That does not mean that Zimbabwe does not have a very high literacy rate - it is well known that it does because of the government policy towards education.
Compared to the rest of Africa, the Mugabe government has been pretty good, and it was generally praised a lot till the land redistribution exercise started, after which the media portrayal suddenly swung the other way.
Many people who are aware of Zimbabwe only studied the country post 2001, and those that did have their information sources mostly from sensationalist U.S or U.K based papers. They do not attempt to balance their understanding by reading alternative points of views.
Mugabe wasn't horrible, and that's what's sad about all of this -- the land reform was a populist grab that was initiated when he started losing his grasp on the country. He's shown over and again that he's willing to put his position above the interests of the country in the last few years, and that's what'll make him go down in history as a despot rather than a hero.
I've got quite a few friends in Zim and spent a few weeks there a bit back. All of the friends that I visited that are under 35 have now left, mostly to South Africa and a few to Botswana. More than a third of Zimbabwe's population has left the country in the last few years. That's far above par for brain-drain.
The coverage in the west is biased, but the fact that people were voting for the MDC, under fear of persecution, which nobody I talked to a year and a half ago when I was there even took seriously, says a lot.
Some of the inflation has been due to external influences, but it's also true that the Zanu-PF leadership let the countries agriculture and industry fall apart. That there's no food now in Zim is nutty.
I don't think the brain drain from Zimbabwe is any larger than any other African country, or any country that were facing similarly tough economic times.
The farm seizures affected less than 3000 farm owners, and those people typically did not employ highly skilled labour, so the effect that had was not so significant on emigration of university-level people.
I'm not sure what exactly your point is - are you saying that farm seizures in some way affected the level of education in the country?
The economic meltdown and repressive political measures in Zimbabwe have led to a flood of refugees into neighbouring countries. An estimated 3.4 million Zimbabweans, a quarter of the population, had fled abroad by mid 2007. Some 3 million of these have gone to South Africa.
Apart from the people who fled into the neighbouring countries, an estimated 570,000 people are displaced within the borders of the country, many of whom remain in transit camps and have limited access to assistance. Most of the displaced have been victims of the Operation Murambatsvina in the year 2005 and continuing evictions and violent farm seizures.
You say only as many as 3,000 of those 4 million refugees were made so by land reform. Where did you get your figure?
Nonsense. The economic situation came about as a result of the wholesale destruction of the Zimbabwean economy, driven first by massive and unsustainable government spending coupled with the violent nationalisation of farms and leading to crippling price controls and the arrests of hundreds of business executives and company owners. The agricultural sector, once contributing over 20% to the country's GDP, contracted by over 47% virtually overnight and manufacturing, itself contributing another 20% or so collapsed under the weight of price, export and labour controls. All this was self-inflicted.
Zimbabwe was never formally isolated from the outside in the same way that, say, apartheid South Africa was. The only sanctions in place were restrictions on the sale of military goods and targeted sanctions against much of the ZANU-PF and ZDF hierarchy. It's a popular belief that Zimbabwe has been under full economic sanctions, but this could not be further from the truth. In fact, such is the eagerness of the international community to help the country recover that official and developmental foreign aid to the country more than doubled between 2000 and 2005, reaching $367 million at its peak. So there was no economic isolation; instead what we have seen is a country that has destroyed its ability to engage in any meaningful level of economic activity whatsoever. It's not isolated, it just can't do anything with the access it has.
Fact is, nearly one third of Zimbabwe's people have left the country, and they have done so in direct response to the actions of the ZANU-PF government, which have included severe political repression, arbitrary state-sanctioned violence and the kind of disastrous economic policies the rest of us all thought were confined to the 1920s.
Amongst the émigrés have been virtually all of Zimbabwe's best and brightest; the skilled and talented individuals who had once been such a major part what appeared to be the country's boundless potential. And even if Zimbabwe were to experience a change in government and some sanity were to be restored, it will take decades to rebuild the country's economy to its previous levels and very few of the skilled individuals will choose to return. Not after they've established successful lives for themselves in their new host countries. The place faces a bleak future.
I don't usually like to throw the word 'evil' around, since it usually oversimplifies complex situations and makes people fall into the trap of considering events along binary lines. But I don't think there's any doubt that history will quite rightfully regard Mugabe and his ZANU-PF confederates as thoroughly evil bastards. We can debate his supposed justifications all year long, from British support for land-reform (or lack thereof) to perceived Western interference, but none of those come even remotely close to justifying what they have done.
Honestly, I think that the absurd claim you made earlier in this thread, effectively stating that Zimbabwe's economic problems are due to externally-imposed factors, is utterly delusional and illogical. I think you should re-examine your assumptions on this subject.
Zimbabwe does not seem to be listed in the recent TIMSS data. http://nces.ed.gov/timss/table07_3.asp Where are you getting your information from?
This TIMSS page shows 1992 reading-score data for 14-year-olds for Nigeria (401), Zimbabwe (372), and Botawana (330):
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d96/d96t402.asp