Mugabe Under Fire Over Cholera Epidemic

In Africa, the crisis is deepening in Zimbabwe, if that's possible. As a cholera epidemic rages, pressure is growing on Zimbabwe's long-time ruler Robert Mugabe, reports CBS News correspondent Richard Roth.

Even Zimbabwe's bankrupt government now admits there's a national emergency. Sewage and health care facilities hardly exist. The country's 12 million people lack money, food and clean water - and it's killing them.

Six hundred or more have died in an epidemic of cholera, which the United Nations says has infected more than 12,000 people.

Just outside the nation's capital, water from wells reeks of sewage.

"I am very afraid of cholera, but there is no substitute where we can get clean water," says one woman. "We rely on these wells."

Spread by contaminated food and water, the disease has followed a tide of desperation to the border with South Africa. Medical help is meager, but as one man put it our hospitals in Zimbabwe "are a dead zone."

Most of the blame falls on the misrule of Zimbabwe's 84-year-old president, Robert Mugabe, who's still in power despite losing an election this year, reports Roth. Now the calls for his ouster, from Europe and the United States are getting louder.

"It's well past time for Robert Mugabe to leave," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "I think that's now obvious."

And with fear spreading like the cholera, Mugabe's neighbors in Africa are also pressuring him to leave office.

"He's destroyed a wonderful country," says Desmond Tutu, former archbishop of South Africa. "A country that used to be a bread basket, it has now become a basket case itself needing help."

If there's hope in all this misery, it may lie in what a Zimbabwean writer calls "the cholera effect" a disease that's crossing borders, and a crisis growing bigger, that could become the catalyst for change.