Here is an article on the upcoming Zimbabwe election, which most likely will end up in the hands of Mugabe, the dictator like ruler who has turned his country into a nation of "peddlers and beggars" as one citizen says. We can only watch and cringe.Robert Mugabe has run this country for so long that his presence is like some common particulate in the air, taken in with every breath. Gladys Sithole can barely recall a Zimbabwe without him, this inescapable "old man," as she calls him, with godlike powers and all-too-human failings.
A mother of three, she was once a bookkeeper in a dry cleaning store, but jobs like that have mostly vanished. She is a street peddler now in a collapsed society, where a surreal inflation rate of 100,000 percent speedily melts money into nothing, and essential commodities are so scarce that bars of soap are sliced up to be sold by the chunk and cooking oil is traded by the tablespoon.
There is a presidential election scheduled here for March 29, and Sithole said she hoped that this time Mugabe, the 84-year-old former guerrilla fighter who has led the nation since independence in 1980, would finally lose.
Here is a Reuters segment on Zimbabwe:
Mugabe, the strongman ruler from Africa.
With another stolen election, will the populace rise up?
Where I got this article/photo and video:
International Herald Tribune/Reuters
