The timing of the staging of the WSSD could not have been more ironic, if perhaps an eye-opener, for Zimbabwe.
Half its citizens face famine in a country which normally feeds itself and poorer neighbours.
Nearly 80 percent of the population lives in squalor compared to about 50 percent at independence two decades ago. Unemployment has soared to a record 70 percent and yet more companies are closing every other week.
Zimbabwe's currency has dramatically collapsed to track record high inflation which has become the scourge of the common man and the economy, reversing the high value of the dollar before 1980 which was the envy of most of southern Africa.
The country's grim death toll from the killer AIDS disease and even from curable diseases such as malaria is rising alarmingly as its health sector crumbles.
To compound the crisis, bands of common thugs have been given blanket authority to seize productive farms and halt production, while the same criminals have launched a sustained campaign of mowing down trees and laying the land bare.
Half its citizens face famine in a country which normally feeds itself and poorer neighbours.
Nearly 80 percent of the population lives in squalor compared to about 50 percent at independence two decades ago. Unemployment has soared to a record 70 percent and yet more companies are closing every other week.
Zimbabwe's currency has dramatically collapsed to track record high inflation which has become the scourge of the common man and the economy, reversing the high value of the dollar before 1980 which was the envy of most of southern Africa.
The country's grim death toll from the killer AIDS disease and even from curable diseases such as malaria is rising alarmingly as its health sector crumbles.
To compound the crisis, bands of common thugs have been given blanket authority to seize productive farms and halt production, while the same criminals have launched a sustained campaign of mowing down trees and laying the land bare.