How many times have you complained that your job pays you poo? Well, from now on, you should probably think twice before you make that statement because apparently in Zimbabwe, some people really are.
Much-maligned Zimbabwe Central Bank Governor Gideon Gono was not content stealing money from international organizations . Now he admits to also stealing money from Zimbabwe businesses. In the latest attempt to defend his actions and policies, Gono placed a multi-page homily in the state-controlled press, where he admits to appropriating $20 million from the personal accounts of tobacco and wheat farmers .
However, Gono justifies his actions by stating that the farmers are being compensated. The Zimbabwe government is paying back the farmers with bags of fertilizer .
“Those wheat and tobacco farmers who are owed money by government through the Reserve Bank, are being repaid in the most direct way of supporting their current season’s production activities,” said Gono.
That must be reassuring to both the farmers and their creditors. Personally, I think it’s a load of poo.
We invite students to join this joint action to mobilize human rights advocates worldwide to petition the UN and the African Union to send human rights monitors to Zimbabwe. The PHR Student Program is excited to provide a mini-action pack(pdf) to easily host a photo-petition table on your campus.
Forward the online petition to your chapter listserve and to listserves of relevant student groups:
In a recent letter to the New York Times, I suggested that donor governments maintain targeted sanctions against a small cohort of Zimbabwe’s power elite, but that they should also now provide targeted humanitarian support to the struggling country in transition. Newspaper editors value brevity, but here in the blogosphere, where the real estate is cheap, I’ll elaborate for some added clarity.
Terminological chaos abounds when describing amorphous concepts like humanitarian aid and developmental assistance.And this imprecision breeds poor policy, as in the case of the United States.Where’s the chaos, you ask?Take a look:
So the good news is that the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe is finally getting under control. Weekly case fatality rates have dropped from over 5% to now about 1%. The bad news is that tuberculosis may soon take its place as a leading cause of death in Zimbabwe. According to the WHO, Zimbabwe has the the fourth highest incidence of TB in the world.
When the government finally admitted four months following the cholera outbreak last year that it did indeed face a spiraling epidemic, the ZANU-PF regime funneled the meager resources it did have toward combating the disease. One of the problems with this vertical health approach, however, is that it redirected resources away from other pressing health issues.
Enter tuberculosis.
When PHR investigators spoke with physicians at Beatrice Infectious Diseases Hospital in Harare, they reported to us that they could no longer treat their TB patients because government authorities mandated they only treat people infected with cholera.
The current health crisis in Zimbabwe poses other major problems including a dysfunctional national laboratory, a lack of diagnostic capacity and a severe shortage of first-, second- or third-line drugs to treat TB. Do you hear the din of alarm bells? They’re sounding the spread of multiple-drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and the most severe form, extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB). These highly lethal forms of TB develop and spread rapidly because treatment interruptions allow the bacillus to evolve and evade the antibiotics by various cellular mechanisms.
Drug-resistant variants of TB are arguably more of a threat to southern Africa than the spread of cholera, which is an acute illness that remains both treatable and curable with basic medical services. Drug-resistant TB will pervade in the regions for years and will greatly increase the cost and complexity of treatment and care.
A new documentary on Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic quotes a former UN humanitarian official as saying:
The United Nations deliberately downplayed the crisis to avoid confrontation with President Mugabe and his ZANU-PF regime.
The Geneva-based International Council of Voluntary Agencies goes further and calls for the UN to sack the current UN humanitarian coordinator in Zimbabwe, Augostino Zacharias, because he’s too closely tied to Mugabe and won’t speak out against him. This blame-and-shame approach does make enticing news copy, but unfortunately does not address the real issue.
That the UN engages in quiet diplomacy with the host government should come as no surprise. It was this type of closed-door dialogue that ultimately persuaded Mugabe to allow humanitarian organizations to resume operations after a four-month mandatory hiatus in 2008.
So what are the real issues? Let’s start with Mugabe’s 2005 nationalization of municipal water services for political gain and profit. After the government took control, it abrogated its most fundamental responsibility toward its citizenry by
dumping contaminated waste into the water reservoir
failing to maintain the reticulated water system
neglecting to procure enough aluminum sulfate for water treatment
shutting off water to selected communities
abandoning municipal waste collection
ignoring sewerage repairs
It’s Mugabe’s malfeasance that directly caused the eight-month-old and ongoing cholera epidemic. So if there’s anyone to blame, it’s the octagenarian with all the power.
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith just announced that his government will provide Zimbabwe with another $6.5 million in aid to help the so-called unity government restore urgent access to safe water, adequate sanitation and health services.
What’s so controversial? He’s betting that historically corrupt ZANU-PF government officials won’t again abscond with these aid dollars the way they have in the past. (Remember last November when reserve bank governor Gideon Gono stole $7.3 million from the Global Fund?)
At least Australia has done its homework. In May 2005, the Mugabe regime nationalized MDC-run municipal water services for political gain and profit. Within three years under ZANU-PF control, the national water authority had collapsed due to malfeasance, which directly led to the current cholera outbreak. 4,000 dead and 90,000 infected - and all from an entirely preventable and easily treatable disease. If there’s any good news with the new unity government, it’s that water services are now back under municipal control. And that’s why Australia is donating half of the new aid to municipal authorities for the provision of water treatment chemicals.
And what of Zimbabwe’s other major donors? Both the US government and UK government have placed their bets on ZANU-PF not changing its stripes any time soon. The United States and United Kingdom have both stated their respective intents to wait until the unity government has made tangible progress toward improving the human rights situation before they renew substantive development aid to Zimbabwe.
Unfortunately, this modest increase in humanitarian aid from the benevolent Aussies will not address the underlying causes of the current outbreaks in disease and collapse of the health system. For that Zimbabwe needs billions in development aid that will only pour in once the Americans and Brits are satisfied.
Mr Tsvangirai said there was only a “one in a thousand” chance that the incident involved any foul play.
UPDATE (3/8): Public remorse from the distraught driver of the truck that ran into the Tsvangirais leads some to believe the crash was an accident. The Movement for Democratic Change continues to insist on a full and impartial investigation. (Source)
Hours later, we received an email from a close colleague and friend in Harare. She conveyed some of her suspicions:
We are in shock here at the death of Morgan Tsvangirai’s wife today. His car met, as we say here, “A Black Dog”—an organized accident. ZANU-PF has done it many, many times to people who have gone against them.
She saw it first on SKY News.
Then she changed the channel to the local ZBC news—mouth piece of the government—which waited until the end of its broadcast to mention that the PM was involved in an accident and that his wife was killed. Our friend heard that the ZBC didn’t know how to handle the story, or they were not told to report it. She’s also heard that in case of any unrest, the police and army are in position with water cannons and ready to beat up the citizens.
She concluded:
This is the worst thing that could happen.
We couldn’t agree more and extend our heartfelt sympathies to Morgan Tsvangirai and his family for the tragic loss of his wife. We urge a full and independent investigation, so the facts can be known and appropriate action taken.
The US Department of State released this week its human rights report card for 194 countries and territories, which it has submitted annually to the US Congress in compliance with the federal Foreign Assistance Act (PDF) since 1977. It took a whopping 26,000 words to describe the Mugabe regime’s “pervasive and systematic abuse of human rights” during 2008.
You’d think the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, who wrote the tome, would address most if not all of the rights enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But that’s not the case.
As part of the Physicians for Human Rights delegation who traveled to Zimbabwe to investigate Mugabe’s immiseration of the health sector in December 2008, I was eager to read the State Department’s report and compare findings. What? Not one paragraph devoted to violations of the right to health in Zimbabwe? The 2008 collapse of the health sector in Zimbabwe was unprecedented in scale and scope, and the State Department didn’t address it?!
This dearth of information should in no way imply the counter-factual position that Mugabe’s ZANU-PF regime respects and protects the right to health. In fact, the PHR delegation found that the health crisis in Zimbabwe is a direct outcome of the malfeasance of the ZANU-PF government and the systematic violation of a wide range of human rights—not just civil and political rights, which the US State Department details.
PHR documented violations of
the right to life due to:
uncontrolled cholera epidemic
cessation and obstruction of humanitarian aid
lack of access to emergency obstetric care
changes in ARV regimens
the prohibition against torture:
widespread ZANU-PF policy of torture, intimidation, kidnappings and other inhuman and degrading treatment
core obligations of the rights to health, water, and food such as:
denial of equal access to health services on a non-discriminatory basis directly following from the dollarization of the health sector
denial of access to medicines
denial of access to safe water and adequate sanitation
denial of minimum essential food that is nutritionally adequate
Perhaps Secretary of State Clinton will conduct a more thorough assessment of human rights violations when reporting to Congress next year.
Just take a look at Zimbabwe, which until recently was one of Africa’s leading agricultural producers. In fact agriculture contributed to 45% of Zimbabwe’s export earnings and provided livelihood to more than 70% of the population. Tragically, more than seven million Zimbabweans today rely on food assistance, according to the UN World Food Program.
How did this phenomenal collapse happen so quickly, rendering Zimbabwe the ignominious distinction of becoming the first failed state without a war to blame? Land reform.
In April 2000, the ZANU-PF-controlled parliament approved amending the Zimbabwe Constitution to establish a legal framework for land acquisition. Mugabe quickly mobilized some 35,000 war veterans and unemployed youth militia and ordered them to begin expropriating white-owned farms while brutally assaulting and sometimes murdering the commercial farmers and farm workers.
The Government claims “that restoring land to the landless majority was right and necessary”. But under the guise of land redistribution to benefit landless black Zimbabweans, Mugabe instead awarded many of these once productive farms to government ministers and other ZANU-PF supporters for their patronage. Many of these farmlands now remain fallow and serve as nothing more than second homes to these non-farming cronies, including Zimbabwe’s First Shopper, Grace Mugabe.
The land seizure led to a 70% fall in agricultural production, and precipitated the collapse of the economy. In fact Zimbabwe’s economy is so bad, one needs to employ scientific notation (remember general chemistry?) to comprehend the rate of inflation – estimated to be 89.7 x 1021% – otherwise known as 89.7 sextillion percent!
Zimbabwe’s new Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai sure has his work cut out for him, especially by promising that “every health worker, teacher, soldier and policeman will receive their pay in foreign currency until we are able to stabilize the economy.”
It hurts that as we celebrate here today there are some who are in prison. I can assure you that they are not going to remain in those dungeons any day or any week longer.
Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s new Prime Minister, made this pledge to thousands of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) supporters following his swearing-in ceremony on 11 February 2009 at Glamis Stadium in Harare. One week later, human rights advocate Justina Mukoko and MDC activists Ghandi Mudzingwa and Fidelis Chiramba remain in Chikurubi Maximum Prison where Zimbabwean security forces have tortured and starved these three civic leaders as well as some 30 other individuals.
Zimbabwean police, military, and CIO officers are skilled sadists who employ an array of techniques in their arsenal of torture: electrocution, falanga (beating the soles of the feet), genital mutilation, water boarding, bludgeoning, and burning to name a few. Government authorities are violating the most basic rights and freedoms of these detainees - some of whom have been imprisoned and held incommunicado in inhumane conditions for several months. Their health has severely deteriorated, and they have not received adequate medical attention.
That ZANU-PF has successfully retained control over the military, police, and security forces bodes poorly for an amelioration of the human rights situation. But Tsvangirai opted to join the unity government with his nemesis Mugabe as president. If he cannot wield enough power as prime minister to keep his pledge and have these men and women be released immediately, there is little hope Tsvangirai will be able to succeed in tackling even bigger challenges such as establishing rule of law, feeding seven million Zimbabweans who face starvation, or addressing the underlying causes of the current outbreaks in disease and collapse of the health system.
