It's strange how Zimbabwe disappeared from the news after Mugabe died. Perhaps the assumption was that once the old tyrant had gone, things would inevitably start to get better.
Well, it clearly isn't so. Jane Flanagan reports in the Times from Harare:
Famished children form an orderly line at Samantha Murozoki’s gate from dawn each day. For most, the hot porridge she ladles into their plastic tubs and metal plates will be the only meal they see.
What began with Ms Murozoki, 35, making supper for a few extra mouths in her suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital a few months ago quickly snowballed into a twice-daily feeding scheme on which 3,000 now rely.
Years of economic bungling and corruption, compounded by drought and the coronavirus pandemic, has left half of Zimbabwe’s 15 million population condemned to hunger.
According to new research from Zimvac, a committee of government and humanitarian experts, a third of children in Africa’s one-time breadbasket now suffer from chronic malnutrition. Rates of stunting, and maternal and child mortality, have soared. […]
Although food shortages have been common since Robert Mugabe’s violent land seizures wrecked commercial farms that used to provide jobs for millions, hunger levels are the worst on record.
Data from Zimbabwe’s treasury shows that during the first nine months of this year, the country that once fed an entire region spent £340 million importing food, mostly grain, up from £104 million during the same period last year.
President Mnangagwa’s repeated pledges to end corruption since he helped topple Mr Mugabe three years ago, have long sounded hollow.[…]
Life is bleaker still for children in Zimbabwe’s former agricultural heartlands, where cases of severe acute malnutrition in infants and under-fives have rocketed in the past year. When food is scarce, women and girls are often the first to go without.
Latest data showed that 19 per cent of women of childbearing age are getting the minimum nutritional limit, down from 43 per cent in 2019. Those who beat the increased risk of maternal deaths are often too weak to breastfeed.
As has been noted in the comments, it certainly puts our own problems into perspective.
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