African Misfortune Abounds

Except for the suffering of the people, things are relatively quiet in Zimbabwe, even while Morgan Tsvangerai's supporters still face the rough justice of Robert Mugabe, who manages still to evade the implementation of power sharing with the result that there will be none in the international community willing to invest in the country's future. It proved too inconvenient for the SADC summit in the DRC to discuss this matter, urgent for Zimbabwe and its starving people.

And over in East Africa there is the deaths-head spectre of mass starvation looming large, with an estimated twenty million Africans on the verge of extreme privation. Crop failures, drought, regional conflict and political storms appear to have become the norm in Africa. Ongoing battles between Islamists and the inept and weak government in Somalia sees half of its population in need of food assistance.

Child malnutrition is rampant; over a half-million people have been made refugees by the fighting in Somalia only since the spring, bringing the total to one and a half million refugees. Living in squalid camps without water, sanitation or medical care in camps in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. One camp alone in Kenya centralizes 300,000 refugees, in a situation described as "barely fit for humans".

Post-election violence in Kenya, which resulted in a political coalition just barely more successful than that of Zimbabwe, spelled out future problems, resulting internally displaced people, and a failure to plant crops, exacerbated by drought conditions that followed - with the war in Somalia creating like conditions, gracing Kenya with even more desperate refugees.

UNICEF has warned the international community that a third of the 250,000 Somali children under age five are a risk of death, exposed to disease and privation in the crude refugee camps in Somalia, a region threatened by ongoing drought. In Ethiopia, ten million people face extreme food shortages, with almost five million requiring food assistance.

Africa, will you ever be capable of disciplining yourself to care humanely for your dependents?