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Zimbabwe residents lack inspiring opposition leader, says archbishop
Bronwen Dachs, Catholic News Service (CNS)
June 12, 2006

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0603368.htm

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (CNS) -- Without a strong leader, residents of Zimbabwe will not risk taking to the streets to protest chronic food shortages and spiraling poverty, said Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo.

"It is hopeless: There is no one to inspire confidence," Archbishop Ncube said in a telephone interview from Bulawayo. He said Morgan Tsvangirai, who leads the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, "is big talk but has no vision."

President Robert Mugabe, who has led the southern African country since its independence from Britain in 1980, "is the only leader people know," Archbishop Ncube said in early June. Most Zimbabweans "have been intimidated into silence" by the government, and "many have left to make a living in other countries," he said.

Zimbabwe, which has an unemployment rate of more than 70 percent, is chronically short of food as well as foreign currency to import essential commodities, including drugs and fuel.

The country's inflation rate is the highest in the world at more than 1,000 percent and, according to the World Bank, it has the fastest-shrinking economy outside a war zone.

Only a few hundred people took part in a protest march in Bulawayo in late May after a court overturned a government ban, Jesuit Father Nigel Johnson said in a telephone interview from Bulawayo.

The march, led by a group of church organizations called the Zimbabwe Christian Alliance, marked the first anniversary of Operation Restore Order, a government campaign that had riot police demolishing homes and vendors' stalls in shantytowns around major cities.

Fear was the main reason for the low turnout at the march, Father Johnson said.

"People are frightened of being arrested and spending at least one night in a jail that is crowded and dirty," he said.

Security forces intimidate government critics, he said, noting that riot police "don't hesitate to fire tear gas" at protesters and "the army would be called in if that wasn't enough" to make a crowd disperse.

People have vivid memories of the nationwide food riots in 1998, in which eight people were killed and more than 2,000 people were arrested and detained on looting charges, he said.

While church-led marches such as the one in Bulawayo are vital in giving a "voice to the voiceless," not all church-organized gatherings can be relied on to do the same, Archbishop Ncube said, noting that some of these events run the risk of being "turned into a platform for government propaganda."

Mugabe is often given a chance to talk at church-organized gatherings, and Zimbabwe Council of Churches President Peter Nemapare "is notorious for backing Mugabe," said Archbishop Ncube.

Many Zimbabweans are destitute, with the prices of food and other essentials "rising every day," Archbishop Ncube said.

In May the country's Reserve Bank introduced a 100,000-Zimbabwe-dollar note, worth less than $1 in American currency, because shoppers had been forced to carry huge stacks of currency into grocery stores.

Noting that "starvation is a gradual thing," Father Johnson said that Zimbabweans are "getting thinner," and starvation "obviously makes people more susceptible to disease."

There is one doctor to every 15,000 Zimbabweans, and hospitals have few or no medicines, Archbishop Ncube said.

"People see no future here for themselves and their families, and those with a profession just leave," he said.

Those who remain have a "passive acceptance" of their increasing struggle to make ends meet, Father Johnson said.

Also, "their struggle in trying to work out ways of buying goods takes up all their time and physical strength," which means they have no energy for organizing or joining resistance movements, he said.

Zimbabweans have "an acute sense of being alone in their struggle and of disappointment in South Africa" for its reluctance to put pressure on Mugabe to reform, he said.

Some of the estimated 700,000 people who lost their homes and livelihood in last year's Operation Restore Order have returned to rebuild the shantytowns in cities around the country, Archbishop Ncube said.

"Many had been there for 30 years or more and have nowhere else to go," he said.

"The few hundred houses that have been built by the government to replace those torn down have been given to soldiers and civil servants," the archbishop said, noting that none of those affected by the operation have benefited.

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