Zimbabwe’s demolition blitz which has left hundreds of thousands homeless was a “disgrace on the continent”, Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka said Thursday, adding he would be in favour of sanctions against Harare.
The 1986 Nobel Literature prizewinner is in South Africa where he will give a lecture as part of 87th birthday celebrations for former president Nelson Mandela.
“Bulldozers have turned into an instrument of governance. It is the ordinary people who suffer in those areas which the party in power believe is against its rule,” the 71-year-old writer said.
“It’s a disgrace on the continent,” he told SABC public radio in an interview.
Some 200 000 people have been left homeless, according to UN estimates, after a two-pronged clean-up campaign in the embattled southern African country which President Robert Mugabe said aimed at ridding cities of crime and grime.
Illegal shacks, stalls and backyard homes have been demolished and many families have been dumped in transit camps in the middle of the Zimbabwean winter, and are now living in makeshift tents and shelters.
The Zimbabwean opposition has denounced the blitz as a campaign of repression and say up to 1.5 million Zimbabweans have lost their homes. (more…)
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Now read this excerpt:
No amount of rocking to Bon Jovi will free a country like Zimbabwe from its Marxist meltdown. How do you fight starvation when you have a country going from breadbasket to basket case after its dictator seizes private farms and gives them to supporters and squatters?
How do you fight poverty and homelessness when the quite mad Mugabe demolishes the homes of hundreds of thousands of poor people in an “urban renewal” project called Operation Drive Out Trash? Zimbabwe’s jobless rate hovers around 70%, its currency is worthless and its GDP shriveled 14% last year alone.
Debt forgiveness? Aid? Zimbabwe has been given 19 loans and 14 lines of credit worth $1.6 billion. Yet, as Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute notes, the country’s economy has shrunk 30% since 1990. (more…)
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