Leading article: A land laid waste by disastrous stewardship

The news that a mass exodus from Zimbabwe is under wayshould surprise no one. The political and economic crises in the country, which was once the bread-basket of southern Africa, are worsening at an alarming rate. More than four million people need food. Inflation is officially 4,500 per cent, but unofficially, it is double that. Some 85 per cent of the population are unemployed and 90 per cent are below the UN's official poverty line. Foreign reserves are almost exhausted. Life expectancy, which was the age of 60 in 1990, has plummeted to 37, the lowest in the world.

All this was made worse last month when the government, in an attempt to curb the rampant inflation, ordered price cuts of at least 50 per cent - backed by the police, who forced thousands of businesses to sell bread, milk and other goods at mid-June prices. The result was more food and fuel shortages and near riots. Orders to slash the price of petrol to half the import cost saw buses taken out of service. Shelves in stores are bare of cornmeal, bread, meat and other staples. The country has spiralled into its worst humanitarian crisis since independence.

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There are various reasons for this, including drought and an HIV/Aids epidemic which has infected one third of people aged between 15 and 49. But the chief problem is economic mismanagement. President Robert Mugabe's decision to evict more than 4,000 white farmers in his controversial land redistribution seven years ago has undermined Zimbabwe's ability to feed itself.

Much of the land was redistributed to incompetent Mugabe cronies, producing a sharp decline in agricultural exports, previously the country's leading source of income. Zimbabwe's ill-conceived four-year war in the Congo drained hundreds of millions of dollars. Mugabe's decision to print $230m-worth of currency to pay international debts made matters worse.

The political repercussions have been significant. Opposition politicians and activists have been ruthlessly suppressed by armed force and beatings. The homes of their supporters have been bulldozed. The courts and the media are tamed. The police are Mugabe stooges. Elections have been a sham. Well-documented human rights abuses led, five years ago, to Zimbabwe's suspension from the Commonwealth.

President Mugabe has an answer for all this. Zimbabwe has been "sabotaged" by foreign governments and the sanctions imposed on the country by the EU and the USA. Britain, the former colonial power, is behind it all, he maintains. By playing this card - and exploiting the respect automatically due to him by other African leaders as a former hero of the independence struggle - Mugabe has managed to fool a lot of the people for a lot of the time. But it looks as though his days in office may be numbered.

Ordinary Zimbabweans may not have realised that the sanctions he condemns are aimed primarily at the government elite and not the general economy. They may learn differently when, in coming weeks, Washington carries out its threat to deport all the children of senior figures in Mugabe's regime who are living in the United States. A tougher line elsewhere in the international community is also in prospect. Gordon Brown, far from easing Tony Blair's backroom pressure on other African leaders over the Mugabe regime, has taken an even tougher line, saying he will not attend a European-African summit in December if President Mugabe is there.

But, in the end, it must be the people of Zimbabwe who decide. As its population pours across the border into the townships of South Africa, the snapping point seems ever closer.