Zimbabwe's Mugabe: Worst of the worst in the world order

Trying to determine who is the world's most destructive national leader might seem daunting. There are so many to choose from.

But look at the facts, and you'll find one obvious choice: Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, where the unemployment rate, the CIA says, stands at 95 percent -- the highest in the world.

That's just one of many superlatives Mugabe has achieved during his three decades in power. No leader anywhere has so assiduously destroyed a nation.

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Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. This article was distributed by Tribune Media Services.

In 2000, the United Nations adopted what it called the Millennium Declaration, urging every nation to reduce poverty and improve the lot of its children. Almost every state I've examined, even the most impoverished and truculent, has seen at least small improvements -- every nation but Zimbabwe.

As an example, for more than 30 years Ali Abdullah Saleh was president of Yemen, another impoverished dictatorship. There, the number of children who died before they reached age 5 stood at 125 per thousand in 1990 -- but 66 today. That's typical. Well, in Mugabe-land, the number went up, from 81 in 1990 to 90 today. Unicef says the rate of infant mortality has increased, too.But there's more. So much more

The seed for much of this was Mugabe's destructive land-redistribution campaign 12 years ago, when he kicked the nation's white commercial farmers off their land. Those farms provided the basic structure for the nation's economy, and the farmers' departure pushed the country into destitution.

Mugabe first tried a massive stimulus/aid program, which threw the country deep into debt. That sent the nation down the path to another superlative. Today Zimbabwe has the highest debt ratio in the world. The national debt stands at 231 percent of the gross domestic product.
For a good while Zimbabwe had the highest inflation rate in the world, at one point pegged at 231 million percent. Then, three years ago, Zimbabwe abandoned its own worthless currency and began using the U.S. dollar instead.

But as the 2000s proceeded and the number of students leaving school outnumbered the available jobs by nearly 10 to 1 some years, thousands of young people fled, giving Mugabe still another "honor" -- the highest emigration rate in the world.

His neighbor, South Africa, has been loudly complaining that Zimbabwe émigrés are taking all the jobs. South Africa and Mozambique built border fences, but just recently a South Africa newspaper reported that its fence was "full of holes." The Harare Daily News reports that, to survive, more than half of Zimbabwe's urban dwellers rely on remittances from relatives living abroad.