World Bank paints a bleak outlook

y 2015, were agreed at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000. In Zimbabwe, MDGs were launched by President Robert Mugabe on September 8 2005. 
But a World Bank report released last week painted a bleak outlook for Zimbabwe. It said 16 African countries had managed to maintain impressive growth rates of 4.5 percent since the 1990s which enabled them to lift a significant portion of their citizens above the poverty datum line. And that would include Equatorial Guinea under the jackboot of Theodoro Obiang Nguema, which achieved a growth rate of 20.9 percent in 2004.
The World Bank facts and figures on Zimbabwe make for some pretty dismal reading. And it is precisely because of this that the government, which blames everyone but its irrational and ruinous policies for Zimbabwe’s never-ending woes, will inevitably seek to dismiss this as the handiwork of its detractors. But the conclusions drawn by the Bank report shed some valuable light as to how poverty remains the single biggest problem facing modern Zimbabwean society. 
And the situation is not getting any better, despite the government claims that the economy has turned the corner towards recovery, which recovery only the government can see. If anything, inflationary pressures show no signs of receding, joblessness remains at an all-time high of 80 percent and industrial production continues on a terrifying steep decline.
While the better part of Africa has made tangible progress in delivering improved health services, education, economic growth, trade and poverty reduction, Zimbabwe is the only country to have bucked the trend. It recorded a negative growth rate of 2.4 percent in 2004 while the life of the majority of its citizens is an absolute misery.
True, Zimbabweans who live in reduced circumstances and hope that their deplorable situation will improve, go about their miserable lives without a murmur. But the fact is thousands, if not millions, of them can hardly afford the stuff of life — bread. And they continue to drop like flies succumbing to curable and operable ailments because the health delivery system, which is in a disastrous state, cannot cope.
Apart from going hungry because of the failure of several years’ harvests owing largely to a poorly executed land reform exercise, thousands of Zimbabweans live under some of the most wretched conditions in Africa. They are caught up in an unforgiving poverty-trap — well below the conservative official level of income that is necessary for one to be able to pay for basic needs. 
As a result, an estimated three million Zimbabweans have been forced into exile as economic refugees where thousands have been stripped of every human being’s most cherished possession — dignity. While the figure of three million Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora in search of pastures anew is probably the biggest refugee statistic from a country not at war, which makes it a bizarre phenomenon, it is hardly surprising. Zimbabweans, who have chosen to live with the indignity of being refugees in countries where it is sometimes difficult to preserve a sense of their importance and value, are running away from the resultant dehumanising effects of grinding poverty and squalor.  And the psychological crises and horror of their experiences as refugees can only be unimaginable.
Thus coming as it does, at a time when Zimbabweans are agreed that it is time to put this tragedy to rest and turn the page to a new and happier chapter of their lives, the gloomy picture painted by the World Bank can only have pushed the poverty-stricken Zimbabweans to the ragged edge of frustration and disillusionment.