(HERALD) Statistics on Zim situation false
Statistics on Zim situation falseBy Mabasa Sasa
If you are reading this article, there is a strong possibility that you are one of a handful of people remaining in Zimbabwe. The others are this writer, the vendor who sold you this paper and President Robert Mugabe and his Government officials. And where has the rest of the country gone?
Well, for starters, HIV/Aids has decimated the population, thousands are fleeing to South Africa every day, even more are starving to death (some four million according to the World Food Programme) and "the Mugabe regime" has butchered the remainder.
A publication run by the Philadelphia Church of God ("Philadelphia" interestingly means "City of Brotherly Love") called "Trumpet.com", says there is a "human tsunami of people fleeing the nation".
In fact, the website claims that "according to recent population estimates, Zimbabwe may be down to seven million citizens — a sharp drop from 11 million".
All things considered, you must celebrate; you are extremely lucky to be alive in this God-forsaken country!
But then again, all these reports smack of unbridled, ill-conceived and, ultimately, desperate propaganda.
After all, since the watershed year of 2000, every year with unstinting consistency the world is told that anything between two and four million people in Zimbabwe are on the verge of dying if the international community does not urgently fly in food and medical supplies.
However, not once have these same people ever told us how many Zimbabweans have actually died of starvation.
Generalisations are the order of the day and with the way people like Christopher Dell loved to bandy statistics, we surely would have been loaded with these fatalities.
Is it because no such deaths have in reality been documented and that the millions starving to the point of knocking on Heaven’s door are creations of over-fertile imaginations in Western capitals?
One statistic the propagandists, however, do love to mention at the drop of a hat is that between 3 000 and 5 000 suffering Zimbabweans are migrating to South Africa daily.
Let’s try a little simple mathematics for purposes of erudition.
For argument’s sake, let’s say an average of 4 000 flee the country daily, amounting to 28 000 a week and some 112 000 a month. It then means some 1 344 000 Zimbabweans are leaving for South Africa alone every year — most of them illegally.
And if we are to be conservative and say this has been going on for five years, a whopping 6 720 000 citizens have left a country with a population of under 12 million in half a decade.
Then surely what we have is a Zimbabwean exodus rivalling the Irish fleeing British brutality in years gone by!
And these are statistics that the world has swallowed hook, line and sinker. For instance, one Briton writing to "The Scotsman" online on August 28, 2007, said: "The population has been devastated under (President) Mugabe, two/three million have run away to South Africa (and) thousands killed . . .
"Of the remaining five million, four million are faced with starvation while some two million in the country are living with HIV/Aids."
Zimbabwe has not had a cosy relationship with the World Food Programme in recent memory and it is not hard to see why when one looks at one of their recent takes on the obtaining humanitarian state of affairs.
The WFP reportedly claimed: "Vulnerable families will be forced to resort to eating potentially poisonous wild plants or exchanging sex for food and other desperate measures to survive."
Echoes of Jeff Koinange and his thoroughly discredited claim that Zimbabweans were being forced to eat rats for their daily sustenance. (If Zimbabweans really did need to eat rats to make it from one sunrise to the next, it’s debatable if Koinange would have made out of the country alive!)
Interestingly, even British researchers are now saying the impact of HIV/Aids on the population has not been as catastrophic as the world has for years believed, and recent studies show that Zimbabwe’s demographic composition is, in fact, expanding by some 1 percent per annum.
So unless these new births can be solely credited to the handful of people still living in the country, then perhaps miracles of old are still with us and virginal, and, indeed immaculate conception is not limited to Biblical times.
South Africa, for one, has refused to be bullied by these creative statistics to force it into creating refugee camps for the "human tsunami" sweeping through Beitbridge.
The attempt to have those Zimbabweans that are going to South Africa classified as refugees would place this country in the same frame as Sudan, a country in the throes of civil strife.
South Africa’s Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nquakula was recently quoted by a probably disappointed "Australia Sun Herald" saying: "I believe that we must defuse the myth that millions of Zimbabweans are in South Africa."
She also slammed the media for peddling incorrect figures on the situation, thereby creating a "state of panic".
Labels: NEOCOLONIALISM, THE HERALD, ZIMBABWE
posted by MrK @ 3:35 AM
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