Zimbabwe on the brink

Among the many signs of a country sliding into chaos, one has gone largely unnoticed: Zimbabwe's morgues are filling up. It's not only that more people are dying, but also that the families of those who are cannot afford to pay their medical bills any longer. To escape them, relatives are registering the sick under false names. When they die, the bodies cannot be claimed.

The practice is just one of the increasingly desperate measures Zimbabweans are taking to survive in a collapsing economy where inflation runs at 1,700 percent a year and the value of local currency can plummet in a few hours.

Most of those who can have left the country in search of a means of survival, or at least made plans to do so. Typical of the estimated three million Zimbabweans who have left — two-thirds of the country's working-age population from doctors and teachers to farm laborers and soldiers — are Mbongani Ntzombane's sons.

They headed south across the Limpopo river, bribing their way into South Africa, and then sent word to their siblings that Johannesburg might not be the promised land but it at least offered hope.

Soon the able-bodied began to empty out of Mandluntsha in southern Zimbabwe. Today, 13 of the 25-strong Ntzombane family have decamped from the village to Johannesburg in an effort to help the very young and old left struggling at home.

“My children send 50 or 100 rand a time, or sugar or rice,” said Ntzombane senior in his three-roomed home set among the parched maize fields of Matabeleland. A pile of car batteries in the living room provides the only electricity.

“It is hard for them to find work when they get there so they do not have a lot to give. But it is better than staying here with no food and no job and Robert Mugabe.”

The bulk of those who leave slip into South Africa, posing as tourists and traders if they have passports and jumping the border if they do not. But anywhere that holds out the prospect of a job is a destination: Namibia, Botswana, London.

What these exiles send back in remittances to their families in Zimbabwe is staving off the total collapse of an economy subjected to the world's highest inflation rate and starved of hard currency to keep basic services afloat.

Even some of Mugabe's most trusted allies are warning that his attempts to paint Zimbabwe as thriving and flush with food is a delusion as inflation wipes out the middle class and malnutrition claims the lives of children in what were once some of the country's wealthiest cities.

The brutal reality of what the exiles have left behind was laid bare this week as opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, and others were severely beaten by the police and arrested on their way to a mass protest against the government. The US and South Africa condemned the assaults as pictures of Tsvangirai's smashed and swollen head prompted outrage overseas. The opposition described the beatings as a turning point in the struggle to force Mugabe from power.

Many ordinary Zimbabweans are not so sure. Their president still looks firmly entrenched to them and popular confidence in the opposition has been sapped over the years since it failed to capitalize on widespread anger when Mugabe stole the 2002 presidential election.

Today, in villages such as Mandluntsha, daily life is instead consumed by the struggle to eat and finding the money for medicines and to keep the children in school. With it there is a growing fear that diminishing food supplies will soon again be used as a political weapon by Mugabe's Zanu-PF party against his most vulnerable opponents.