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I NTERNATIONAL EDITION | FRIDAY,AUGUST 2, 2019
THINKING SMALL
HOTELS BET ON
TINY ROOMS
PAGE 8| BUSINESSHERBIE HANCOCK
NO RULES FOR THE
JAZZ EMINENCE
PAGE 17| CULTURESLOW CRUISE IN FRANCE
ACLASSIC CAR FOR A
MOUNTAIN ROAD TRIP
PAGE 19| TRAVELclean outfit last week. “We have to stop
ourselves from going to the toilet.”
Zimbabwe’s acute water shortage is a
result of a particularly bad drought this
year, a symptom of climate change. Poor
water management has wasted much of
the water that remains. Two of Harare’s
four reservoirs are empty from lack of
rain, but between 45 percent and 60 per-It had been five days since water had
stopped flowing out of the taps at Eneres
Kaitano’s bungalow in southern Harare,
Zimbabwe’s modern and tidy capital
city. Five days since she had done any
laundry. Five days since she had forbid-
den her children to use the toilet more
than once a day.
On the sixth day, she again rose at 3
a.m. to fetch water from a communal
borehole. In the early afternoon, she
was still waiting her turn at the tap with
her six buckets and cans.
Much of the city had the same idea.
More than half of the 4.5 million resi-
dents of Harare’s greater metropolitan
area now have running water only once
a week, according to the city’s mayor,
meaning they must wait in lines at com-
munal wells, streams and boreholes.
“It is causing us serious problems,”
said Ms. Kaitano, a 29-year-old jeans
wholesaler who was down to her lastcent of the water that’s left is lost
through leakage and theft, said Herbert
Gomba, the mayor of Harare.
But the water crisis is only a micro-
cosm of Zimbabwe’s malaise. Years of
mismanagement under Robert Mugabe,
who governed Zimbabwe for 37 years
until he was finally ousted in 2017, have
left the economy in tatters. Residentsare battling daily blackouts that last be-
tween 15 and 18 hours; shortages of
medicine, fuel and bank notes; and infla-
tion of more than 175 percent.
Zimbabwe has become a country of
long lines. In recent weeks, drivers have
typically lined up for about three hours
to refuel their cars with gasoline that
has been diluted with ethanol, which
makes it burn faster. Workers wait for
hours outside of banks to receive their
pay in cash, because of a shortage of
Zimbabwean dollars.
The price of bread has increased sev-
enfold in the past year, and some medi-
cines are now 10 times as expensive,
even though most wages remain stag-
nant.
“It is a nightmare,” said Norman
Matara, a physician and board member
of the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors
for Human Rights, a medical watchdog
agency. Some of Dr. Matara’s patients
can no longer afford medication, while
others take it “once every three days in-
stead of once a day,” Dr. Matara said.
The shortage of water has become an
annual problem in Zimbabwe, but this
year’s drought is particularly serious,
because it has occurred earlier in the
summer and has affected even more
people than usual.
The level of rainfall this year has been
about 25 percent less than the annual
Z IMBABWE, PAGE 4A cart loaded with water from a spring southeast of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. More than half of residents have running water only once a week, according to the city’s mayor.PHOTOGRAPHS BY ZINYANGE AUNTONY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESZimbabwe taps run dry
HARARE, ZIMBABWEDrought worsens effects
of mismanagement and
an economy in tattersBY PATRICK KINGSLEY
AND JEFFREY MOYOResidents must wake up early to search for water in the Harare suburbs. Poor water
management has wasted much of the remaining water in the city.Hal Prince, the Broadway royal and
prodigious Tony Award winner who
produced or directed (and sometimes
both) many of the most enduring musi-
cals in theater history, including “West
Side Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cab-
aret,” “Sweeney Todd” and “The Phan-
tom of the Opera,” the longest-running
show in Broadway history, died on
Wednesday in Reykjavik, Iceland. He
was 91.
A spokesman, Rick Miramontez, said
Mr. Prince, who lived in New York, had
been on his way home from his resi-
dence in Switzerland when he died in
Iceland after a brief illness.
Mr. Prince began working in the the-
ater in the halcyon days of Broadway,
when Cole Porter and Rodgers and
Hammerstein were its songwriting
kings, the stage musical was a robust
American art form (not to mention anaffordable entertainment option) and
theater songs were staples of the air-
waves.
His contributions were prolific, per-
sisting through challenging eras —
when rock ’n’ roll threatened to make
show music irrelevant, when the decline
of Times Square discouraged Broadway
attendance, when the arrival of popular
British musicals like “Phantom” pushed
aside their American counterparts, and
when corporations like Disney entered
the Broadway sweepstakes and minia-
turized the impact of the independent
producer.
Mr. Prince’s singularly significant
role in shaping the Broadway musical
during the second half of the 20th cen-
tury was attested to by the Tony Award
for lifetime achievement he received in
2006.
That was his 21st Tony, a number far
surpassing that of anyone else in multi-
ple categories. His count began with the
1955 best musical, “The Pajama Game,”
which Mr. Prince co-produced with
Frederick Brisson and Robert E. Grif-
P RINCE, PAGE 2‘Fiddler’ to ‘Phantom,’ he was Broadway
HAL PRINCE
1928-BY BRUCE WEBERThe producer and director Hal Prince during a rehearsal of “The Phantom of the
Opera” in Moscow in 2016. Over his prodigious career, he received 21 Tony Awards.VYACHESLAV PROKOFYEV/TASS VIA GETTY IMAGESThe New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.Several of the questions directed at Je-
rome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve
chair, after he announced a cut in inter-
est rates boiled down to this: Why take
such action when, by your own acknowl-
edgment, the United States economy
looks perfectly solid? What good can
this possibly achieve?
Mr. Powell, answered by ticking off
reasons — persistently low inflation and
a troubled world economy that poses
risks to the United States — for the Fed
policy committee’s move.
But there is a broader way to interpret
it.
The quarter-percentage-point cut to
the target interest rate announced on
Wednesday was really about trying to
apply the lessons that the last decade
have taught us. It is not a recession-
fighting measure per se, but a recalibra-
tion and an implicit acknowledgment
that the Fed made a mistake last year by
raising interest rates to nearly 2.5 per-
cent.
In particular, the Fed in 2018 was
overly confident that it could apply
pre-2008 rules of thumb about what con-
stitutes “normal” policy, what causes in-
flation, and how the Fed’s actions are
likely to reverberate around the world.
Wednesday’s action was about trying to
undo that damage.
The action telegraphs that the Fed is
willing to act to keep the economy on its
growth path, even in the absence of deci-
sive evidence that the economy is slow-
ing, which bodes well for the decade-
long expansion to continue through next
year’s presidential election and beyond.
But most important, it signals the
death knell of an approach to setting
monetary policy. The central bank had
been slow to adjust to years of low
growth, low inflation and international
blowback whenever it moved to tighten
the money supply.
An episode in late 2015 was one such
example. The Fed was making plans to
begin raising interest rates — to “nor-
malize” them, as its officials often said,
believing that the United States job mar-
ket was returning to full health and that
there would be an outbreak of inflation if
it didn’t act.
But the shift toward tighter policy
contributed to the rising of the dollar
and a slowing in the world economy that
in turn walloped American energy, agri-
culture and heavy industry companies
and nearly pulled the entire economy
into recession. A turnaround came when
the Fed backed away from its plans for
interest rate increases through most of
2016.
F EDERAL RESERVE,PAGEWhy the Fed
decided to
lower U.S.
interest rates
THE UPSHOTCentral bank’s action
signals a shift from
its traditional policiesBY NEIL IRWINIf I learned anything from 25 years in
the F.B.I., including a stint as head of
counterintelligence, it was to trust my
gut when I see a threat unfolding.
Those of us who were part of the post-
Sept. 11 intelligence community had a
duty to sound the alarm about an
impending threat.
Now, instinct and experience tell me
we’re headed for trouble in the form of
white hate violence stoked by a ra-
cially divisive president. I hope I’m
wrong.
Since October, the F.B.I. has made 90
arrests in domestic terrorism cases.
Domestic terrorism includes violence
by Americans who belong to anti-
government militias,
white supremacist
groups or individuals
who ascribe to simi-
lar ideologies not
connected to Islamic
extremism. In fact,
the F.B.I. says that of
its 850 pending
domestic terror
investigations, about
40 percent involve
racially motivated
extremism. In 2017 and 2018, the F.B.I.
made more arrests connected to do-
mestic terror than to international
terrorism, which includes groups like
Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and
their lone-wolf recruits.
Last weekend, a young man with a
rifle took the lives of three people and
injured at least a dozen others at the
annual Gilroy Garlic Festival in Cali-
fornia. Preliminary reports indicated
that among the gunman’s social media
postings was an exhortation to read
the obscure 1890 novel “Might Is
Right,” which justifies racism and
asserts that people of color are biologi-
cally inferior.
That same weekend, President
Trump lashed out via Twitter at a black
congressman, Representative Elijah
Cummings, a Maryland Democrat. As
he has before, the president expressed
his wrath with a message aimed at
dividing us along racial lines. Mr. Cum-
mings is chairman of the House
Oversight Committee, which recently
voted to authorize additional subpoe-
nas for senior White House officials’
communications.
Mr. Trump attacked with multiple
tweets, including: “Why is so much
money sent to the Elijah Cummings
district when it is considered the worst
run and most dangerous anywhere in
the United States. No human being
would want to live there. Where is all
this money going? How much is stol-Provoking
race-based
terrorism
Frank Figliuzzi
OPINIONPresident
Trump is
making the
F.B.I.’s job
harder by
fanning
the flames
of hatred.F IGLIUZZI, PAGE 15CULTURAL
CATHARSIS
A podcast with culture writers Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham.
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