Mugabe needs help

last updated 8 January 2015

Harare, Zimbabwe

With his country virtually in a state of collapse, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe this week asked South Africa for a huge aid package. Zimbabwe is in the throes of a deadly famine, and there are virtually no functioning farms. The government recently began demolishing shantytowns, creating a huge population of homeless people, many of them children and all of them desperately poor. South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki is willing to help, South African newspapers reported, but only if Mugabe ends the housing demolitions and makes “substantial” reforms.