Zimbabwe: from riches to rags: twenty-eight years of authoritarian misrule by Robert Mugabe has turned an African breadbasket into a basket case.

• Author: Dugger, Celia W.
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

Every morning, Rose Moyo, 29, and her husband wake up at 2:20 a.m. and trek to the bank, joining hundreds of other Zimbabweans waiting in line to withdraw the maximum amount of currency the government will allow per day--the equivalent of only one or two American dollars.

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Zimbabwe is in the grip of one of the great hyperinflations in world history. Its once proud people have been reduced to peddlers and paupers, hawkers and black-market hustlers.

And the economic collapse is gaining speed. As the bankrupt government prints ever more money, inflation has gone wild, surpassing an almost unimaginable 40 million percent. (The government had to lop 10 zeros off the currency in August to keep the nation's calculators from being overwhelmed. Had it not acted, 1 U.S. dollar would be worth about 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.]

MUGABE'S RULE

Economists say the only thing that can halt the downward spiral is a political solution that takes control of the country's economy out of the hands of Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old President who has ruled the country since its independence in 1980, when the former British colony of Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.

After a fiercely contested election Last spring, Mugabe has signed a power-sharing agreement with opposition reader Morgan Tsvangirai, but they are still deadlocked over its implementation.

What makes the suffering of Zimbabwe's 12 million people especially tragic is that this was once one of Africa's most successful, countries. Just eight years ago, Zimbabwe was prospering, with an economy driven by wheat, beef, and tobacco exports.

The economic collapse began under the guise of a land-redistribution program in which the government confiscated white-owned farms with violent invasions by thousands of Mugabe supporters. That not only sent...