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Zimbabwe melts down in slow-motion

Survival is a daily test with inflation at 7,000 percent and basics of life missing.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published October 19, 2007

HARARE, Zimbabwe - Around dawn, Susan lights a fire of wood and garbage in the yard to boil tea. There's no sugar, and sometimes no tea either - just mugs of tepid water for her two boys to drink before they head to school.

It's the start of a typically desperate day in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, where the economy is so crippled that households across the country often awake without power or running water, and a soft drink can be a luxury. Those who suffer most appear so burdened by the effort of living from day to day, they have little energy left to fight for change - and little hope for a better future.

Susan's is a world in slow-motion meltdown.

The first dim wash of daylight at 5 a.m. brings the clatter of chores on treeless Rakgajani Avenue in western Harare, in a crowded district where some homes are no bigger than a household garage. Firewood comes into the city from outside, on buses, on women's heads, or trundled in on pushcarts to be sold on street corners.

Susan's boys, Paul, 9, and Dumi, 7, are walking to school when their mother takes up her spot on the sidewalk. Here she'll spend most of the day selling maputi, a popcorn-like snack of roasted maize kernels, and sometimes vegetables and children's clothing she has foraged at the district market.

She sits on the concrete paving outside her house, a tall lean woman aged 32, wearing a faded cotton head scarf. The weather forecast on state radio says it will be 95 degrees Fahrenheit by noon. She displays just one small plastic bag of maputi in case the police come on a confiscation raid and accuse her of illegal vending. The rest she hides inside her house until customers request it.

"We have no money, but still the police chase us," Susan said.

With food and hard currency scarce and inflation running at nearly 7,000 percent for this year, Mugabe's government seems to have decided that the vendors share the blame - that they are price-gougers and black-marketeers and the sources of worsening crime.

Those were the official reasons given for a brutal slum clearance operation in 2005 that left tens of thousands of people homeless and saw makeshift markets flattened by bulldozers in urban strongholds of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

The government called it "Operation Clear Out the Filth."

On a good day, Susan earns 300,000 Zimbabwe dollars (60 cents at black market exchange rates). Her husband recently lost his job as a driver at a small engineering factory that went broke. When he was working, he brought home less than Susan earned as a street vendor.

Now that the central bank has struck three zeros off the inflated bank notes, Susan no longer has to wrestle with armfuls of banknotes.

But no matter what shape the money takes, it can't buy Susan's family the basics. She says they manage on one daily meal of sadza, or corn meal porridge, with scraps of boiled vegetables but no cooking oil, salt, meat or bread. She last drank a Coke at a relative's wedding in April and can't remember when her sons last had cookies or candy.

"Now we say that's good - it rots your teeth," she said.

The young play street soccer with a ball of plastic bags held together with rubber bands. But they have little will or energy left for play, said Jane, Susan's sister. Both women asked that their surnames be withheld, saying they fear retaliation by Mugabe's agents.

By about 2 p.m., the boys are back from school. They quickly shed their uniforms. To keep them uncreased, Susan wipes them down with a damp cloth, then covers them with books, old magazines, her Bible, a tea tray of saucers and cracked china plates and an old wooden footstool. No matter how hard life is, the children must look neat.

Uniforms are obligatory, and Susan would have to sell 400 packets of maputi to afford a new school blazer for Dumi.

Many trace the economic collapse to the program Mugabe launched in 2000 to seize white-owned farms and give them to blacks to right the wrongs of the murungu, the whites who founded this corner of the British empire and ruled it until it won independence in 1980.

The often violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms disrupted the agriculture-based economy of what used to be a regional breadbasket.

The government has cracked down hard on Mugabe's critics, arresting and beating opposition leaders. Mugabe himself has declared his "police have a right to bash" dissidents.

Still clinging to the remnants of the democracy it inherited from the whites, when the black majority had no vote, Zimbabwe is holding presidential and Parliament elections in March. Past elections have been marred by violence, intimidation and allegations of rigging.

Mugabe, 83, the only ruler since independence, is to run again next year. If he wins "we will die of hunger," Jane said. "If anyone else wins, we will be beaten. It will be war."

[Last modified October 19, 2007, 00:55:24]