Zimbabwe Update -- Dumping Babies in Harare

Mad Bobby Mugabe's program to create a racist, Maoist hell right here on earth is progressing quite nicely, thank you. The Times reports:

THE first time Knowledge Mbanda found a dead baby in the drains of Harare, he was horrified. “It is completely against our culture to abandon children,” he said. “I thought it must be of a woman who had been raped or a prostitute.”

But now he and fellow council workers find at least 20 corpses of newborn babies each week, thrown away or even flushed down the lavatories of Zimbabwe’s capital.

The dumping of babies, along with what doctors describe as a “dramatic” increase in malnourished children in city hospitals, is the most shocking illustration of the economic collapse of a country that was once the breadbasket of southern Africa.

Some of the corpses are the result of unwanted pregnancies in a country experiencing a rise in sexual abuse and prostitution. But others are newborns dumped by desperate mothers unable to support another child. Inflation has reached 1,000% and the government’s seizure of 95% of commercial farms has seen food production plummet.

The dead gutter babies are the most pitiful victims of a government that believes it can starve its people into compliance, or death, turning Zimbabwe into the only country in the region with a shrinking population.

It gets worse -- read the whole article here.

The health care system has collapsed.

“There are shortages of everything. We have no insulin so cannot treat diabetic patients. You get to theatre and are told there are no clean sheets because the government has not paid the laundry bill. For months we could not do x-rays.

“There’s no saline for drips, because it was used for washing as there was no sterile hand wash. It’s desperate. Quite a number of us are thinking about giving up. Yet when I came here 20 years ago, this health service was one of the best on the continent.”

So many doctors have gone overseas that the surgeon is working with one house officer instead of eight and the hospital almost had to close down casualty altogether because it had no staff.

Yet an aid agency in Harare recently had to incinerate hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of American drugs, including expensive antibiotics, because they were not registered in Zimbabwe.

That's right -- bureaucrats forced the destruction of medicinal supplies because the proper officials had not been bribed.

And there's this:

The government refuses to admit that its people are suffering. For months it even refused to let the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) start the Back to School feeding programme it runs throughout the world. In the end Unicef had to rename it Be in School as the government would not admit that any children were ever taken out of school. Spiralling school fees have forced many parents to withdraw their children from education.

And this:

After a damning UN report on Operation Murambatsvina — which Mugabe described as “an urban beautification programme” — the government announced Operation Garakai to build new houses. But not one person contacted by The Sunday Times, from aid agencies to diplomats, knew of a single victim who has been rehoused by the government.

The few houses that have been built have gone to officials of the ruling party, Zanu-PF.

In case you missed it..., Operation Murambatsvina was the mass destruction of homes in poor neighborhoods that rendered approximately 700,000 people homeless and without any means of support.

Zimbabwe will also have to import 200,000 tons of wheat, 40,000 tons of sorghum and 6,000 tons of rice to avert widespread deaths related to starvation.

The government has no money to pay for this and Mugabe has consistently refused to appeal for food aid. To do so would mean admitting the failure of his land distribution programme.

Yet despite all this Mugabe, the mad Maoist who has brought this horror on his people, is a hero to many throughout southern Africa because of his anti-colonialist past -- such is the power of anti-colonialism, racism, and radical ideology.