Letters from Zimbabweans to the man called Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Please post to mufarostig@yahoo.co.uk who will post it for you! Also visit www.zimfinalpush.blogspot.com , www.dearmrthabombeki.blogspot.com, www.zimprayer.blogspot.com, www.zimgossiper.blogspot.com and www.radicalzim.blogspot.com . RGM's letter at www.dearmrtonyblair.blospot.com


"RGM WAS NEVER A LEGITIMATE PRES" ARGUES CHOKWADI CHIYE

"RGM WAS NEVER A LEGITIMATE PRES" ARGUES CHOKWADI CHIYE
PLEASE CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO GO TO THE ARTICLE!!!

REV HOVE WITH MANDISA OF "SWRADIOAFRICA" 21/12/2009

Please click and listen and pass on link!

Merry Christmas to those that can make it merry!


http://www.swradioafrica.2bctnd.net/12_09/callback211209.mp3

M S Hove...Rev

Cell: 0749498923 RSA.


REV HOVE BIDS TRUE ZIM FIRST LADY GOOD-BYE!!!

REV HOVE BIDS TRUE ZIM FIRST LADY GOOD-BYE!!!
PLEASE CLICK ON PHOTO TO GET TO ARTICLE!!!
pollcode.com free polls
Who do you believe wanted to assassinate the Tsvangirais?
Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF! Other forces..... you can give comment! No-one.... just pure accident!   

"MY WIFE YOU HURT ME!" REV M S HOVE

"MY WIFE YOU HURT ME!" REV M S HOVE
PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE TO GET TO ARTICLE!!!

REV M S HOVE: PROFILE!!!

REV M S HOVE: PROFILE!!!
PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE TO GET TO ARTICLE!!!

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Zimbabwean women want Dignity.Period!

"Our father which art at State House illegitimately....!"

"Our father which art at State House illegitimately....!"
http://dearmrrobertmugabe.blogspot.com/2007/04/zimbos-prayer_29.html

Whoever is "brave" now must acknowledge Mr Morgan Tsvangirai!

Whoever is "brave" now must acknowledge Mr Morgan Tsvangirai!
Kindlt visit www.zimdebate.blogspot.com for the Two-Part Interview!

gostats

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Saturday, 31 March 2007

Dear Dr John Makumbe,

We heard you "LIVE" on Radio "702" here in South africa giving an Ultimatum to the South Africans about their expected role in the resolution of the Mugabe-made crisis in Zimbabwe!
 
We agree with you in full and we are asking you issue that particular ultimatum in writing so we can post it on our blogsites!
 
We hold you in the highest esteem and we thank you for your kindest co-operation in this regard!
 
Rev Mufaro Stig Hove.
 
THE RADICAL SOLDIER.
 
 
 
Cell: 0791463039 RSA.


 


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Friday, 30 March 2007

MESSAGE FROM THE ZCTU AND ZINASU!

We are starving; we will eat your teargas!!!
 
.
 - Zimbabwe National Students Union
 
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU)
 
has resolved that:
  • All workers be mobilised to stay away from work from 3 to 4 April 2007
  • National actions will be called for after every three months and they will be incremental until the situation improves
Poverty. Hyperinflation. Oppression. Unemployment. Failure of basic services.
  • Show your disagreement with how our country is being mismanaged and SUPPORT the ZCTU and STAY AWAY ON 3 and 4 April 2007
  • Read the ZCTU communique about the stay away on http://www.zctu.co.zw/html/stmts/21906.shtm or contact them for more information, on email info@zctu.co.zw or phone +263-4-794702/42 or +263-4-702517.
  • Lobby your friends and colleagues - forward this email on to them.
Let the workers organise. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labour is the future of Zimbabwe.


 


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Thursday, 29 March 2007

V President Mujuru resigns?

Zimbabwe Vice President resigns!

The World Today - Thursday, 29 March , 2007  12:46:00

Reporter: Jennifer Macey

ELEANOR HALL: There are reports from Zimbabwe today that President Robert Mugabe's power base, the ruling Zanu-PF party, may be splintering.

An independent Zimbabwean paper in London reports that Zimbabwe's Vice President has tendered her resignation in protest against the actions of President Mugabe.

And some are now speculating that she may attempt to gain her party's nomination and so derail Mr Mugabe's plan to run again in the upcoming elections.

Jennifer Macey reports.

JENNIFER MACEY: There are growing signs that the recent police crackdown against members of Zimbabwe's opposition movement are now causing unrest within President Robert Mugabe's own ranks.

The London based paper The Zimbabwean is reporting that Vice President Joyce Mujuru has formally tended her resignation.

The Zimbabwean's editor Wilf Mbanga spoke to the BBC.

WILF MBANGA: We've got a very good source and we then double checked with other sources in the Mujuru camp and they've confirmed tha, you know, she did resign about two weeks ago and that Mugabe is sitting on her resignation.

JENNIFER MACEY: Joyce Mujuru leads one of the ruling Zanu-PF factions that is pushing for the 83-year-old President to retire.

Other news reports say she has also held secret talks over the growing crisis in Zimbabwe with South African Government officials.

WILF MBANGA: She feels that he should go and that he should make way for her, and she feels that he has become a liability not only to Zanu-PF, but to Zimbabwe.

JENNIFER MACEY: While the newspaper is openly critical of President Mugabe's regime, Editor Wilf Mbanga is confident of his sources.

WILF MBANGA: My initial doubts, but after checking with several sources, we are now satisfied that there is substance to the story.

JENNIFER MACEY: The latest news comes as police launched another raid on the offices of the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC.

Leader Morgan Tsvangirai was among 20 people briefly detained by police just before he was about to hold a press conference over the attacks against party members earlier this month.

The party's Secretary-General, Tendai Biti.

TENDAI BITI: They made everyone lie down and then they started beating people on the back. We're told that all of the women, they can't even walk. Why they are arresting them, we don't know.

JENNIFER MACEY: The latest violence isn't going to be well received at an emergency two-day summit of the Southern African Development Community leaders in Tanzania.

However Tendai Biti says Mugabe will reject pressure from the international community.

TENDAI BITI: I think he's suffering from senile dementia. Mugabe is a megalomaniac. He's a despot. He's a tyrant. He will never abandon his terror tactics, his fascism.

JENNIFER MACEY: Mosagu Boraygo (phonetic) is a Professor of Political Science at Dar es Salaam University. He notes many countries across southern Africa are emerging from a colonial history, and there's a view that President Mugabe is being punished for his controversial land distribution program.

He warns the west must change its approach to Zimbabwe, but says regional leaders need to apply the sort of pressure to Mugabe's regime that was put on South Africa during the apartheid era.

MOSAGU BORAYGO: At that time, the west came up with the idea of constructive engagement and it looks to me that we are faced with another challenging situation in which we should try out the same old medicine - constructive engagement in Zimbabwe.

I do believe myself that it can produce results.

JENNIFER MACEY: The emergency meeting in Tanzania will be seen as a test case for African leaders, but President Mugabe is holding firm.

He says at 83 he's not too old to contest the next election in 2008 and has vowed to survive any western attempts to dislodge him from power.

ELEANOR HALL: Jennifer Macey reporting.


 


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Tuesday, 27 March 2007

ZIM LAND REFORM DISCUSSED IN UK HOUSE OF PARLIAMENT!

UK Minister explains British Government's Stance on Zimbabwe's Land reform


Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:10:00
 
UK Parliament

The Minister for Trade (Mr. Ian McCartney): With permission, Mr. Speaker, I wish to make a statement on Zimbabwe. I hope that the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) and the Liberal Democrats received a copy in good time.

Mr. Ian McCartney



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As the Prime Minister told the House last Wednesday, what is happening in Zimbabwe is appalling, disgraceful and utterly tragic for its people.
My noble Friend Lord Triesman, Minister responsible for Africa, noted on 12 March that it was a direct consequence of Mugabe's own approach and of his disregard for the suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans.
What we are seeing is a wilful waste of Zimbabwe's assets and potential by a ZANU-PF Government who have substituted plunder and corruption for a programme of economic and social advancement for its people.
Hunger and malnutrition are all that millions of Zimbabweans now experience in their daily lives, and Mugabe and his regime are directly responsible.
They are directly responsible for Zimbabwe's economy being in free fall: the economy shrank by 40 per cent. in less than a decade, and will shrink by a further 5 per cent. this year. Inflation is already at 3,000 per cent and the International Monetary Fund says that it will breach 5,000 per cent. by the end of this year.
They are directly responsible for circumstances in which a quarter of the resident population is dependent on food aid, and a quarter has already fled the country. They are directly responsible for an unemployment rate of over 80 per cent., the third highest in the world.
It is little wonder that there has been an exodus over the Limpopo river. They are directly responsible for Zimbabwe's having the world's highest orphan rate, largely as a consequence of the pandemic rate of AIDS: roughly 20 per cent. of adults are infected.
They are directly responsible for circumstances in which Zimbabweans can expect to die younger than anyone else on the planet.
A Zimbabwean woman today can expect to live to just 34, while a Zimbabwean man can expect to live to 37. However, instead of taking the necessary measures to reverse each of those evolving tragedies, the regime continues to make people homeless, suppress independent media, harass human rights defenders and arbitrarily arrest those involved in peaceful demonstrations.
The violence and repression used against peaceful protesters gathering to pray for change during the weekend of 10–11 March, during which at least one young person was shot and killed, has continued unabated.
Four members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have been prevented from leaving Zimbabwe, including one MP, Nelson Chamisa, who was badly beaten when travelling to a meeting in Brussels. I am pleased to note that the MDC's vice-president was able to take his place: we salute his bravery and that of his colleagues.
A significant number of activists are still being arrested and beaten throughout Zimbabwe. Lawyers representing those who have been detained have themselves faced intimidation.
Trade union and student union members have also been harassed and arrested. My noble Friend Lord Triesman summoned the Zimbabwean ambassador to register our disgust,
As I did during my address to the Human Rights Council on 13 March, I send my deepest condolences to the families and friends of those killed and injured in the last two weeks of terrible assault, and offer my solidarity to all Zimbabweans on behalf of everyone in the House.
Mugabe's men might break the bones of the democracy campaigners, but they cannot break the quiet dignity of these extraordinary human beings. One day, Zimbabwe will return to democracy; Zimbabweans will be free. Mugabe knows that. He knows that he has got it wrong, and that the crisis has resulted in an increase in internal pressure.
He feels more vulnerable. The involvement of the military in almost all aspects of Zimbabwe life—from running state businesses and economic programmes to agriculture and food distribution—underlines that.
What does Mugabe do? He blames everyone else, especially us in the United Kingdom. He persistently alleges that the UK is responsible for Zimbabwe's woes—that we are somehow victimising him for his disastrous fast-track land reform policies.
That is simply not true. We have always recognised the need for an equitable redistribution of land, but that has to be done in a transparent, legal manner. We signed up to all three of the internationally recognised land reform packages: in 1979, 1998 and 2001.
The UK gave a total of £44 million to the first of them. About £3 million was returned unspent in the mid-1990s when the Zimbabwean Government lost interest in proper land reform. We were also willing to support the package put together by the United Nations Development Programme in 2001, but Mugabe's violent land invasions put a halt to that.
Let us look for a moment at Mugabe's claims that the crisis is down to us. It was his Government—not the UK—who displaced and destroyed the homes and livelihoods of, 700,000 people during Operation Murambatsvina, which I understand means "drive out the filth". It is the Government of Zimbabwe—not the UK—who previously refused to appeal to the UN for food aid despite widely reported food shortages. It is the Government of Zimbabwe—not the UK—who have crushed a free media. It is the Government of Zimbabwe—not the UK—who deny Zimbabweans their basic rights of freedom of expression and assembly by routinely and violently breaking up peaceful protests. It is the Government of Zimbabwe—not the UK—who have ignored IMF recommendations to reform an imploding economy.
It is they who continue to squander the country's limited foreign exchange while ordinary Zimbabweans can scarcely afford food.
It is the Government of Zimbabwe—not the UK—who destroyed property rights by removing land from the legal process. It is they—not the UK—who have ruined the Zimbabwean agricultural sector; agricultural productivity has fallen by a staggering 80 per cent. since 1998.
Since 2000, more than 250,000 black commercial farm workers have lost their livelihoods. Including families, that means that there has been a rural displacement of about 1 million people, to match the urban dislocation of 700,000. Of course, while the Government of Zimbabwe continue to blame the international community, the European Union and the UK Government for their troubles, in each case we are taking action to improve life on the ground for ordinary Zimbabweans.
As my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said last week, there is considerable concern throughout the international community about the situation in Zimbabwe.
The United Kingdom is greatly concerned about the situation there, but those concerns are shared by the whole of the European Union, by the African Union—sadly, those concerns have not always been expressed as loudly as they might be—by the United Nations and by the rest of the international community.
Ministers and officials are in constant contact with our African counterparts, emphasising the risks to regional stability and the importance of Zimbabwe's African neighbours taking a more direct role in addressing the crisis in Zimbabwe.
The Prime Minister last week wrote to President Mbeki and spoke with President Kikwete of Tanzania on this issue. We recognise the difficulties in challenging Mugabe bilaterally, but without the engagement of the Southern African Development Community, with its commitment to promoting good governance and respect for human rights and the rule of law, the situation will deteriorate further.
We therefore welcome the visit of the chair of the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security, President Kikwete, to Harare on 15 March.
With President Mbeki of South Africa, he has proposed an initiative to encourage internal dialogue between ZANU-PF and the Movement for Democratic Change on policy reform, but quick progress is necessary if that is to have an impact.
Mugabe is a master of denial and delay. The Zambian President has recently called Zimbabwe a "sinking Titanic"—an apt description, indeed.
On the European Union, despite the claims of Mugabe about illegal economic sanctions imposed by the EU, let us be clear: the EU has no economic sanctions against Zimbabwe.
They exist only in his mind. The EU does not prevent western companies, including British ones, from doing business with Zimbabwe, which in fact has a trade surplus with the UK. The EU does have an arms sales ban, and a travel ban and an assets freeze on leading members of the regime.
While those targeted measures have had no impact on the Zimbabwean economy, they show that the EU is serious about human rights.
Zimbabwean civil society organisations support those measures because they are focused on the destroyers of Zimbabwean society and not on its suffering people.
As my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary told the House on Tuesday and the Prime Minister repeated the next day, we will look to add to these targeted measures. We are pushing for, and expect there to be, progress on the addition of extra names to the EU visa ban list, again pressurising the regime without impacting on ordinary Zimbabweans.
On the actions of the UK Government, let the House be clear: we are doing all that we can to relieve the suffering of the Zimbabwean people. T
he UK is one of the three largest donors to Zimbabwe, and, contrary to the claims of some, that money is making a real difference to the lives of ordinary people in Zimbabwe. For some, that money is quite literally the difference between life and death, and the House should be proud of that contribution.
In the past five years, the Department for International Development has committed more than £143 million to humanitarian programmes, including food aid, life-saving vaccines, support for orphans and vulnerable children, and agricultural inputs to the poorest farmers.
We have also provided £37 million to tackle the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Of the €200 million given by the EU last year, the UK alone disbursed nearly €60 million in bilateral assistance—hardly the actions of a country not interested in the affairs of Zimbabwe; far less one with a bilateral grievance.
As the Foreign Secretary made clear on Tuesday, our aid is channelled through United Nations and NGO agencies to escape the clutches of the regime.
I want to stress that our food aid is not a part of the ZANU-PF programme to use food as a means to force support or to punish opposition.
It is also clear that not only are innocent Zimbabweans suffering, but the tragedy in Zimbabwe is having a significant impact on the region: both a direct impact with mass migration, and a consequent social impact in terms of HIV, malnutrition, safety and the education of children, to name but a few factors. As Zimbabwe disintegrates, those impacts will increase.
The UK shares the region's desire to see Zimbabwe's recovery—there is no other UK agenda.
Our concerns are for the ordinary Zimbabweans and their suffering at the hands of a regime determined to pursue policies that hurt rather than help them. We stand ready to help, with our international partners, but only when there is an environment inside Zimbabwe in which that assistance will be effective.
Until the Zimbabwean regime changes course, we will maintain the international spotlight on them, and increase Mugabe's isolation.
In that vein, I welcome France's decision not to invite Mugabe to the February France-Africa summit, which sent a clear signal that this woeful governance will not be tolerated.
However, as I and others, including the Prime Minister, have made clear, the Zimbabwean crisis cannot be solved by the UK. Those sentiments were echoed by the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who told the BBC on 18 March:
"I have repeatedly said that the British government cannot be seen to be at the forefront in confronting Robert Mugabe alone. I've always said that that will be misconstrued as a colonial resuscitation of the same situation again. So I always say that Britain, together with the rest of the international community, the African Union, and the rest of the international community have to act together."
So we in this House and elsewhere must be careful that, while expressing our outrage at recent events and at the downward spiral of Zimbabwe, we do not do or say anything that will hand a propaganda tool to Robert Mugabe.
We will continue to exert pressure in international forums, including the United Nations—we expect a tough EU statement on the Human Rights Council this week, and a humanitarian briefing on the UN Security Council next week—the African Union and the European Union, and with international partners, until democracy is restored to Zimbabwe.
We will continue to do everything that we can to ensure that whoever governs Zimbabwe does so in a way that guarantees a better future for all Zimbabweans: a democratic and accountable Government, and policies that ensure economic stability and development, not humanitarian misery.
My generation was the first to be born not as children of the empire, but as children of the Commonwealth.
When I first became involved in political life, the struggle against colonialism, and the struggle of the peoples in southern Africa who were subjugated by racist regimes, were an inspiration to me and to my generation. As time went by, we celebrated as Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and the fighters came out of the bush to create a new democratic future for their people.
That is why it is so hard for me personally to watch what is happening in Zimbabwe today. Uniquely, the people whom we once cheered as liberators are now the oppressors who have taken away the voice of the Zimbabwean people.
Brave Zimbabweans are speaking up for their freedom. They are looking to their African neighbours to help. We are playing our part in the international community.
In 1980, Zimbabwe proudly proclaimed its independence. Tragically, 27 years later, its people have still to gain their freedom.


 
 

Peace and Tranquility???
Peace and Tranquility???
 Cell in RSA: 0791463039
 


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Friday, 23 March 2007

MUGABE THINKS HIGHLY OF HIMSELF.....WHAT A SHAME!

Robert Mugabe's secret shrine

The US ambassador Christopher Dell stormed out of a meeting yesterday when he was told President Mugabe's regime would not answer questions about attacks on opposition politicians.
Mugabe may have a low opinion of foreign ambassadors - he is threatening to deport any who go on "abusing his hospitality" - but he has a high opinion of himself. His latest top secret project is to establish a magnificent shrine commemorating his life and achievements.
While the country struggles to find foreign currency to buy food and fuel, Mugabe is spending $400,000 on the Robert Mugabe Memorial.
Work, under the direction of local government minister Ignatius Chombo, has already begun in Mugabe's home town, Zvimba. The president, now 83, is apparently anxious for it to be completed while
While his country struggles, Robert Mugabe builds a vast memorial to himself
he lives, so he can open it himself.
The memorial will cover an area the size of a football pitch, and depict the former guerrilla leader's life and role in the country's liberation struggle. It will include a statue, and reproductions of his clothes and letters from prison.
The material for the construction has been sourced in Asia, and architects are expected to fly in to Harare in early April.
Mugabe enjoys a grand and extravagant life. He has built his own retirement home - a 25-bedroom mansion in the suburb of Borrowdale Brook, some 16 miles north of Harare. Aerial pictures of this project show the building to look like a medium-sized hotel.
But it is his grandiose memorial at Zvimba by which his fellow citizens will remember Mugabe - that, and the pitiful state of ruin and despair to which he has reduced his country.
FIRST POSTED MARCH 20, 2007


 


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Tuesday, 20 March 2007

SPECIAL COMMENT POSTED ON WEBSITE!

Zimbabwe is about White Supremacy

BY John Iteshi

http://johntina1.spaces.live.com/



Izhiogoagbo@yahoo.com


London


Racism, the worst kind of racism is the only reason for British media's
obsessions about Mugabe. Nothing in Zimbabwe equates to one tenth of what
happens in each of the 36 states of Nigeria. What the opposition leader
Morgan Tsvangirai, did by trying to instigate mass uprising, cannot be
attempted successfully by anybody in Nigeria today. Just dreaming of it
aloud will put you in jail in Nigeria let alone starting it. Before 2003
general elections key political opponents of the Federal government and
various state governments were assassinated, but they made no real news to
BBC and other western media. Just few months ago in Ebonyi State one of the
poorest States, the governor locked up two journalists for over three months
for publishing articles which accused the governor, Sam Egwu of corruption
in a local newspaper. What a pity, this fact did not make any news to the
democracy loving western media! Currently, oppositions at all levels are
being openly suppressed and systematically excluded from contesting the next
elections by the electoral body headed by a government stooge (in fact there
are clear evidence that the head of the electoral body has forged
certificate but he cannot be removed because he has a mission to install
government candidates). The vice president of Nigeria is openly humiliated
and denied his official privileges just for standing up against the plot by
the president to extend his rule through the back door. One would have
expected the democracy loving white world to stand up against the evil
regime of Obasanjo, but nothing like that has happened.

The clear message being sent across Black Africa seems to be that all one
needs to succeed as president of his country is to be a friend of the west
even at the expense of his people just like Obasanjo and not transparency
and good governance. The fact is now clearest that any Black African leader
regarded as good by the west is definitely evil or incompetent. Example
Obasanjo vis-à-vis General Abacha who was condemned in the west but has left
indelible landmarks of great infrastructural development in Nigeria... For
the benefit of those who are unaware of the facts. Abacha ruled Nigeria
between November 1993 and June 1998 during which the oil market was not at
all booming, but used the meagre resources wisely enough to rehabilitate
roads, hospitals universities and other public amenities through the
Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF). Obasanjo's democracy has ruled Nigeria since may
1999 witnessing unprecedented increase in revenue through the unprecedented
oil boom and irresponsible disposals of the most lucrative public
corporations in the name of privatisation, but has achieved virtually no
definite success in any sector. Roads are basically left where Abacha left
them in 1998 and I speak as an enlightened Nigerian who knows Nigeria. I
visited Nigeria in 2005 October and travelled by coach round the country to
see if there has been any changes. I travelled from Abuja to Abakaliki via
Enugu; from Enugu to Onitsha - Benin - Ore - Lagos and from Lagos to
Ibadan-Okene-Abuja and was shocked to see that we have wasted 8years of
unprecedented economic boom. There are global drumming about economic
reforms and progress in Nigeria, while the reality is that only white rogues
collaborating with the government are the gainers. Destroying landline
phones networks and public payphones in order to force every Nigerian to
depend on GSM (which enriches mainly white South Africans) is what people
call economic progress in Nigeria. The fact that western media and their
governments have continued to praise a government as evil as Obasanjo's
despite clear evidences of everything they claim to stand against makes me
confident that any government condemned by the west might not be all bad
after all. Perhaps, Idi Amin might have not been as bad!
It seems to me that the only reason the white world is against Mugabe is
because he expelled white farmers because genuine concern for the Black race
would have meant that Nigeria being the largest Black society would be given
greater focus. It is now clear to me that BBC and other British media are
far worse than the British National Party (BNP) which is labelled racist.
The BNP is not threatening the existence and survival of the Black race
while British journalists are. I am most grateful for the hospitality of the
British state for affording me the good life and respect that no Black
country can afford its Black citizens. I do not shy away from the hard fact
that the most racist white country would treat ordinary Black immigrants
better than the best Black country would treat its own citizens. Therefore,
I am grateful to Britain, but at the same time believe that my people must
be enlightened about the true location of racism. The real racism is not
about local people genuinely resenting to uncontrolled immigration of
dubious people into their country. I put myself in the shoes of ordinary
white British people who have no other country to run to! What I call racism
at its worst is the one-sided stand of the "white world" on Zimbabwe.

It is accepted that the takeover of white farms could have been more
diplomatically done, but it cannot justify the current scale of global
condemnation of Mugabe. What the white supremacists pretending to be
messiahs are insinuating is that Zimbabwe cannot survive without white
farmers who clearly were not even farming to feed Zimbabweans in the first
place. What is being propagated around the world is that no Black country
can survive on its own even though, I know that there had been no evidence
of starvation since the controversial take over of farms. What needs to be
done by enlightened and decolonised Black people is to rally round and use
the Zimbabwean case as an inspiration for building successful societies.
Zimbabwe is by far more democratic and successful than most other Black
African countries like Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, DRC etc., but today it bears
the ignoble reputation of being one of the worst places to live in. Even
though nobody can prove that the best of the 36 state governors of Nigeria
is not worst than 10 Mugabes as I have severally challenged the BBC to do,
we are still being fed with lies about Mugabe. It is therefore very clear
that Mugabe would have remained a friend of the west if he had not expelled
white farmers. Hence, it is purely and squarely about race!
John Iteshi

http://johntina1.spaces.live.com/

Izhiogoagbo@yahoo.com
London

A POEM BY BRO DANIEL MOLOKELA!

FREEDOM CHETE!

Those who've always known her

Say she is not only such a beauty

But that she's always vivacious

Abounding with energy and life!

Yet today when I saw she was so different

It wasn't the normal her at all

As she limped up to court with her co-accused

She was visibly drained and deflated!

Her normally beautiful bright face

Was not so today, she looked a bit darker

Her eyes were ruddy, more of blood shot

Far from the sparking white eyes she normally has!

Those who saw her latest pictures

Say she now has a battered body

Polished black all over by the brutality of the police

Far from her normally golden crisp body!

I also saw her as she struggled out of the court

The medics also had seen enough of her pain

She was lifted up into a waiting ambulance

Driven through the avenues to a hospital ward

But as she left, a stinking air of injustice filled the air

Covering the whole rotten area of the magistrates courts

But I am told when she woke up in her bed

In the privacy of Avenues Clinic

The nurses thought the first words she muttered

Had a familiar ring around her!

"Freedom Chete!!!!"

All she wanted was her people's freedom

All she wanted was her own freedom

"Freedom Chete!"

That's all she wanted. Just that!!!

Mr. Daniel Molokele
Centurion, Pretoria, RSA
Cel. +27 72 947 4815
Tel. +27 12 657 1445
Fax. +27 86 691 6257
Website: www.danielmolokele.com

Monday, 19 March 2007

Bro Moeletsi Mbeki Paints A Gloom Picture For Zimbabwe !

http://crybelovedzimbabwe.blogspot.com/2007/03/moeletsi-mbeki-paints-gloom-picture-for.html


Moeletsi Mbeki Paints A Gloom Picture For Zimbabwe




I watched Moeletsi Mbeki's interview on Sky News this morning and I am afraid the picture is bleak. He starts by pointing out that Zimbabwe is a landlocked country that if any pressure was needed then it can only be exerted by the neighbouring countries i.e South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique. He then points out what he conceives as the primary reason for the neighbours for not exerting pressure on Zimbabwe is mostly because they fear that their support for MDC and Morgan Tsvangirai would send a wrong message for Africa's most industrialised region. Souther Africa being the most industrialised has more people working and this has given rise to trade unionism, the trade unions using their sheer size are becoming more and more political. He cites the case of Zambia where Kenneth Kaunda was ousted by a trade union leader after 27 years in power. Therefore African leaders are reluctant to be drawn into the issue of Zimbabwe for fear that they own labour movement might oust them from power one day. Mr Mbeki argues that the influx of refugees would not make a big policy change as he acknowledged that even in South Africa, COSATU the largest umbrella labour body in whole of Africa poses a threat to South Africa's ANC led government. COSATU is only civic body together with The Church Council of Souther Africa which issued a statement concerned by what was happening in Zimbabwe. On Human Rights day in South Africa it has promised to demonstrate against South Africa's quiet diplomacy and the illegal arrest and torture of Zimbabwean's opposition and civic leaders on their way to a prayer meeting.

Mbeki having lived in Zimbabwe when he was forced to flee apartheid was there when Mugabe ordered the massacre of more than 50 000 civilians to crush Joshua Nkomo's opposition Zapu PF which later merged with Mugabe's Zanu PF. He then uses this example to say that things will get worse before they get better in Zimbabwe. Asked about the fact that The MDC President feels that last Sunday's events were a tipping point, he answers that Morgan is an optimist. He says he knows Mugabe personally and know that he has an appetite for violence and will continue to exert brutal violence to stop regime change in Zimbabwe.

Mr Moeletsi Mbeki is a brother to South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki, has a strong background in journalism, with a resume that includes a Nieman Fellowship and time at the BBC. He was a media consultant for the ANC in the '90s, and is currently the chairman of Endemol South Africa. He has always bee outspoken and differs on many things from his brother South Africa's president. He caused waves when he said: Africans Were Better Off During Colonial Times Than They Are Now


 


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Thursday, 15 March 2007

HOW TO KILL A COUNTRY BT SAMANTHA POWER!

How To Kill A Country


http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200312/power


Turning a breadbasket into a basket case in ten easy steps-the Robert Mugabe
way


by <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/by/samantha_power> Samantha Power

.....

Nearly forty years ago Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, became the
first and only white colonial ruler to break away from the British Crown. He
had tired of London's nagging about the subjugation of Rhodesian blacks. In
1965 Smith declared independence. "The mantle of the pioneers has fallen on
our shoulders," he said, calling on white Rhodesians to maintain standards
in a "primitive country." Smith saw himself as an apostle of Cecil John
Rhodes, the British magnate who gave Rhodesia its name, and who in the late
nineteenth century duped black tribal leaders into signing over the fertile
land to white pioneers. Although Rhodesia in 1965 was home to just over
200,000 whites and four million blacks, Smith shared Rhodes's belief that
black majority rule would occur "never in a thousand years."

Smith was of course wrong. In 1980, after a civil war that cost 30,000
lives, the black majority took charge of the country, which was renamed
Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe-the nationalist leader whom Smith had branded a
"Marxist terrorist" and jailed for more than a decade; a man who had once
urged his followers to stop wearing shoes and socks to show they were
willing to reject the trappings of European civilization-became President.

Zimbabwe, one of southern Africa's most prosperous countries, held great
promise. Its Victoria Falls was one of the seven natural wonders of the
world. Its gushing Zambezi River boasted wildlife and pulsing rapids. Its
lush soil was the envy of a continent. And, though landlocked, the country
had modernized sensibly: it had a network of paved roads, four airports,
and, thanks to Mugabe's leadership, a rigorous and inclusive education
system. Mugabe knew that whites drove the economy, and he was pragmatic.
"Good old Bob," as white farmers quickly came to call him, kept his shoes
and socks on, and urged reconciliation: "An evil remains an evil whether
practiced by white against black or black against white," he said on the eve
of independence. In a cordial meeting with Smith, Mugabe acknowledged that
he had inherited the "jewel of Africa," and he vowed to keep it that way.

"I was very pleasantly surprised," says Smith, who still lives in Zimbabwe.
"He spoke like a sophisticated Westerner. He was very courteous: it was 'Mr.
Smith this' and 'Mr. Smith that.'" That Ian Smith has stayed in Zimbabwe is
itself surprising. But it is even more remarkable that the man who once ran
an election campaign promising "a whiter, brighter Rhodesia" does not live
as other well-to-do Zimbabweans do-behind a bolted gate manned by forbidding
security forces. For three years, with Zimbabwe imploding politically and
economically, Mugabe has been inciting violence against whites. Yet Smith's
spacious home, next door to the Cuban embassy in the capital, Harare, is
shielded by neither a guard post nor a guard dog-only by purple jacaranda
trees. When I visited him, earlier this year, Smith's driveway gate and his
front door stood wide open, offering passersby an inviting glimpse of his
plush Victorian furnishings.

Swallowed up by a Queen Anne armchair, Smith, a bone-thin
eighty-four-year-old, told me that all he ever wanted to do in life was
manage his 4,000-acre farm, 220 miles southwest of Harare. He has run the
farm since he returned from flying Spitfires for the British in World War
II. He grows oranges and seed potatoes, and raises cattle. "I hope I don't
sound arrogant," he said, "but you won't find a better-run piece of land."
Smith insists that when Mugabe banned him from politics, in 1987, he was
glad for the opportunity to return to full-time farming. But in Zimbabwe,
where whites owned the finest farmland and most blacks remained dispossessed
two decades after independence, politics and land became inseparable. A few
days before my visit Smith was reading the morning newspaper when he came
across a government notice listing the latest batch of farms designated for
seizure by the state. His farm was among them.

For a man who had just learned that he would lose his livelihood, his
passion, and his family home, Smith was strangely unflustered. Largely
ignored since independence, he seems to have found in the blind bungling of
Robert Mugabe's regime a grim redemption for white rule. "You can't imagine
how many people come up to me and say, 'We didn't agree with you back then.
We thought you were too rigid and inflexible. But now we see you were right.
You were so right: they were not fit to govern.'"

The "they," of course, is the black majority. But Smith is drawing the wrong
lesson. Although Zimbabwe is as broken as any country on the planet, it
offers a testament not to some inherent African inability to govern but to a
minority rule as oppressive and inconsiderate of the welfare of citizens as
its ignominious white predecessor. The country's economy in 1997 was the
fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking. A onetime
net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now
exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of
thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa,
children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like
miniature pregnant women.

How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the
continent's basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe, now seventy-nine, who
by his actions has compiled something of a "how-to" manual for national
destruction. Although many of his methods have been applied elsewhere, taken
as a whole his ten-step approach is more radical and more comprehensive than
that of other despots. The Zimbabwe case offers some important insights. It
illustrates the prime importance of accountability as an antidote to idiocy
and excess. It highlights the lasting effects of decolonization-limited
Western influence on the continent and a reluctance by African leaders to
criticize their own. And it offers a warning about how much damage one man
can do, very quickly.

1. Destroy the engine of productivity

The Harare Sports Club, a Rhodesian throwback, sits kitty-corner from
Mugabe's private residence. I was told ahead of time by locals that the
patrons would be mostly white ex-farmers "crying into their beer." Inside,
towering, bull-necked men lined the bar. Most were chain-smoking, and they
did seem quite wobbly. A television hanging from the ceiling played reruns
of Tim Henman's latest Wimbledon tease. At the entrance to the club is a
sports shop, which sells squash rackets and cricket bats. The place is Old
England in a capsule, and yet the paint is chipped, the tabs are unpaid, and
the lively chatter, once about crop yields and rugby scores, now focuses on
court dates and emigration plans.

Pat Ashton, a stocky, white-haired fifty-five-year-old farmer, stops in at
least twice a month. Ashton grew up in Cheshire, England, and moved to
Rhodesia in 1971. Trusting Mugabe's moderate rhetoric, he made a down
payment on a farm the year after independence. It took him two decades to
pay back his loans, but in 2001 he finally did so. The Ashton farm grew
mangoes, tobacco, maize, and flat peas, grossing about $800,000 annually.
His workers didn't earn enough to buy their own land ("I probably could have
done more to make them self-sufficient," he admits), but he did build them a
village of some ninety houses, a social hall, a football field, and a
medical clinic. Ashton reinvested virtually all of his surplus in the farm.

In July of 2001 about fifty people who lived in the nearby town arrived on
his land. Most were miners, and they were led by three officials from the
Mugabe government. The group began surveying Ashton's property and marking
out plots for homes. The next six months were a constant battle. The
settlers returned and erected makeshift thatch huts in the middle of
Ashton's maize and tobacco fields. They dug up his maize crops, beat up his
farm workers, and removed and bent his irrigation pipes. Still Ashton hung
on, living in his farmhouse and planting and harvesting what he could. In
January of 2002 four trucks arrived, containing youth militia and men
claiming they were veterans of the liberation war collecting their reward
for service. This time the invaders attacked Ashton, with steel rods and an
ax, cutting him in the forearm and badly damaging his pickup truck as he
tried to escape. They held two of his sons hostage for a day, threatening to
execute them and making them chant songs in praise of the ruling party. As
the invaders carted away all the Ashton family's transportable
belongings-from crockery to toilet seats-the police watched with amusement
and then decided to join in.

Ashton is more sympathetic than many other farmers, but the story of his
eviction is fairly typical. In 2000, about 4,000 large-scale commercial
farmers owned some 70 percent of Zimbabwe's arable land. Nearly two thirds
of these farmers had bought their farms after independence, and thus held
titles issued not by Ian Smith or the British colonial regime but by the
Mugabe government. Mugabe had long pledged land reform as a way of
redistributing farmland to black peasants and dismantling what many saw as
the country's "mini-Rhodesias." But he had delayed action for two decades,
generally taking farms only on a "willing seller, willing buyer" basis.

Mugabe decided on what he called "fast-track land reform" only in February
of 2000, after he got shocking results in a constitutional referendum:
though he controlled the media, the schools, the police, and the army,
voters rejected a constitution he put forth to increase his power even
further. A new movement was afoot in Zimbabwe: the Movement for Democratic
Change-a coalition of civic groups, labor unions, constitutional reformers,
and heretofore marginal opposition parties. Mugabe blamed the whites and
their farm workers (who, although they together made up only 15 percent of
the electorate, were enough to tip the scales) for the growth of the MDC-and
for his humiliating rebuff.

So he played the race card and the land card. "If white settlers just took
the land from us without paying for it," the President declared, "we can, in
a similar way, just take it from them without paying for it." In 1896
Africans had suffered huge casualties in an eighteen-month rebellion against
British pioneers known as the chimurenga, or "liberation war." The war that
brought Zimbabwean blacks self-rule was known as the second chimurenga. In
the immediate aftermath of his referendum defeat Mugabe announced a third
chimurenga, invoking a valiant history to animate a violent, country-wide
land grab.

Initially, the farmers held their ground, but it became clear after several
white farmers were murdered that they were too few and Mugabe's regime was
too determined. Of the 4,000 large-scale commercial farmers in business
three years ago, all but 500 have been forced off their land. Most
Zimbabweans (including white farmers) say that land reform was both
necessary and inevitable. The tragedy of Mugabe's approach is that it has
harmed those whom a well-ordered, selective redistribution program could and
should have helped. Generally the farms have not been given to black farm
managers or farm workers. Indeed, because of their association with the
opposition, more than a million farm workers and their dependents have been
displaced, and they are now at grave risk of starvation. In fact, the
beneficiaries of the land seizures are, with few exceptions, ruling-party
officials and friends of the President's. Although Mugabe's people seem to
view the possession of farms as a sign of status (the Minister of Home
Affairs has five; the Minister of Information has three; Mugabe's wife,
Grace, and scores of influential party members and their relatives have two
each), these elites don't have the experience, the equipment, or,
apparently, the desire to run them. About 130,000 formerly landless peasants
helped the ruling elites to take over the farms, but now that the dirty work
is done, many of them are themselves being expelled.

The drop-off in agricultural production is staggering. Maize farming, which
yielded more than 1.5 million tons annually before 2000, is this year
expected to generate just 500,000 tons. Wheat production, which stood at
309,000 tons in 2000, will hover at 27,000 tons this year. Tobacco
production, too, which at 265,000 tons accounted for nearly a third of the
total foreign-currency earnings in 2000, has tumbled, to about 66,000 tons
in 2003.

Mugabe's belief that he can strengthen his flagging popularity by destroying
a resented but economically vital minority group is one that dictators
elsewhere have shared. Paranoid about their diminishing support, Stalin
wiped out the wealthy kulak farming class, Idi Amin purged Uganda's Indian
commercial class, and, of course, Hitler went after Jewish businesses even
though Germany was already reeling from the Depression. Whatever spikes in
popularity these moves generated, the economic damage was profound, and the
dictators had to exert great effort to mask it.

2. Bury the truth

Zimbabweans get their news from state television, "the first and permanent
media choice for every Zimbabwean." The station is required to play at least
once every hour a social-realist commercial accompanied by the jingle
"Rambai Makashinga," or "Persevere." The ad shows youthful, chiseled
Zimbabweans, dressed in designer jeans, dancing in maize and wheat fields as
they cheerily harvest the season's crops. Many are wearing yellow and green,
the colors of the ruling party. One is wearing a T-shirt bearing the number
23, signifying Mugabe's years in power. The maize is shucked to the beat,
and the hoes land rhythmically in the rich red soil. The commercial reminds
starving Zimbabweans what they got from their liberation from white rule:
Nike sneakers and crops aplenty.

More representative of the country's actual situation is the state of the
fertile crescent north of the capital. If Zimbabwe is Africa's breadbasket,
the Mazowe Valley is the breadbasket of the breadbasket. Yet driving through
it today is like visiting a refugee camp that has been hit by a hurricane.
Fields that should brim with knee-high, forest-green winter wheat now
contain only the crackling yellow stubble of last year's crop. The barbed
wire that once hemmed in cattle has been ripped away by squatters, who have
plopped down cheap cement houses in the middle of arable fields and killed
off cows and sheep for food. Surviving cattle wander, emaciated, onto the
roads. Untended, they are riddled with foot-and-mouth disease, dooming what
was once a thriving cattle-export business. Irrigation equipment lies
derelict and rusting; much of it has been dismantled and sold as scrap
metal.

Government food warehouses used to contain sacks of wheat and maize piled to
the sky, but the warehouses, on which the vast majority of the population
depends, now stand empty. Mugabe designated the state-run Grain Marketing
Board as the sole buyer and distributor of maize and wheat in the country,
and he fixed prices at a fraction of market value. In a country with
moderate inflation this might have kept staples at affordable prices. But
given that the prices of everything else in the country, including seed and
fertilizer, are doubling each month, farmers can grow these vital crops only
at a severe loss. As a result both commercial and small farmers have gotten
out of the maize and wheat business, shifting to crops that are not
price-controlled.

Mugabe handles the unprecedented food shortages the totalitarian way: he
hides them, guarding the size of GMB stocks as carefully as he would
military secrets. Longtime foreign correspondents have been expelled from
the country, and local journalists dare not approach the GMB, for fear of
arrest. Driving by one warehouse in Mvurwi, I observed a typically listless
group of GMB workers in blue overalls lounging in the sunshine, smoking
cigarettes, and stacking and restacking wooden pallets that would ordinarily
be used to store the harvest. Nothing too explosive there. Yet when the GMB
overseers saw they were being watched, they dispatched a posse of young men
to pursue my vehicle in a harrowing (and, owing to their reluctance to waste
scarce fuel, unsuccessful) car chase.

Zimbabweans are severely malnourished, and deaths from starvation occur even
in the cities. The country has not yet suffered nationwide famine only
because international donors have stepped in. Before Mugabe launched his
chimurenga, the UN's World Food Programme relied on Zimbabwean agriculture
to help keep the rest of Africa fed. It maintained only a small procurement
office in Harare, staffed by a dozen people. Last year, however, the WFP had
to overhaul its operation, hiring hundreds of international and Zimbabwean
aid workers to distribute food in the country. Western governments have
given the organization $300 million to feed some 5.5 million Zimbabweans,
nearly 50 percent of the country's population. (At the height of the
Ethiopian famine, international donors fed just 20 percent of Ethiopia's
citizens.)

Shortages are expected to be far more severe in the coming year. But instead
of disclosing the country's true needs and requesting a helping hand,
Mugabe's cabinet has delivered a passive-aggressive screed to the
international community. In a twenty-four-page "appeal" delivered this past
July, it defended the land seizures for "economically empowering the poor,"
and criticized donors for their "skepticism [toward] pro-poor policies."
Everyone and everything was responsible for food shortages except the real
culprit, Mugabe himself. By exaggerating Zimbabwe's crop yields in Potemkin
fashion, the cabinet downplayed its needs, making it impossible for the WFP
to get from donors (already stretched thin in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Liberia) the food Zimbabwe will need to stave off widespread starvation in
2004.

3. Crush dissent

Zimbabweans are remarkably unshy about criticizing Robert Mugabe's rule. Ask
a taxi driver how he is doing, and he will answer without hesitation: "I am
suffering." Several months after rejecting Mugabe's proposed constitution,
voters in the major cities swept the ruling party out of office, giving the
MDC fifty-seven of the 120 contestable parliamentary seats. In March of last
year, although the ruling party beat and tortured opponents, controlled
media coverage of the campaign, and posted its armed watchdogs at election
booths, the voters turned up-and by all unofficial accounts elected Morgan
Tsvangirai, the head of the Movement for Democratic Change, to replace
Mugabe as President.

Mugabe rigged the results, but Tsvangirai's supporters still call the
opposition leader "Mr. President." Tsvangirai is a large man, a labor
organizer who gives a rumpled impression despite his recent turn toward
designer suits. "Mugabe underestimated the people and overestimated his
invincibility," he told me when I met with him in August. Time will tell.
For now, instead of leading protests at home, or mobilizing pressure abroad,
Tsvangirai spends his days in court-fending off charges of treason, which
carry the death penalty. On the eve of Tsvangirai's stunning showing in the
election, the government produced a grainy and unconvincing videotape
showing him supposedly telling a shady Israeli businessman that he would
like to "eliminate" Mugabe. Stuck in court, Tsvangirai hasn't appeared much
in public since.

The MDC's message has been circulated by the Daily News, the country's only
independent daily newspaper, which was launched in 1999 and quietly captured
the highest newspaper readership in the country: it was so popular that it
sold out by lunchtime. In January of 2001 Mugabe's Information Minister,
Jonathan Moyo, described the paper as "a threat to national security which
has to be silenced." Hours later the Daily News printing presses were
destroyed by a bomb. This past September the government denied the
irreverent paper a license, and the police shut it down.

Tsvangirai's international standing has thus far helped to keep him alive
(although he was once beaten unconscious), but some of his followers have
not been so lucky. About 250 Zimbabweans have died in political killings
since the competition for power heated up, in 2000. According to Amnesty
International, 70,000 incidents of torture and abuse took place in Zimbabwe
last year alone. The government's most pervasive form of intimidation is
also its most effective: the denial of food. While international aid groups
try to feed Zimbabweans in rural areas, city folk must buy their maize and
wheat from the sole distributor-the Grain Marketing Board. In order to get
food they are often forced to produce a ruling-party membership card or to
chant such slogans as "Long live Robert Mugabe!," "Down with whites!," and
"Down with Morgan Tsvangirai!" Last year the former speaker of the
parliament, Didymus Mutasa, stated, "We would be better off with only six
million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle. We
don't want these extra people."

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has famously argued that no
functioning democracy has ever suffered a famine, because democratic
governments "have to win elections and face public criticism, and have
strong incentive to undertake measures to avert famines and other
catastrophes." Like Pol Pot's Cambodia and Mao's China, Mugabe's Zimbabwe
shows what can happen when political elites operate with no fear of being
taken to task.

4. Legislate the impossible

For all the lawlessness in Zimbabwe, the country in fact suffers from an
overabundance of laws. Indeed, Mugabe has introduced so many economic edicts
in the past year that most citizens have found it impossible to keep track.
He fixed the price of a loaf of bread at half the bakers' break-even price,
and levied astronomical fines on any baker who charged more. Bakers stopped
making bread until somebody noticed that sesame bread, a "luxury item,"
wasn't price-controlled; by sprinkling a few sesame seeds on their standard
loaves, bakers were able to get back in business. A pair of mortuary workers
were arrested recently for running a profitable "rent-a-cadaver" business:
because Mugabe had decreed that drivers in funeral processions would get
privileged access to the trickle of fuel coming into the country, these
entrepreneurs had begun leasing bodies to Zimbabwean drivers.

"Mugonomics," as Mugabe's brand of economic policy is known in Zimbabwe,
addresses the symptoms of economic collapse, such as food and fuel
shortages, but ignores the underlying causes. Inflation in Zimbabwe is
expected to surpass 800 percent by year's end. Unemployment is at 70
percent. Zimbabwe has its own dollar, but the highest (and rarest) currency
denomination, a $Z 1,000 note, cannot buy even a loaf of bread. Most
transactions require hundreds of $Z 50 and $Z 100 bills. When Tsvangirai was
arrested, several men were needed to carry his bail money to the Harare high
court in huge cardboard boxes. Newspapers advertise "money rubber bands" and
electronic money counters that "count 1,500 bills per minute."

Because the rate of inflation is astronomical in comparison with the
interest rates offered by banks, Zimbabweans are desperate to withdraw their
savings in order to spend the money while it still has value. The banks say
they would be happy to oblige-but they don't have the cash. The government
has so little foreign currency that it can't pay to import the ink and the
paper needed to print more bills or bills of higher denominations. In July
desperate Zimbabweans began sleeping outside banks so as to be there when
the doors opened. But because the banks limited the maximum withdrawal to
the equivalent of $2.50, patrons were rewarded for a night's wait with just
enough money to cover their bus fare home.

Mugabe has kept the official exchange rate fixed at 824 Zimbabwean dollars
to one U.S. dollar, even though the black-market rate hovers around $Z
5,000. Businessmen thus do their best to bypass official banks and
government institutions, and the black market has become the only market of
relevance. The state requires Zimbabweans who export goods to change 50
percent of their foreign earnings into local money at the official exchange
rate. This means that every dollar converted loses almost all of its
value-giving companies no incentive to bring money home, and worsening the
severe cash shortage.

Forlorn Zimbabwean pensioners whose savings have vanished in a matter of
months are reminiscent of the doleful Yugoslavs and Argentines who have
endured similar implosions. The economic dynamic in Zimbabwe is perversely
robust: while ordinary people suffer, black-market dealers and people with
foreign bank accounts prosper, making them powerful stakeholders in the
perpetuation of devastating economic policies.

5. Teach hate

When Mugabe took over as President, fewer than half of Zimbabweans could
read and write. He transformed the country-producing a literacy rate higher
than 85 percent. Yet he may be remembered less for his education drive than
for creating the "Green Bombers," the youth militia that emerged from the
National Youth Service Training Program, introduced after the ruling party's
dismal showing in the 2000 parliamentary elections.

Some 50,000 Zimbabweans aged ten to thirty have passed through the training
program since it started. The youth academies initially advertised
themselves as offering training in agriculture, construction, and other
occupations, but they have morphed into a paramilitary and indoctrination
enterprise. When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is
not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in the hope of enlisting
impressionable youths in their cause. And because tyrants never stop
worrying about the loyalty of their militaries, they often establish
ruling-party militias to act as personal guarantors of their safety in the
event of assassination or coup attempts. In the service of the third
chimurenga in Zimbabwe, students are taught how to make gasoline bombs and
set up roadblocks. Elliot Manyika, a hard-line ruling-party official who now
runs the program, says the training will teach youths to "change their
mind-set ... and not aspire to be a servant of the white man," especially
now that "whites are going where they came from." Many enroll reluctantly,
because they know they have no chance of finding work otherwise: slots at
university, at teacher and nurse training schools, and in the civil service
are reserved for those who can produce certificates showing that they have
graduated from a youth academy. Clad in green fatigues and red-and-green
berets, those graduates who become Green Bombers vandalize MDC offices,
harass Zimbabweans waiting for food, seize whites' farms, confiscate
newspapers, and intimidate voters and candidates.

6. Scare off foreigners

The Mbare market, in Harare, is Zimbabwe's largest bazaar. It contains more
than a hundred stalls, selling African carvings, tapestries, and sculptures.
In normal times at least four tourist buses and dozens of taxis visited the
market every day. Yet when I arrived one Sunday, the vendors looked at me as
though they were seeing the ghost of Cecil Rhodes. After a moment's pause
they rushed behind their stalls and hurriedly began polishing and propping
up their wares. One of them told me I was his first customer of the month;
it was July 27.

The murder of white farmers, the attacks on the opposition, and the theft of
an election have obviously done nothing to help tourism. Nor has the
disappearance of two indispensable travel items: cash and fuel. One Air
Zimbabwe flight attendant recently explained a two-hour delay by telling
passengers that the plane was waiting for a flight arriving from London "so
we can siphon from its tank." One of the reasons tourists used to visit
Zimbabwe was its game parks. But many of the fences around the parks have
been destroyed by squatters, and amid starvation, poachers have begun
hunting even rare wildlife. Farm invaders running out of white commercial
farms to seize have begun taking over wildlife preserves, creating safari
parks for their personal viewing. Foreign capital is disappearing faster
than the wildlife. When Mugabe called for the "indigenization of the
economy," he asserted pointedly that some Zimbabweans were "more indigenous
than others." It wasn't only farmers who were threatened by the chimurenga.
In 2000 "war veterans" invaded white-owned urban businesses-everything from
hotels and department stores to the offices of foreign corporations. The
remaining investors are running scared.

7. Invade a neighbor

As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit
a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can
distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's
elites. In August of 1998 Robert Mugabe sent 11,000 soldiers-a third of his
army-into the most menacing country in Africa: the Congo. He justified the
invasion on the grounds that he was defending the sovereignty of an African
country being invaded by Rwandan, Ugandan, and Burundian forces, which were
backing a rebellion against the Congo's President, Laurent Kabila. In
reality, just as Saddam Hussein went after the oil in Kuwait, Mugabe had his
eye on the Congo's riches. "There are fortunes to be made in the Congo,"
Tshinga Dube, one of Mugabe's colonels, told a television interviewer, "so
why rush to conquer the rebels?" Mugabe's cronies did in fact get rich off
diamonds, cobalt, and timber. But the war was extremely unpopular at home.
As casualties mounted, some army officers grew restless and began plotting a
coup, which was foiled in its planning stages. Mugabe dismissed his critics
as "black white men wearing the master's cap." But it was harder for him to
ignore the outrage of one of his key constituencies: the veterans of the
1970s liberation war, who saw fortunes being made in the Congo and began
clamoring for the compensation Mugabe had promised them for their
sacrifices. Mugabe thought he might placate the war veterans by offering up
the white farms, but in the end, although the vets were the ones who
expelled the white farmers, it is the country's elites who got the farms.
Zimbabwe's troops are thought to have withdrawn from the Congo in September
of last year, but the consequences of the war are more durable. In addition
to unleashing the war veterans as a powerful political force, the Congo war
consumed vast sums of money that would have been better spent on medicine
for the country's dying people.

8. Ignore a deadly enemy

Zimbabwe's only real surplus is HIV, which has infected a third of the
population, causing life expectancy to drop from fifty-six years in the
early seventies to a deeply distressing thirty-five years today. In 1999
Mugabe's government actually did something that no other African government
had tried: it introduced an "AIDS levy"-a three percent tax on every
Zimbabwean's salary, which was to be used to fund AIDS prevention and
treatment. Predictably, most of the money disappeared.

AIDS and food shortages have combined to generate what is called a "new
variant famine," in which hunger weakens the immune system, speeding HIV's
progression to full-blown AIDS. AIDS illnesses and deaths, in turn, further
wreck the economy, reducing the number of communal farmers who can produce
in the countryside, and forcing factories and mines to hire almost twice as
many workers to secure the same amount of labor. Zimbabwe's neighbors have
begun to treat patients with anti-retrovirals, but Mugabe can't afford the
drugs. "Working here is pointless," says Barbara Deve, the lone nurse in the
impoverished Hatcliffe township, near Harare. "We write prescriptions
knowing very well our patients don't have the money to buy the medicines in
the pharmacy. We say 'go buy' and 'go buy,' but it is just cruel theater."
Some 3,800 deaths from AIDS occur in Zimbabwe each week. Ignorance and
misinformation persist. When an AIDS death occurs in a rural area, it is
still common to hear the deceased described as having been "bewitched." A
recent poll revealed that condoms were thought to harbor HIV.

9. Commit genocide

Gukurahundi refers to the seasonal Zimbabwean rains that wipe out the debris
of the previous year's crop. It signifies a purging of the old, a
purification. In January of 1983 Robert Mugabe, a member of the ethnic Shona
majority, ordered his North Korea-trained Fifth Brigade to carry out what he
called a gukurahundi against the Ndebele people. The Ndebele account for
about a fourth of the country's population, and Mugabe felt that they
threatened him because his chief political rival at the time, Joshua Nkomo,
was a Ndebele. The Nazis gave us the Final Solution; the Serbs gave us
"ethnic cleansing"; the Zimbabweans have given us "wiping away."

Public discussion of the gukurahundi is forbidden in Zimbabwe. But George
Mkwananzi, thirty-three, is the self-anointed keeper of Ndebele memory.
Wearing thick spectacles that keep sliding down his nose, he doesn't fit the
image of a would-be rebel leader. But that is what he says he and others
will become if Mugabe is not punished for the murder of the Ndebele. "In the
whole history of this country nobody ever caused such a loss of life, not
even Cecil John Rhodes," Mkwananzi says. Rhodes's conquest left some 5,000
Ndebele dead. Mugabe's forces are thought to have killed 25,000. "When
liberation was achieved, we never experienced it as a region," Mkwananzi
says. "We were merely transferred from British colonialism to Shona
colonialism. If Mugabe and his henchmen are not prosecuted, we will break
away and create our own country, and we will find a way to make revenge
against Mugabe. It will happen. It may sound like a dream, but ours is a
brutalized past that has to be revisited. Five or ten years from now they
will say, 'What that man was saying was true.'"

In an era of international justice, dictators with blood on their hands are
afraid that if they relinquish power, they will end up prosecuted, like
Slobodan Milosevic, or humiliated, like Augusto Pinochet. Mugabe knows that
his massacres have been carefully documented by survivors and human-rights
investigators, and he is right to be nervous. Tsvangirai, for his part,
might be willing to accept a deal in which Mugabe was given a golden
parachute to Nigeria (as Charles Taylor, of Liberia, was), but he knows that
if he does so, his many Ndebele supporters may revolt. "I cannot stand up
now and say, 'We will forgive Mugabe,' because I will be dead," Tsvangirai
told me. "But neither can I say, 'We are going to send you to the Hague,'
because he will say, 'Let me burn down the building.'"

10. Blame the imperialists

Following the lead of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the United States
and Europe have imposed sanctions against Mugabe and seventy-four members of
his inner circle, freezing their assets, imposing a travel ban, and
forbidding arms sales. But other nations, including Malaysia, Libya, and
Venezuela, have been openly supportive of the Mugabe regime. Mugabe swats
away American and European criticism by citing imperial sins. "How can these
countries who have stolen land from the Red Indians, the Aborigines, and the
Eskimos dare to tell us what to do with our land?" he has asked. Like Castro
in Cuba, Mugabe is admired in the developing world for flouting the Western
powers.

The foreigner who could wield the most influence in Zimbabwe is South
African President Thabo Mbeki. But Mbeki, who has insisted on a "softly,
softly" approach, often seems simply to be stalling in Mugabe's behalf. In
September, with Zimbabwe in its worst condition since Mugabe came to power,
Mbeki said that things had normalized. Although his African National
Congress once benefited from sanctions in the fight against apartheid, he
has called for the termination of those against Zimbabwe. When, in 2002,
Tony Blair persuaded the Commonwealth of Nations to suspend Zimbabwe, Mbeki
urged that Britain be the one to exit. "Those inspired by notions of white
supremacy are free to depart if they feel that membership of the association
reduces them to a repugnant position imposed by inferior blacks," he said.

President Mbeki and other African heads of state are torn. On the one hand,
they know that an "African renaissance" can't come about while Mugabe and
people like him continue to wield power. On the other, they are power-hungry
themselves, and they are terrified that their own liberation-era
organizations will be left behind in such a renaissance. So they close ranks
on racial and anti-imperial grounds.

But although Mugabe's neighbors in Africa may applaud the President at
international conferences, they are privately taking steps to protect
themselves against the Zimbabwean catastrophe. So many Zimbabwean refugees
now flood South Africa that Mbeki grants entry only to those who can produce
a bank statement proving financial solvency or a deposit of $Z 300,000. His
government also deports several thousand illegal Zimbabwean immigrants each
week. Botswana has found itself so overrun by desperate Zimbabweans that it
is erecting an electric fence 300 miles long. Meanwhile, Mugabe's
anti-imperialist rhetoric, though an expedient balm at home, only deepens
Zimbabwe's isolation from potential lenders, investors, and tourists.

Still, Mugabe will have the last word on Zimbabwe's fate. His cronies are
clearly worried that if he clings to power indefinitely, the ruling party
will sink with him. He is under pressure to choose a successor by the end of
the year. But at seventy-nine, Mugabe may well decide to stick around,
relying-though he would never admit it-on the United States and Britain to
bail out his people with food aid.

If he hangs on, and if other African leaders don't force him out, Zimbabwe
may go in one of two directions. Its destitute citizens might be so
preoccupied with finding food and staying alive that they will increasingly
tune politics out. Over time their memory of-and sense of entitlement to-a
better life will give way, and they will docilely submit to authorities
whose power will only increase as the crisis deepens. Or the country's
appalling conditions might stir a domestic revolution, a fourth chimurenga,
which will bring down Mugabe and his ruling party.

The stakes are not small. Mugabe is one of the last surviving members of a
club of African big men-a club that included the likes of Mobutu Sese Seko,
of Zaire, and Daniel Arap Moi, of Kenya. These men led necessary and bold
opposition to colonial rule, but then grew addicted to power and its opulent
trappings. They began to see themselves less as rulers of their lands than
as owners. As their support waned, the big men acted in ways that big men so
often do, following a manual very much like Mugabe's-profiteering, stealing
elections, torturing opponents, alienating professionals and foreigners, and
ignoring the needs of their impoverished citizens.

Because Zimbabwe had so much going for it, and because the country has come
apart at such a frighteningly brisk pace, one can see the continent's worst
tendencies in microcosm. The lessons are clear. First, the contemporary
skeptics of democracy-who argue that it enables tyrannies of the majority
and that it ranks lower in priority than economic development-miss the
central insight of the Zimbabwe experience: When a ruler operates without
constraint, he can institute a tyranny of the minority, and he can plunder
his country's economy and starve his people without any potential
corrective. Democratic accountability is the bedrock concept that no
developed or developing state can live without. An outspoken press, a
healthy opposition, periodic elections, and an independent judiciary are
rightly valued for themselves, but their greatest virtue is practical: they
deter and thwart top-down demolition. Second, however distant the days of
imperial rule or Cold War interventions in Africa, the residual resentments
are a huge psychological impediment to sensible action by African leaders.
In many instances these leaders are simply deflecting attention from their
own failings. But anti-colonial rants get a receptive hearing among ordinary
citizens, because Western leaders have rarely acknowledged their past sins
and still refuse to face up to the way the West's farm subsidies are
ravaging African agriculture. Thus when things go wrong, it remains
expedient-and easy-to blame the white man. Third, regardless of the measure
of Western responsibility for Africa's mess, it is clear that the future of
Africa lies in the hands of African leaders. Thus far, individually and
collectively, they have been more prone to hide behind the past than to take
responsibility for the present. If Zimbabwe is a test of South Africa's
capacity to lead an African renaissance, then South Africa has flunked that
test.

Finally, Zimbabwe shows just how hard it is to destroy a place completely.
Mugabe has done virtually everything conceivable to ruin his country, but
one finds signs of a redoubtable spirit everywhere. Graffiti has sprung up
at city bus stops, reading, "Zvakwana!," or "It's enough!" Despite arrest
and torture, opposition activists remain brazen in their dissent. Displaced
farm workers now survive by growing vegetables in grass patches beside bus
stops. The destitute wait patiently in line to cast ballots in elections
they know will be stolen. White farmers spend what's left of their savings
suing for the return of their land in courts presided over by a government
whose officials occupy their farmhouses. All say the same thing: Yes,
Zimbabwe has been the continent's latest example of how not to govern. But
the mounting severity of Mugabe's crackdown is a testament to his
frustration with the resilience of civil society, which simply refuses to go
away. If Mugabe were to give up power, Zimbabweans insist, the country would
quickly show how liberated citizens can mend a shattered land. The effect,
they say, could be contagious.

For all their differences, Mugabe and Ian Smith share a basic misconception
about power: they both fail to realize that a government cannot survive
indefinitely when it advances the political and economic desires of the few
at the expense of the many. When I asked Smith whether he would stop leaving
his front door open now that starving Zimbabweans are prowling the city, he
replied, "I'm not going to change now." The same, alas, is most likely true
of Robert Mugabe.