can change on a single trip."

"Two professionals, a husband and wife, tell me their combined monthly income is $57-million ZWD. "That buys four loaves of bread," says the wife. When bread can be found.

Life in Harare has been described as an existential struggle.

I lived here two decades ago as The Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent. I have come back for a look at the country as its March 29 election campaign gets under way. Because foreign journalists at the moment are unwelcome - it's been four years since the government last gave The Globe permission to report in the country - I have entered as a teacher of religion."

"He negotiates a price of $61-million for a litre of cooking oil, paying for it with the country's newly issued $10-million notes.

"It's the sanctions," John says.

When he refuses to pay $70-million for a three-kilo bag of potatoes, he says again: "It's the sanctions." And when his new, four-wheel drive Isuzu repeatedly stalls because of water in the fuel line, and he says he can't get filters to remedy the problem, he repeats: "It's the sanctions." The sanctions.

Economic mismanagement along with flagrant human-rights abuses and past election fraud are the issues in the election manifestos of Mr. Mugabe's presidential opponents - former finance minister Simba Makoni and Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

But the prime victims here are truth and this ruined country's 12 million ordinary people."

"The inflation. The 80 per cent unemployment. The 21 per cent HIV infection rate (with the country now virtually bereft of anti-retroviral drugs). The exodus of Zimbabwe's best and brightest (I had a long conversation with a student trying to figure out how to complete his bachelor of science degree in nursing with all his instructors suddenly having emigrated). And now a cataclysmic looming food shortage as a result of horrendous rains that devastated the planting of maize, Zimbabwe's staple food crop.

A health-care official told me that, without massive food aid, there will be an explosion in the coming months of young women working as prostitutes, leading to more HIV infections and more AIDS orphans, and more children dying of malnutrition - already a commonplace diagnosis in the country's hospitals and clinics along with widespread diarrhea and typhoid from contaminated urban water supplies.

The news is not all bad.

Some commercial farmers have been invited to reapply to the government for land. Others are working as behind-the-scenes managers of farms redistributed to blacks. I saw a number of productive, well-run farms and drove past an agricultural estate owned by a Zimbabwean cabinet minister with a sign at the gate advertising eggs for sale.

A substantial portion of the population is being supported by remittances from about one million Zimbabweans abroad - estimated to be as much as $1-billion (U.S.) a year, by far the largest inflow of cash into the country. And the rains that ruined maize planting created lush grazing pastures: In a few months there will be meat from now-skinny cows and goats (if anyone can afford it)."

"A health-care professional in her 40s, buying three onions for $10-million at a roadside market and two pints of oil for her car from a man who magically appeared from behind a butcher shop, explained it like this: "I saw my grandfather shot dead in front of me [by Rhodesian troops]. I saw seven men in my village ordered to put on poisoned clothes and run around a house until they worked up a sweat that triggered the poison which entered their pores. I saw all the pregnant women in my village gagged and told to lie on the ground while water was forced up their nostrils to make them talk about where the guerrillas were.

"Most whites were very cruel. People know Mugabe rescued them from this. Every adult Zimbabwean knows he rescued them from this, and many, many believe that to vote for the opposition is to vote to go back to what Mugabe rescued them from." On the road from the village back to Harare, I passed broken-down trucks and a magnificent gleaming-white mansion on a hill overlooking a posh roadhouse called the Sweet Valley Restaurant."

Hér eru svo tvær auglýsingar sem eru birtar í greininni:

Isuzu Wizard This Model is a regretable sale. It comes with brand new tyres, clean almost new V petrol engine, ABS, dual airbags, fitted gas stove for recreational use, 75,000 km only. Please only genuine buyers, only asking Z $450 billion, negotiable.

- newzimbabwe. com

Greystone Park

Charming bedroom home with study/ office, lounge, separate dining room, fitted kitchen, scullery & pantry, / bathrooms, enclosed verandah & fitted bar, open patio overlooking chiptile pool, double staff quarters & storeroom, double lockup garage, satellite dish & alarm, acre with borehole, securely walled with electric fence & electric gate. Only Z$5.7 trillion Better be quick!