Hell on Earth

Poverty and the plague of a dictator who brought an entire country to its knees

16^th March 2007

The border post at Beitbridge is a crash course in the complexities of a country in freefall.

The town, such as it is, grew up around a bridge built across the Limpopo in 1920 by the German mining tycoon Alfred Beit. Today, it marks the border between Africa's largest economy, South Africa, and its fastest shrinking one, Zimbabwe. The traffic is almost entirely one way. Trucks, cars and trailers are backed up for hours waiting to cross south to where the money is.

Less than a mile north of the Zimbabwean border, the tarmac road disappears into red dust and a sign declares that a resurfacing project is under way. The sign has been there since the last election. No one expects anything to be built.Developers have flanked the road with shiny filling stations and supermarkets with asphalt car parks. But this is also charade. There is no petrol or diesel at the pumps. The car parks are empty. Instead the forecourts are littered with people waiting patiently, sometimes days or weeks at a time.

At the supermarket the aisles are full of produce, but the shoppers are few and far between.

The prices change hourly. Economists expect Zimbabwe's inflation rate to pass 2,000 per cent this year. To put that startling number into context, the next worst rate in the world is Burma, with 60 per cent.

Since the turn of the century, this country's once sophisticated economy has shrunk by half. The result is 80 per cent unemployment, and 85 per cent of the population living in poverty. From unplanted fields to unwatered safari parks to hospitals emptied of nurses and doctors, there is no sector of society that has remained unscathed.

It was not always so. When, in 1980, Robert Mugabe won the first free elections in independent Zimbabwe, he was feted by Western liberals as a beacon of hope for Africa and hailed by his people as a liberator.

His early approach of soothing racial rivalries and respecting property rights encouraged many. But that was never the whole truth. Soon after taking power, he launched a brutal pogrom, the Gukuruhundi, against the minority Ndebele people, killing as many as 25,000.

North Korean-trained and equipped soldiers were unleashed on the civilian population and thousands of war veterans who had fought the white minority army led by Iain Smith just as hard as the Zanu soldiers under Mr Mugabe's command were murdered.

By 1995, when Nelson Mandela visited Beitbridge to open a new bridge and salute the liberator, Mr Mugabe's grip on power was starting to loosen. His strategy for holding on was to rip the country apart. Sensing that the only violent threat to his authority would come from war veterans disenchanted with their own fate in the new Zimbabwe, he scrapped the principle of willing buyer and willing seller established in the 1979 talks at Lancaster House and incited land invasions. Using the racial, anti-imperialist rhetoric of the independence struggle, the President unleashed organised militias to take back the land from their "oppressors".

At the forefront of this disastrous "land reforms" were Joyce Mujuru and Emmerson Mnangagwa, two of the leading favourites to succeed the 83-year-old Mr Mugabe should he die or, less credibly, step down.

The human cost of what followed - when scores of white farmers, and many thousands more black farm labourers were intimidated or killed - was heavy. The economic cost was crippling. What had been dubbed the breadbasket of Africa was turned in a few short years into a famine zone in need of emergency grain imports from the World Food Programme.

Zimbabwe's real economy, or what's left of it, is in the teeming slums and flea markets that surround the ghostly modern Beitbridge. Here, everything is for sale. Filthy single-storey brothels service the lorry drivers. No one is testing for HIV - they don't need to, the infection rates are near total. Touts rush to open car windows offering petrol, paraffin, hard currency, all the things that can only be bought on the black market.

Bundles of the monopoly money of hyperinflation are passed shiftily from hand to hand. In a world where paper money has almost no value, unless it is South African rands, the system of barter has returned. But even this informal sector is not left alone. As foreign currency reserves have collapsed along with exports, the regime has turned its attentions to squeezing the black market in search of the cash that it needs to survive. In its most basic form, this has meant giving the green light to unpaid police and security services to loot and extort the very street markets that people are using to survive.

All across the country, stalls boasting little more than homegrown maize and fruit picked from trees and carried on foot for miles into urban areas is being confiscated and distributed among regime loyalists.

Everyone knows they are being watched. Mugabe's spies are everywhere. The secret police of the Central Intelligence Organisation - plain-clothes informants - are on the lookout for smugglers, border hoppers, opposition members, anyone who could pose a threat or offer an income. They are also on the lookout for journalists. The Mugabe regime would rather the world looked elsewhere, so reporting without permission now carries a two-year prison sentence.

On the other side of Beitbridge, there is a new camp for the deported migrants. Every day upwards of a thousand people are bused from Johannesburg back into the country they are so desperate to escape. They stand in long lines at a tent erected by the International Organisation for Migration. At the end of the line is the promise of soup and a bus ride to Bulawayo or Harare.

Most of the people in the line will disembark, turn around and start the trek back to the border. It is their only realistic chance of survival.

By Daniel Howden - The Independent, UK