Country ... Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe's Child Exodus

AJE Africa Investigates ... What motivates thousands of children to take great risks smuggling themselves across the border into South Africa?

COMMENTARY
While there was a need to bring Zimbabwe into a post-colonial world, the post white Rhodesia could have been a whole lot better than Zimbabwe under the rule of Mugabe.

There was a time when Rhodesia was a 'rich' country ... but it was also racist, white and colonial. There has been change, but the change has created something that seems to bring little of value to anyhone except maybe a few corrupt people in high positions in the government and the security services. Mugabe seems to have had an ideology that was wrong on almost every count.

This piece by AJE Africa Investigates is evidence of the socio-economic failure of this once rich country under Mugabe.
Peter Burgess

Zimbabwe's Child Exodus What motivates thousands of children to take great risks smuggling themselves across the border into South Africa?

Over the past decade, tens of thousands of Zimbabwean children have taken quite remarkable risks to smuggle themselves across the border into South Africa. For the most part they are acting illegally, and most travel alone or unaccompanied by adult relatives, but it is the only way that many of them feel they can escape the debilitating poverty, disease and violence they have experienced under Robert Mugabe's regime.

'The African story, told the African way' - Zimbabwean journalist Stanley Kwenda says African journalists have grown used to having foreign correspondents, often with little local knowledge, telling their stories

This extraordinary exodus is part of a wider migration that has seen almost two million Zimbabweans leave the country in search of a better life. Some will find it, but many will find that life in South Africa will never be the safe and prosperous existence they once dreamed of.

Investigative journalist Stanley Kwenda fled Zimbabwe in 2010 when his life was threatened by senior police officers after he exposed corruption in the country's police force. For Africa Investigates, Stanley has returned to his homeland, once one of the richest countries on the continent, to reveal the disturbing story behind the flight of his country's children.

Along the way, he meets 14-year-old runaways, the orphaned children of AIDS victims, and goes undercover with the Magumagumas, the infamous people traffickers who operate out of border towns and whose reputation often instills fear in the lives of those who pay them for safe passage.

Zimbabwe's Child Exodus is a searing investigation into a phenomenon, ignored by much of the world's media, that has seen school-aged African children struggling for survival and facing a dangerous and uncertain future.

As Stanley himself says: 'What has my country come to, that despair and poverty are forcing children to take such dreadful risks?'

Watch more Africa Investigates for reports by undercover African journalists who face intimidation, beatings and death threats.

Source: Al Jazeera