By Angus Shaw
Zimbabwe's respected Roman Catholic Justice and Peace Commission on Sunday decried deepening hardships in the country, including hunger, deaths caused by a junior doctors strike and a record
dropout rate in state schools over spiralling education fees.
In a message to coincide with Sunday services, the commission called for political reforms by President Robert Mugabe's authoritarian government to ease the way for fiscal measures to bolster and liberalise the crumbling economy.
The Commission described "wholesale hardships" facing ordinary Zimbabweans every day that included the collapse of the health delivery and education systems, chaotic transport and
communications and "paralysed manufacturing and mining among many other sectors of the economy that are in intensive care units."
In order to bring back the dignity of the people the commission said it called on the government "to immediately set priorities that put the people first before anything else."
"The economy should be managed prudently if the suffering is to be halted. Politics and the economy are interrelated. No amount of fiscal and monetary policies will steer us away from our suffering without the integration of the two," the commission said.
Mugabe has blamed deepening economic woes on erratic rains and Western trade embargoes on the agriculture-based economy in Zimbabwe, a former regional breadbasket.
Western aid, loans and investment have largely dried up in the wake of alleged democratic and human rights abuses since Mugabe ordered the often-violent seizures of thousands of white-owned
commercial farms in 2000.
The strike by junior doctors and nurses in the main state hospitals that began late December "has caused untold human suffering and loss of life," the commission said.
Fees at government and private schools rose sharply in the hyperinflationary economy in January, the commission said.
"A stroll in our residential areas during school hours will bear witness to the large numbers of school-going children roaming the streets," it said, saying this would cause with long term affects on literacy and skills of the young in nation once considered to offer model education facilities.
A teachers group reported earlier in January just seven children attended class at a state junior school, down from 38 at the beginning of 2006. Fees for the new term had gone up sixfold.
The independent Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights said Friday that maternal and infant care was hardest hit by the strike.
Child mortality has risen to 1 100 per 100 000 live births, the same rate as war-ravaged Somalia, the doctors for human rights said.
Annual inflation is running 1 281 percent, the highest in the world. - Sapa-AP