From what the Germany Ambassador to Zimbabwe said on Hot seat, the EU will at best leave the targeted sanctions unchanged – the 200 or so individuals and 40 or so companies will remain and the many loop holes in the sanctions will remain. For those who see the sanctions as the only small thing causing minor irritation to Mugabe and his cronies worse could happen, the EU will start lifting the sanctions.
The Ambassador is right; Dr Madhuku’s insistence on a “people driven” process which means the exclusion of politicians is tenuous. MPs are elected representative of the people and they should rightly lead the process. What the Ambassador failed to acknowledge is the commitment and will of the GNU to carryout this important and critical task. If there had been any doubt on this twelve months ago then the shambolic performance of the GNU so far says it all.
The West should support calls for fresh elections instead of bankrolling a constitution making process which is only meant to extend the life of self-serving administration. The new constitution the GNU will produce will not be worth the paper it is written on!
Zimbabweans are trying to build a democratic country and we not only have to fight the dictator Mugabe and his cabal of thugs and murders; we must also fight fellow Zimbabweans like Tsvangirai who have now taken it upon themselves to gloss over what the dictator is doing and present him as a great statesman. As if that was not tough enough, we must also fight the Westerners, the very people who are supposedly the champions of justice, rule of law, human rights, etc.
Of course the ordinary person has no chance against the rich West, they have the money. He who pays the piper calls the tune! And so we, the ordinary Zimbabweans who are at the cutting edge of this economic melt down and know what it means to be beaten up and terrorised for no other reason than that we dared to exercise our basic right to vote have no say. We have no voice!
The West is set to lift targeted sanctions to appease Mugabe although the latter has been even more repressive than ever before and, more significantly, they could careless what we the people think. This is really, really frustrating!
Friday, 29 January 2010
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
APPEAL TO ZIMBABWE'S FARM INVADERS: IS YOUR OWN LIFE THAT WORTHLESS!
Has it ever occurred to you jambanjas who have been used by Mugabe and the ruling elite to invade farms and cause all the lawlessness that have now become the norm in Zimbabwe that this IS the root cause of Zimbabwe's economic melt down? I know the need to be revenged on the whites for all the colonial injustices is simply too irresistible to you. It is this Mugabe is exploiting and keeps stirring up. I appeal to you all to stop for one minute and think this through.
The farm invasions have been going on in Zimbabwe for more than ten years now. You, jambanjas, know better than anyone else the number of farms invaded and the white owners evicted. You know better than most of us how productive the farms were before the invasion. You also know what has happened to those farms after the invasion. Whatever the farms were producing, the yield has dropped significantly since the invasion. This is an established fact and no amount of propaganda can change this simple fact!
Zimbabwe’s total economic melt down happened at the same time and pace as the collapse of our agricultural sector. Zimbabwe’s economy well being was dependent of it agricultural sector just as the branches of a tree are dependent on the roots. Cut the roots and the branches will soon wither and die.
Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean lives were lost in our fight for freedom, peace, human dignity and economic prosperity. In the last tens years particularly all these been forgotten or denied in pursuit of this single object: to humiliate the whites and be revenged for all the years of colonial oppression and exploitation. Jambanjas and all those who have supported farm invasion have had their fill of revenge but at what price?
Today the millions of our people live in abject poverty, thousands of them are sick and can not get even the most basic medical help and hundreds are dying unnecessarily.
Please stop and ask yourself: is your life, the lives of your own family and children and the future of the whole nation really that cheap to be trading in for sadistic pleasure of humiliating and harassing a handful of white farmers!?
Zimbabwe’s future is truly gloomy; how can we build a prosperous nation out of such people like jambanjas who hold themselves is such low regard, they consider the loss of their own life in return for humiliating a white man a very good bargain!
The farm invasions have been going on in Zimbabwe for more than ten years now. You, jambanjas, know better than anyone else the number of farms invaded and the white owners evicted. You know better than most of us how productive the farms were before the invasion. You also know what has happened to those farms after the invasion. Whatever the farms were producing, the yield has dropped significantly since the invasion. This is an established fact and no amount of propaganda can change this simple fact!
Zimbabwe’s total economic melt down happened at the same time and pace as the collapse of our agricultural sector. Zimbabwe’s economy well being was dependent of it agricultural sector just as the branches of a tree are dependent on the roots. Cut the roots and the branches will soon wither and die.
Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean lives were lost in our fight for freedom, peace, human dignity and economic prosperity. In the last tens years particularly all these been forgotten or denied in pursuit of this single object: to humiliate the whites and be revenged for all the years of colonial oppression and exploitation. Jambanjas and all those who have supported farm invasion have had their fill of revenge but at what price?
Today the millions of our people live in abject poverty, thousands of them are sick and can not get even the most basic medical help and hundreds are dying unnecessarily.
Please stop and ask yourself: is your life, the lives of your own family and children and the future of the whole nation really that cheap to be trading in for sadistic pleasure of humiliating and harassing a handful of white farmers!?
Zimbabwe’s future is truly gloomy; how can we build a prosperous nation out of such people like jambanjas who hold themselves is such low regard, they consider the loss of their own life in return for humiliating a white man a very good bargain!
Sunday, 24 January 2010
MUTSVANGWA - MUGABE'S MAN ON ZMC - FLEXING THE DICTATOR'S DISRUPTIVE MUSCLES
Christopher Mutsvangwa lashes out at Journalists for failing to condemn the sanctions imposed by the West. “Sanctions are real and journalists must focus on how foreign powers have sapped the country’s capacity to fend for itself through colonialism and sanctions,” he said.
Mutsvangwa is a Mugabe and Zanu PF support so there is nothing new in that. What makes his remarks notable is that he is one of the commissioners of the Zimbabwe Media Commission – the body, that nation hoped, that would bring freedom of expression to all Zimbabweans.
With a hot head like Mutsvangwa, the ZMC will be rendered useless ineffective; particularly when he will doing this at the instigation of none other than Mugabe himself.
What I find laughable is that there great cheer following the appointment of ZMC commissioners. It is not only Tsvangirai and his MDC friends who have refused to accept that this GNU is not working and never will. The evidence was there from the word go and has continued to pile up over the months and still MDC has continued to pretend the GNU is working. MDC leaders and their supporters are no alone in this many Zimbabweans too refuse to face the cold reality.
The GNU is not working and we should consider other ways out of this mess! Having refresh elections now is one way out!
Mugabe rightly guessed that Tsvangirai would never consider leaving the GNU once locked in. MDC neither have the mental finesse to have a plan B nor the political will to see it through. So Mugabe, not one to miss a trick, has taken full advantage of that and abrogated for himself even more sweeping powers than the GPA had given him much to the annoyance of all the SADC leaders who have now have egg on their faces. Still it is the Zimbabwean people who have more than egg on their faces; we are paying the price for the continued political chaos and economic melt down with our very lives!
No self respecting nation would allow itself to be treated with such contempt and arrogance as Mugabe is showing. Why we let him; is the biggest mystery of our time!
"Chaunonzi rasha ndechawakabata; chawadya unofa nacho!"
Mutsvangwa is a Mugabe and Zanu PF support so there is nothing new in that. What makes his remarks notable is that he is one of the commissioners of the Zimbabwe Media Commission – the body, that nation hoped, that would bring freedom of expression to all Zimbabweans.
With a hot head like Mutsvangwa, the ZMC will be rendered useless ineffective; particularly when he will doing this at the instigation of none other than Mugabe himself.
What I find laughable is that there great cheer following the appointment of ZMC commissioners. It is not only Tsvangirai and his MDC friends who have refused to accept that this GNU is not working and never will. The evidence was there from the word go and has continued to pile up over the months and still MDC has continued to pretend the GNU is working. MDC leaders and their supporters are no alone in this many Zimbabweans too refuse to face the cold reality.
The GNU is not working and we should consider other ways out of this mess! Having refresh elections now is one way out!
Mugabe rightly guessed that Tsvangirai would never consider leaving the GNU once locked in. MDC neither have the mental finesse to have a plan B nor the political will to see it through. So Mugabe, not one to miss a trick, has taken full advantage of that and abrogated for himself even more sweeping powers than the GPA had given him much to the annoyance of all the SADC leaders who have now have egg on their faces. Still it is the Zimbabwean people who have more than egg on their faces; we are paying the price for the continued political chaos and economic melt down with our very lives!
No self respecting nation would allow itself to be treated with such contempt and arrogance as Mugabe is showing. Why we let him; is the biggest mystery of our time!
"Chaunonzi rasha ndechawakabata; chawadya unofa nacho!"
Sunday, 17 January 2010
DEMOCRATIC CHANGE IN CHINA IS COMING REGARDLESS OF THE ECONOMIC BOOM: IN ZIMBABWE IT IS THE OPPOSITE!
“There is an expression in China: "Kill the chicken before the monkey." Target the weak and vulnerable, it means, to frighten the strong and many,” wrote Peter Beaumont (Mail and Guardian 17 January 2010.
It was an excellent article except for one thing, the Chinese dissents may be few but the one thing they are not is “weak and vulnerable”.
No one should under estimate the importance of economic feel-good factor on the people. The standard of living for the ordinary people in China has improved in giant leaps and bounds in the last fifteen years. On the political front, nothing has changed; the Communist Party is as repressive as ever. And as long as the people feel their lives are getting better they will go along. Any Zimbabwean would testify to that!
The dollarization of Zimbabwe’s monetary systems ended the country’s supersonic hyper inflation and almost overnight the shops filled with food and other commodities. This has been brandished as “proof” that the GNU was working. Even those numbering among the 90% unemployed would not question why the economic recovery has been sluggish let alone the continued lawlessness and political repression by Mugabe and his thugs.
The fact that the Chinese dissents have managed to keep alive the demand for political reform regardless of the economic success is itself a measure of how focused they are on the cause and their iron determination to see it through.
The dissents have their eyes firmly on the ball: the basic human rights of the individual are a basic and fundamental right not to be denied or traded-off for economic privileges or anything! Man and woman like that can never be “bought” to give up their cause by the promise of premiership, a Mercedes Benz, etc. That is what is worrying China’s ruling elite and forcing them to respond is the only way they know – continued and increased repression as shown by increased arrests of dissents and disruptions of human rights websites.
It was the growing demand for political reforms that forced China’s Communist leaders, fifteen years ago, to embrace the economic reforms that have pulled China’s economy from the dark ages into the space age. That only delayed the inevitable political change.
China’s economic boom has had a seismic shift on the country’s demographics. Before, China was a nation of peasants, preoccupied by the daily challenge of eking a living, with a sprinkling of academics and the rich ruling elite. Now, China has a significant affluent and well educated middle class and billions of the peasants are snapping at their heels demanding a share of the national wealth denied them all these years.
The Communist Party is under great pressure to continue to deliver on the economic front; it is doubtful it will. Tyrannical one-party states are inherently corrupt and inefficient. Even if Communist party manage to deliver the high economic growths of the last decade and a half; the party’s monopoly on political power is not assured. The growing middle class, with their economic needs met, will be demanded greater political power and freedoms next!
The stage is set for real democratic change in China; continued and increased repression will only delay the day of reckoning but not stop it coming!
Mugabe may have Tsvangirai in his pocket and economic feel-good of having food in the shops will quickly wear off – Zimbabwe’s economic improvements of the last year is a far cry from the economic boom of China. He will still have to face regime; in Zimbabwe it is coming because Mugabe failed to embrace economic reforms necessary for economic recovery!
It was an excellent article except for one thing, the Chinese dissents may be few but the one thing they are not is “weak and vulnerable”.
No one should under estimate the importance of economic feel-good factor on the people. The standard of living for the ordinary people in China has improved in giant leaps and bounds in the last fifteen years. On the political front, nothing has changed; the Communist Party is as repressive as ever. And as long as the people feel their lives are getting better they will go along. Any Zimbabwean would testify to that!
The dollarization of Zimbabwe’s monetary systems ended the country’s supersonic hyper inflation and almost overnight the shops filled with food and other commodities. This has been brandished as “proof” that the GNU was working. Even those numbering among the 90% unemployed would not question why the economic recovery has been sluggish let alone the continued lawlessness and political repression by Mugabe and his thugs.
The fact that the Chinese dissents have managed to keep alive the demand for political reform regardless of the economic success is itself a measure of how focused they are on the cause and their iron determination to see it through.
The dissents have their eyes firmly on the ball: the basic human rights of the individual are a basic and fundamental right not to be denied or traded-off for economic privileges or anything! Man and woman like that can never be “bought” to give up their cause by the promise of premiership, a Mercedes Benz, etc. That is what is worrying China’s ruling elite and forcing them to respond is the only way they know – continued and increased repression as shown by increased arrests of dissents and disruptions of human rights websites.
It was the growing demand for political reforms that forced China’s Communist leaders, fifteen years ago, to embrace the economic reforms that have pulled China’s economy from the dark ages into the space age. That only delayed the inevitable political change.
China’s economic boom has had a seismic shift on the country’s demographics. Before, China was a nation of peasants, preoccupied by the daily challenge of eking a living, with a sprinkling of academics and the rich ruling elite. Now, China has a significant affluent and well educated middle class and billions of the peasants are snapping at their heels demanding a share of the national wealth denied them all these years.
The Communist Party is under great pressure to continue to deliver on the economic front; it is doubtful it will. Tyrannical one-party states are inherently corrupt and inefficient. Even if Communist party manage to deliver the high economic growths of the last decade and a half; the party’s monopoly on political power is not assured. The growing middle class, with their economic needs met, will be demanded greater political power and freedoms next!
The stage is set for real democratic change in China; continued and increased repression will only delay the day of reckoning but not stop it coming!
Mugabe may have Tsvangirai in his pocket and economic feel-good of having food in the shops will quickly wear off – Zimbabwe’s economic improvements of the last year is a far cry from the economic boom of China. He will still have to face regime; in Zimbabwe it is coming because Mugabe failed to embrace economic reforms necessary for economic recovery!
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