HARARE, ZIMBABWE - Following an emergency meeting with senior members of his ZANU PF Party, longtime ruler of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe unveiled bold new plans Friday to alleviate the country's growing AIDS outbreak, declaring: "they must all starve."
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| Image Credit: United States Navy. Creative Commons. |
Opting to eschew more traditional methods of raising AIDS awareness through community outreach and flyering, Mr Mugabe insisted that AIDS sufferers and people found to be HIV positive should be "cut off from the food chain, so as to reduce our AIDS statistics."
"The mere fact that the AIDS problem is getting worse proves that simple classroom mentoring does not work," said Mugabe. "We need to identify these people and cut off their source of food. Immediately."
A 2010 report on the epidemic found that the African country was experiencing one of the worst AIDS records in the world, with 1 in 10 people said to be suffering from the disease.
"Those kind of figures make our nation look bad," continued Mugabe. "Rather than waiting five to ten years for the AIDS virus to take its toll, we must let them die from severe malnutrition over the course of three weeks."
"I just don't see what the problem is."
Meanwhile, President Mugabe insisted that exceptions would be made for people in the final stages of the virus.
"It would not be right to starve someone who only had two weeks to live," he said, in a rare moment of candor. "I'd have them shot instead."