Glenn Reynolds links to an article speculating that Zimbabwe might be on the verge of heading down the same path that Idi Amin’s Uganda took. But the scary thing is that even without that sort of problem, the long term result of Robert Mugabe’s tyranny is going to be unbelievably high numbers of deaths in Zimbabwe due to something that’s been a bit overlooked — the AIDS crisis.
Yes, millions of people in Zimbabwe are at risk of starvation and political violence is likely to rise, but even if those two outcomes are averted, Zimbabwe is headed toward an HIV Holocaust.
In July the United Nations released a report on AIDS in Africa claiming that by 2020, more than 68 million people in Africa will likely die from AIDS. And Zimbabwe is the poster child for the epidemic.
In 1997, an estimated 25 percent of all adults in Zimbabwe were HIV positive. While Mugabe fiddled about with seizing white farms and jailing opposition parties and journalists, that figure jumped to an estimated 33 percent of all adults in Zimbabwe being HIV positive.
Other countries, such as Botswana, have larger estimated rates of infection, and certainly places like South Africa have dragged their feet at dealing with the epidemic, but at the moment Zimbabwe seems the leading candidate for the nightmare scenario where AIDS all but wipes out a large nation. If Mugabe is able to hold on to power like Mobutu did in Zaire and Amin did in Uganda, by the end of the decade Zimbabwe will likely be looking at HIV infection rates in excess of 50 percent of the adult population and with no end or solution in sight.