Zimbabwe
We can only hope and pray that the situation in Zimbabwe gets the right result, not only in terms of votes but what happens afterwards. The post-election unrest in Kenya could look like a vicarage tea party in comparison.
Grudgingly, I have to admit to a sneaking admiration for Mugabe. He’s a very bright bloke, with a hatfull of degrees, and at 84, in a country with an average life expectancy of 37, he seems to have more energy than a sack of ferrets. However, he’s presided over the destruction of a once-great country, he’s mad as a hatter, and he has to go. Whether the thugs and gangsters who all have a vested interest in propping him up will allow that to happen is another matter.
Twenty years ago, Zimbabwe was a beautiful, prosperous and relatively peaceful country, well endowed with natural resources. It had its problems, certainly, and climate change hasn’t helped, but nothing that couldn’t have been managed if Mugabe hadn’t interfered. The resulting slow motion train wreck has been a classic example of how to run a society and an economy into the ground with greed, stupidity, half-baked ideology and racism.
Sphere: Related ContentPete Smith @ March 31, 2008