Mugabe’s Opponents Say Cholera Denial Shows ‘Madness’
2008-12-12 14:48:20.770 GMT
By Brian Latham
Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Zimbabwe’s leading opposition party said President Robert Mugabe displayed “madness” yesterday when he denied the existence of a cholera threat in the nation he has ruled for 21 years.
A United Nations health agency stood by its warning that the number of people infected may almost quadruple to more than 60,000, while a U.S. aid agency authorized new emergency assistance for Zimbabwe.
Mugabe made his comment in a nationally televised address, saying cholera “no longer exists” in the country and crediting the World Health Organization and the Southern African Development Community for their help in fighting the disease. He also dismissed calls by global leaders for him to resign.
Mugabe’s announcement is “clearly madness,” Nelson Chamisa, a spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said in an interview from the capital, Harare. “At least 800 people have died, perhaps more because we do not really know the effect of the disease in outlying rural areas.”
Cholera, mainly spread through contaminated water and food and poor sanitation, causes severe diarrhea and vomiting that can be fatal. The first cases in the Zimbabwean outbreak were reported in August. A collapse of the country’s economy has led to shortages of chemicals for water-treatment plants.
U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee criticized Mugabe and his government.
‘Insatiable Greed’
“The so-called leaders of this country need to stop feeding their insatiable greed and take care of the poor and deserving Zimbabweans languishing because of corruption,” McGee said in an e-mailed statement today.
“In the past year, the U.S. has provided over $218 million in humanitarian assistance to Zimbabwe. We are the leading donor,” McGee said. “What is the Mugabe regime doing? It is buying hundreds of cars so that every minister can have multiple vehicles. It is buying plasma televisions for judges. It is stifling the private sector so that mines and factories are forced to close, laying off workers, while harassing the non- governmental organizations that try to provide support to suffering Zimbabweans.”
More than 16,000 Zimbabweans have contracted cholera since it broke out in August, the WHO said in a statement yesterday.
The government put the death toll at 783. Budiriro, a working- class township in Harare that houses about 300,000 people, has been hardest-hit, the UN agency said.
‘Worst-Case Scenario’
“Our response to the cholera outbreak is well under way, though in a worst-case scenario we still predict as many as 60,000 people could be affected,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said in a telephone interview from Geneva a few hours after Mugabe’s announcement. “The longer-term issue of cholera- infected water in rivers can’t be resolved overnight. Solving the water problem takes much longer.”
U.S. officials also said the crisis is growing worse.
Fatality rates in some areas are reaching 4.8 percent, while seasonal rains threaten to spread the epidemic, said Ky Luu, director of foreign disaster assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington.
USAID authorized $6.2 million in additional emergency aid yesterday, bringing U.S. spending on Zimbabwe’s food shortage and health crisis to more than $226 million since October 2007, said administrator Henrietta Fore. The agency also will finance the WHO’s command center for the crisis.
‘Dire’
The United Nations Childrens Fund, or Unicef, is seeking
$17.5 million in emergency funding to cope with the cholera outbreak.
“The situation in Zimbabwe is dire and our response has to match the severity,” Roeland Monasch, the group’s acting representative for Zimbabwe, said in an e-mailed statement. “The deepening crisis in Zimbabwe comes amidst growing food insecurity and the HIV/AIDS epidemic and poses the worst threat to child survival and development in 20 years.”
Zimbabwe’s doctors, with help from the Southern African Development Community and the World Health Organization, “have quelled the outbreak,” Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu said in a telephone interview from Harare yesterday.
President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown “can stop calling for the invasion of Zimbabwe now that we have defeated cholera,” Ndlovu said. “The claims they’ve made that we cannot control or govern our country have been laid to rest. We don’t need to hear more from their dirty mouths. We don’t need to hear more about military intervention from their leashed poodles in Kenya, either.”
‘Using Sarcasm’
The U.S. president was among several Western leaders who, along with Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, this week called for Mugabe to step down.
Mugabe’s denial was intended as sarcasm, George Charamba, his spokesman, said today in an interview from Harare.
“President Mugabe was merely using sarcasm to clinch an argument with two foreign broadcasters,” he said. “The BBC and Radio France International had both linked cholera with the need for an invasion of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe does not call for the invasion of European countries when they have outbreaks of mad cow disease.”
Mugabe has declared a national health emergency so he can’t have meant there was no cholera, Charamba said.
Cholera has spread from Zimbabwe into the neighboring countries of Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa. The French government, which holds the rotating European Union presidency, said Zimbabwe refused visas to a six-person team of diplomats and specialists who tried to enter the country to plan for aid delivery.
‘Dead in the Streets’
A decade of recession and recurrent famine is weakening the population, making it susceptible to diseases, said Caritas, a Catholic aid agency.
“Our staff say that people are dropping dead in the streets from cholera,” Caritas Secretary-General Lesley-Anne Knight said in a statement on the organization’s Web site. “They’ve witnessed people mixing cow dung with what’s left of their food to make it go further. The poverty is at its most dehumanizing.” |
