Another Jimmy Carter Success Story

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/22/wzim22.xml

70pc of workforce has fled Zimbabwe, says report
By Christopher Munnion in Johannesburg
(Filed: 22/11/2004)

Up to 70 per cent of Zimbabwe's workforce, some 3.4 million people, has fled the country to escape the political oppression and collapsing economy under President Robert Mugabe's rule, according to research by an independent church study group.

The South African-based Solidarity Peace Trust said that most of them had crossed the borders into neighbouring countries, with an estimated 1.5 million skilled and able-bodied workers arriving in South Africa to seek work to support families left behind in Zimbabwe.

"An estimated 25 to 30 per cent of the entire Zimbabwean population has left the nation," the Peace Trust reported.

"Out of five million potentially productive adults, 3.4 million are outside Zimbabwe. This is a staggering 60 to 70 per cent of productive adults."

Zimbabwe's economy is in its most dire crisis since independence in 1980.

Unemployment remains at about 70 per cent, inflation persists in three figures and the UN and other aid organisations have warned that the country will again face severe food shortages caused mainly by the government's ill-planned and violent seizure of white-owned commercial farms which has wrecked a once-thriving agricultural sector.

Political repression and the heavy-handed suppression of any opposition to the Mugabe government by the authorities have added to the country's economic woes and forced many professional and skilled people to leave by any route they can find.

"The loss of skills has impacted on the health and education services in Zimbabwe," the Peace Trust report said. "Many professionals such as teachers, nurses, policemen and artisans have been driven out by political events and are living like vagrants in South Africa."

Kevin Dowling, the Roman Catholic bishop of Rustenburg, said he feared that the exodus from Zimbabwe would increase in the run-up to the next general election, due to be held in Zimbabwe next March.

If the Zimbabwean government went ahead with its plans to ban human rights groups and block foreign funds from reaching local activists, political oppression was bound to increase, he said.

"The climate of oppression could be ratcheted up with impunity and there is a good chance we in South Africa will have to receive yet more refugees," the bishop said.

The report urges the South African government to make it easier for Zimbabwean asylum seekers to find work in the country to avoid a worsening humanitarian crisis.