Hunger and obesity tourism

Neil Connery reports from Bulawayo:

Linguile finishes applying her lipstick and adjusts her skimpy top. Every night she goes through the same ritual before heading on to the streets of Bulawayo. She is 15 years old, and says that she has no choice but to work as a child prostitute.

"I was driven to desperation to do this. I have to get money for food - there's no other way," she said. "My mother died and my father ran away. I have two younger sisters to look after. There's nobody else now. I do this so I can put food on the table and pay the rent. If I didn't do this, I don't know where we'd be."

Linguile starts work at about 7pm, hanging around clubs and hotels in the city centre looking for clients. "I work for 12 hours, seven days a week," she said.

"If I'm lucky I might make 90,000 Zimbabwean dollars [£6] a night, but it's getting harder because more and more young girls are doing the same. They have to, just to survive these days."

And specifically for England's cricketers:

Although Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, is determined that reporters with England's touring cricketers - who are due to play two matches in Bulawayo this week - should write only about sport, Linguile has a message for the players. "I think they should come and see what is really happening here," she said. "I'd like to tell them about girls like me because we really have to do this."

Read the whole thing. Then move straight on to Christina Lamb's report in today's Sunday Times:

Zimbabwe has come up with a bizarre proposal to solve the food crisis threatening half its population with starvation. It wants to bring in obese tourists from overseas so that they can shed pounds doing manual labour on land seized from white farmers.

The so-called Obesity Tourism Strategy was reported last week in The Herald, a government organ whose contents are approved by President Robert Mugabe's powerful information minister, Jonathan Moyo.

Pointing out that more than 1.2 billion people worldwide are officially deemed to be overweight, the article exhorted Zimbabweans to "tap this potential".

"Tourists can provide labour for farms in the hope of shedding weight while enjoying the tourism experience," it said, adding that Americans spent $6 billion a year on "useless" dieting aids.

"Tour organisers may promote this programme internationally and bring in tourists, while agriculturalists can employ the tourists as free farm labour.

"The tourists can then top it all by flaunting their slim bodies on a sun-downer cruise on the Zambezi or surveying the majestic Great Zimbabwe ruins."

The notion that oversized, overpaid Americans could be enticed into paying to spend their holidays working free for those who seized the country’s commercial farms illustrates how far the Mugabe regime has descended into a fantasy world.