His country is in ruin, on the verge of total collapse. The highest inflation in the world drives a hopelessly inept government to keep printing furiously devaluing currency. Teachers who don't go to work because their salary no longer even covers bus fare. Key civil servants who get regular raises that are wiped out by inflation in just weeks. Hospitals shut down, sanitation systems broken down, cholera outbreaks spreading. Even soldiers who go hungry.
How does Robert Mugabe cling to power in the midst of this chaos? According to The Telegraph, Mugabe is becoming increasingly reliant on plain, old fashioned graft:
"But the economic collapse has created opportunities for the corrupt elite around Mr Mugabe, who have already benefited from the seizure of white-owned farms.
"Senior figures in the ruling Zanu-PF party can buy US dollars from the Reserve Bank at the meaningless official exchange rate – and then sell them on the parallel market at a 2,000 per cent profit. They can buy fuel from the state at one twelfth of the market price. This gives a powerful core of Zanu-PF figures a vested interest in keeping Mr Mugabe in power.
"The president, who turns 83 later this month, gambles that by keeping this wealthy handful happy, he can survive the economic collapse and extend his 27-year rule."
3 comments:
If the British army needed to be deployed anywhere it was here, not Iraq.
The country that bears some responsibility for Mugabe's excesses is South Africa. They should have intervened a decade ago, diplomatically if possible, with force if not, to put an end to Mugabe's lunacy. Instead they empowered him to bring Zimbabwe to the hellish state it finds itself in today.
This is interesting.
Speaking to the UN General Assembly, Mugabe said the world body had "remained silent about the shocking circumstances of obvious state neglect surrounding the tragic Gulf Coast, where a whole community of mainly nonwhites was deliberately abandoned to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina as sacrificial lambs" while his country was pilloried for its attacks on low income squatter encampments.
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