There is a very interesting process which I have been so privileged to observe from a front row seat. As I write, election results are being announced from difference races across the country, they are appearing slowly, but surely. I think it is important to give a context to how this election has been set up:
There are 4 different elections happening simultaneously: local council elections, lower house parliamentary seats [House of Assembly], the Upper House of parliament [The Senate] and the Presidency. There are 1 958 local council seats up for election in 1 958 wards around the country, there are 210 House of Assembly seats up for grabs, there are sixty senate seats and one presidential seat. Now each one of these positions has at least two candidates contesting, with some having as many as seven candidates (and in other cases more). So there are a lot of people involved in contesting for all the elected offices in zimbabwe.

The post-voting electoral process

The process itself, that has come about out of a series of negotiations between the government and the opposition over the course of the past 12 months has meant that significant changes have been made to the electoral law in the country. New law requires that every polling station counts their ballots AT the station – this is in order to avoid rigging or tampering with ballot boxes in transit to any other location. This has been done in accordance with the law in every case. In a ward, you can get up to 3 or 4 polling stations depending on population data. In a constituency, you can get as many as 15 wards. This means that per constituency you get about 60 polling stations.

When the voting is done in that polling station, counting for all four seats begins – the local council, the lower house, the upper house and the presidency. For each candidate, there is a polling agent present to preside over the counting and to contest what they may deem to be deviations from due process or law. A result is only official when all the polling agents agree to it; hence in the case where there are disputes, this can take a while. Now remember, that this is happening for every single ballot, and every candidate's representatives can argue their cause. When a final result is reached and agreed upon by all parties and everyone signs to confirm such, the result for that polling station is posted on the entry way to that station. The official result is then sent to the 'Command Center' of that constituency. So in each constituency, they would have to wait for all sixty or so polling stations to reach that agreement, and then send the results to a central place where they are collated, and again agreed upon by all the Chief Election Agents of the candidates [if they chose to have agents represent them] and then a final result is reached. So in these cases, you can imagine how long this process may take given that (i) this is the first time that this was done in Zimbabwe; (ii) as in a big sporting game, the world cup final or something, every possession is contested – the same with these elections.; (iii) in some of the rural constituencies [actually, in most of them] the roads are horrendous. In some cases, non-existent. So moving a distance of 30 kilometres can actually take as long as an hour and a half to two hours. So movement is slow and complicated. And there are no telephones or electronic communications.

So the process is a slow one, and I think most people are doing the best to get these results out as fast as possible.

I observed the process in three electoral constituencies in rural Matabeleland. In VERY rural places so I am writing about all of this from first hand experience. The polls closed Saturday at 7pm. In the one constituency we only got a final result (after the process above was complete and all agreed upon) on Monday morning. Another one only by Monday afternoon. Others are not yet complete.

The mistake most people are making is that they see the result outside one polling station, take that as the overall result and then cry "that results are out. Why are they not being announced" and are completely ignorant of the process that must be taken to ensure that all parties involved at that local level are satisfied.

Allegations of Rigging etc

The international news media is buzzing with stories about how these delays are being caused by the government trying to buy time and rig the election. I think that is all the elections I have participated in and observed in Zimbabwe, this has been the most free, fair and competitive election. There was almost no violence leading up to the election. For the first time, you actually had a lot of oppositions parties using main stream including government controlled media to campaign and having access to the electorate almost on par with the government [I saw almost, because the government always has the advantage of incumbency. If a government minister is commissioning a new project for example, that is a 'national duty' and not a political meeting so the electoral rules don't necessarily apply, but any smart operator would use that platform to plug for their cause]. This doesn't mean that everything about the period leading up to the election was fair, but I think the environment really has allowed for people to express their will.

Even the post-election process I feel has provided for much more fairness than before. What is really surprising to me is the extent to which immediately after the election was done, the main opposition (the MDC party led by Morgan Tsvangirai) went on a global media blitz claiming the election is being rigged and already setting up an environment for those who are either not really aware of the details of the process, or who are far removed from it to prejudge all that is happening. I was really surprised by this and think it to be a really sleazy tactic.

Rigging, if it is taking place, is not happening with people stuffing boxes full of paper etc. It is happening on very technical grounds where those who are least informed on electoral law and procedure don't know how to play the game fully.

Most people reading this will be surprised by what I am about to say, but in my observations, I saw the greatest cases of foul play [call it rigging if you will] coming from the opposition. And their methodology for this is very sophisticated. Let me try and explain…

When we were children, there was a tactic where if there was a dispute between us as kids playing together, lets say, one kid hits another, the initiator of the transgression would run to an adult and cry the loudest and claim they were hit. The adult would run out in response and to the surprise of everyone watching would lash out at the person who actually was smacked in the first place, but it was too late, the initiative had been lost by the 'victim'. It was a smart tactic which worked most of the time, but it left the person who was really hit feeling very, very unjustly treated.

A similar thing has happened in this election from what I have seen. The MDC has run out screaming that we've been cheated, there is rigging etc. they've smartly managed tog et everyone watching the wrong place while they smugly cook the books where they can. It's a very close election in most cases so every point counts. Let me give you examples of what I mean, without mentioning specific locations and situations as this could have legal implications.

The widespread belief is that the government will rig the election because it is so popular that it cannot win the election fairly. They say it will rig it because it has deployed civil servants to oversee the election. In reality, the people who have the greatest animosity towards the government are civil servants. Teachers, Nurses, Police etc. they are the lowest paid people in the country and yet have the most expected from them. So we found in 3 places, and I think this is a sample behavior of what you would find nation wide, whereby you had electoral officials, employed by the government trying to work things in favor of the opposition.
In one polling station, where a government candidate had won and the papers confirming this were signed at that station, the delivery note meant to go to the Command Centre with the result 'disappeared.' There was a recount and a revisiting of the whole process I've described, the result again came out in favor of the government. Again, the delivery note disappeared. Eventually, the culprit was identified and arrested and the processes repeated once again and the result eventually went through. In that constituency, the government representative for that seat won, and there were incredible delays in releasing that data over endless, undescribed technicalities. Eventually, representatives from the electoral commission from the region's capital had to be called in to settle it.
Another incident, there was a case whereby a person standing for office of the government had a comfortable lead in their constituency with a margin of over 1000 votes. Two wards were still outstanding [about 6 polling stations]. When results came in, the ZANU PF [the governing party] representative won one constituency, and lost the other. The margin of the loss was significantly smaller than one thousand. The candidate's polling agent left the scene assuming victory. This was on Monday morning. Monday afternoon, we heard the results announced that the ZANU PF candidate has lost by over 2000 votes. Mathematically, this is not possible. There was most certainly an 'accounting error' in that case and the result will most probably be legally challenged.
The opposition has set up all of these 'parallel' structures to feed the word election results as 'they' see them. Some of them are so grossly wrong its disturbing. Yesterday they projected that out of 210 Lower House seats, the government has won only 50, the opposition 117 and the balance going to independents – which would of course mean a land slide for the opposition. As I type, about 90 results for the House of Assembly have been announced with 43 going to ZANU PF, 41 going to one faction of the MDC (Tsvangirai's faction) and the balance to independents and the smaller MDC Faction.

One thing that is being done which could be seen as controversial is that the results in the early stages are being announced almost in a balanced manner – i.e., you announce one victory for the opposition, one for the government etc. one reason for doing this may be so that you don't raise expectations of one side and then have a Kenya-type dispute when the final results swings in contradiction to early results. I think this makes sense because you do want to maintain calm in such a tense situation. Those advocating for this to be done "as results appear" seem to not have learned from what happened just north of Zimbabwe a few months ago.

I am sure there are cases of government (ZANU PF) rigging happening too, but I think ZANU's mischief would more have been done before the election, in the process leading up to it rather than during or post the election. But I am sure others elsewhere have their own reports and perspectives to share on this, especially those participating or observing the election for places that overwhelmingly support ZANU PF, of which Matabeleland isn't traditionally one of them.

Contrary to 'popular' expectations
Most commentators outside the country expect the ruling party and president to lose the election. The economic situation and an environment that actually allows more of a freer expression of people's will are cited as some of the influencing factors in those calculations. This is plausible thinking to some degree. I did not expect the president to have any support in Matabeleland at all. Given the history of this region, given the economic situation and the strong support the opposition has always had here, I was surprised to see the results in some places.

You would see results in a polling station where the president won by a significant margin over his opponents. You would get some where he lost by a very wide margin, and others that were close. I certainly expected him to lose everywhere in this part of the country. It's not turning out that way. In most areas here where I observed things up close, except for Bulawayo and urban centers, the presidential contest seems to have been between Robert Mugabe and Simba Makoni. Surprisingly, there is not much traction for Morgan Tsvangirai (which may be different in the northern and eastern regions of the country). In one entire constituency, Robert Mugabe beat Simba Makoni in the final tally of about 55 polling stations! It was a small margin but extremely surprising. In general, I think he will lose Matabeleland, but not by the wide margins people predict.

Where there is the greatest volatility in the election has been the local councils. That's where you get the most surprising results with many, many incumbents being thrown out. In retrospect, it makes sense because those are the candidates they know the best, that have the most direct contact and influence and that people have some form of control over. Again, that surprised me, given that the elections have always been billed as a presidential contest primarily.

The funny thing is that, you have external commentators surprised by the victories that the government achieves despite the situation economically. I feel that most people who vote for the president or governing party candidates have really done so out of their will. Many have chosen not to vote [hence the low voter turn out] for whatever reasons. When you have a 'democratic' election, and the candidate that outsiders don't prefer wins, there is always a problem. Ironically, those are the people who become hypocritical and do not accept the results. When Hamas won the elections in Palestine we saw the same thing happen. It's really funny watching the perspective of the 'western media' on Zimbabwe. BBC, CNN et al have been giving some pretty hilarious (and infuriating reporting). Partly because of their obvious biases, but also because of their location – they are not on the ground in Zimbabwe (for various, debatable reasons).

There are all sorts of notorious reports out there:
The president has left the country – Not True
The Military has been ordered to announce the president the winner – again, I don't think this is true. (http://www.swradioafrica.com/news300308/military300308.htm)

And so on … Most of these are not really true from what we can acertain, although confirming anything like that isn't really easy to do.


There are reports of civil unrest, and the military and police on the street. That is CERTAINLY not the case. Definitely not the case in Bulawayo and from what friends are telling me, it's not the case in Harare. It's one thing to look for an interesting story. It's mischief to say things that could lead to a tense (but calm) situation becoming tense and volatile.

I think if I called the BBC and claimed that I was being attacked by a Sabre Tooth Tiger sent by the government, I'd be on the front page of their website and on satellite TV within the hour!

It's a pretty close election – I think it could go either way. You'll probably get nothing more dramatic than a 55% -- 45% margin in the final result as far as parliament is concerned. The same may hold for the presidency.

I don't think Robert Mugabe is going to lose. If he does, I think he will probably accept the result, but expect some trading to take place about a way forward depending on his margin of defeat. But I don't think he will lose.

Well, my 'few thoughts' did become rather long and protracted – but other than that, we are all fine and awaiting the completion of the process with as much anxiety as everyone else.

Actually, the REAL result we are awaiting has NOTHING to do with the election. At around 3am this morning my sister, Mvuse, went into labor with her first pregnancy! So we are all on edge because that will be my parent's first biological grand child!!! It's a girl, that we know – but we're super excited to have her finally arrival. And what perfect timing, in time for the election results and on April Fool's Day no less!

Coup d’Media in Zimbabwe

It is shocking how the media in South Africa and that emanating mainly from countries in Europe and North America has gone ahead and made bold declarations about Zimbabwe’s recent election without paying much attention to the legal proceedings that dictate the unfolding of events here.

1. they have been drumming up since before voting closed been declaring that the president, Robert Mugabe, as lost the election, and the blitz has been so total that the intention seems to be to convince the whole world that the desired outcome of people not in Zimbabwe, who did not vote, becomes the dominant perception and in a way, reality.
2. the bias on the commentary on the satellite TV station is not surprising, but it is surprisingly anti most of the ethics and values you associate with the ‘independent press.’
3. the media went on for days about how the president and the ruling party were attempting to ‘rig’ the election. The opposition has gone on to declare victory unilaterally before any of the processes stated under law are complete which are actually slow by their nature and based on the nature of this most recent election. No one is accusing the opposition of ‘stealing’ the election. Where is the balance there? Imagine the President had declared himself the winner Sunday morning. What would those same ‘defenders of democracy’ have stated?
a. The same opposition which woke up the morning after the election is claiming fraud is now claiming that the same fraudulent election is one which they have won… how?
b. The same people who stated last night that they will wait for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to issue the official results and that they will follow the official results have now gone and stated that they will declare victory based on their own results which they have collated [some of which I have seen and are very different to what has been the actual results]. Yet the same media stations are accepting, tolerating and even promoting all of this.
c. Imagine if the government had done the same – the outrage, and retaliation by the ‘international community.’

Then when Robert Mugabe rages on about his fight against imperialism and western domination, and western bullying and the lack of respect of the principles of sovereignty, people say he is a disgruntled old dictator? Wouldn’t you be upset if you were in his position everyday for 15 years?

If i had the time, i would do a fuller analysis of this, but i am not sure it's even worth the time. No one out there listens to any other perspectives other than the ones that they want to see as reality

There is a very interesting process which I have been so privileged to observe from a front row seat. As I write, election results are being announced from difference races across the country, they are appearing slowly, but surely. I think it is important to give a context to how this election has been set up:
There are 4 different elections happening simultaneously: local council elections, lower house parliamentary seats [House of Assembly], the Upper House of parliament [The Senate] and the Presidency. There are 1 958 local council seats up for election in 1 958 wards around the country, there are 210 House of Assembly seats up for grabs, there are sixty senate seats and one presidential seat. Now each one of these positions has at least two candidates contesting, with some having as many as seven candidates (and in other cases more). So there are a lot of people involved in contesting for all the elected offices in zimbabwe.

The post-voting electoral process

The process itself, that has come about out of a series of negotiations between the government and the opposition over the course of the past 12 months has meant that significant changes have been made to the electoral law in the country. New law requires that every polling station counts their ballots AT the station – this is in order to avoid rigging or tampering with ballot boxes in transit to any other location. This has been done in accordance with the law in every case. In a ward, you can get up to 3 or 4 polling stations depending on population data. In a constituency, you can get as many as 15 wards. This means that per constituency you get about 60 polling stations.

When the voting is done in that polling station, counting for all four seats begins – the local council, the lower house, the upper house and the presidency. For each candidate, there is a polling agent present to preside over the counting and to contest what they may deem to be deviations from due process or law. A result is only official when all the polling agents agree to it; hence in the case where there are disputes, this can take a while. Now remember, that this is happening for every single ballot, and every candidate's representatives can argue their cause. When a final result is reached and agreed upon by all parties and everyone signs to confirm such, the result for that polling station is posted on the entry way to that station. The official result is then sent to the 'Command Center' of that constituency. So in each constituency, they would have to wait for all sixty or so polling stations to reach that agreement, and then send the results to a central place where they are collated, and again agreed upon by all the Chief Election Agents of the candidates [if they chose to have agents represent them] and then a final result is reached. So in these cases, you can imagine how long this process may take given that (i) this is the first time that this was done in Zimbabwe; (ii) as in a big sporting game, the world cup final or something, every possession is contested – the same with these elections.; (iii) in some of the rural constituencies [actually, in most of them] the roads are horrendous. In some cases, non-existent. So moving a distance of 30 kilometres can actually take as long as an hour and a half to two hours. So movement is slow and complicated. And there are no telephones or electronic communications.

So the process is a slow one, and I think most people are doing the best to get these results out as fast as possible.

I observed the process in three electoral constituencies in rural Matabeleland. In VERY rural places so I am writing about all of this from first hand experience. The polls closed Saturday at 7pm. In the one constituency we only got a final result (after the process above was complete and all agreed upon) on Monday morning. Another one only by Monday afternoon. Others are not yet complete.

The mistake most people are making is that they see the result outside one polling station, take that as the overall result and then cry "that results are out. Why are they not being announced" and are completely ignorant of the process that must be taken to ensure that all parties involved at that local level are satisfied.

Allegations of Rigging etc

The international news media is buzzing with stories about how these delays are being caused by the government trying to buy time and rig the election. I think that is all the elections I have participated in and observed in Zimbabwe, this has been the most free, fair and competitive election. There was almost no violence leading up to the election. For the first time, you actually had a lot of oppositions parties using main stream including government controlled media to campaign and having access to the electorate almost on par with the government [I saw almost, because the government always has the advantage of incumbency. If a government minister is commissioning a new project for example, that is a 'national duty' and not a political meeting so the electoral rules don't necessarily apply, but any smart operator would use that platform to plug for their cause]. This doesn't mean that everything about the period leading up to the election was fair, but I think the environment really has allowed for people to express their will.

Even the post-election process I feel has provided for much more fairness than before. What is really surprising to me is the extent to which immediately after the election was done, the main opposition (the MDC party led by Morgan Tsvangirai) went on a global media blitz claiming the election is being rigged and already setting up an environment for those who are either not really aware of the details of the process, or who are far removed from it to prejudge all that is happening. I was really surprised by this and think it to be a really sleazy tactic.

Rigging, if it is taking place, is not happening with people stuffing boxes full of paper etc. It is happening on very technical grounds where those who are least informed on electoral law and procedure don't know how to play the game fully.

Most people reading this will be surprised by what I am about to say, but in my observations, I saw the greatest cases of foul play [call it rigging if you will] coming from the opposition. And their methodology for this is very sophisticated. Let me try and explain…

When we were children, there was a tactic where if there was a dispute between us as kids playing together, lets say, one kid hits another, the initiator of the transgression would run to an adult and cry the loudest and claim they were hit. The adult would run out in response and to the surprise of everyone watching would lash out at the person who actually was smacked in the first place, but it was too late, the initiative had been lost by the 'victim'. It was a smart tactic which worked most of the time, but it left the person who was really hit feeling very, very unjustly treated.

A similar thing has happened in this election from what I have seen. The MDC has run out screaming that we've been cheated, there is rigging etc. they've smartly managed tog et everyone watching the wrong place while they smugly cook the books where they can. It's a very close election in most cases so every point counts. Let me give you examples of what I mean, without mentioning specific locations and situations as this could have legal implications.

The widespread belief is that the government will rig the election because it is so popular that it cannot win the election fairly. They say it will rig it because it has deployed civil servants to oversee the election. In reality, the people who have the greatest animosity towards the government are civil servants. Teachers, Nurses, Police etc. they are the lowest paid people in the country and yet have the most expected from them. So we found in 3 places, and I think this is a sample behavior of what you would find nation wide, whereby you had electoral officials, employed by the government trying to work things in favor of the opposition.
In one polling station, where a government candidate had won and the papers confirming this were signed at that station, the delivery note meant to go to the Command Centre with the result 'disappeared.' There was a recount and a revisiting of the whole process I've described, the result again came out in favor of the government. Again, the delivery note disappeared. Eventually, the culprit was identified and arrested and the processes repeated once again and the result eventually went through. In that constituency, the government representative for that seat won, and there were incredible delays in releasing that data over endless, undescribed technicalities. Eventually, representatives from the electoral commission from the region's capital had to be called in to settle it.
Another incident, there was a case whereby a person standing for office of the government had a comfortable lead in their constituency with a margin of over 1000 votes. Two wards were still outstanding [about 6 polling stations]. When results came in, the ZANU PF [the governing party] representative won one constituency, and lost the other. The margin of the loss was significantly smaller than one thousand. The candidate's polling agent left the scene assuming victory. This was on Monday morning. Monday afternoon, we heard the results announced that the ZANU PF candidate has lost by over 2000 votes. Mathematically, this is not possible. There was most certainly an 'accounting error' in that case and the result will most probably be legally challenged.
The opposition has set up all of these 'parallel' structures to feed the word election results as 'they' see them. Some of them are so grossly wrong its disturbing. Yesterday they projected that out of 210 Lower House seats, the government has won only 50, the opposition 117 and the balance going to independents – which would of course mean a land slide for the opposition. As I type, about 90 results for the House of Assembly have been announced with 43 going to ZANU PF, 41 going to one faction of the MDC (Tsvangirai's faction) and the balance to independents and the smaller MDC Faction.

One thing that is being done which could be seen as controversial is that the results in the early stages are being announced almost in a balanced manner – i.e., you announce one victory for the opposition, one for the government etc. one reason for doing this may be so that you don't raise expectations of one side and then have a Kenya-type dispute when the final results swings in contradiction to early results. I think this makes sense because you do want to maintain calm in such a tense situation. Those advocating for this to be done "as results appear" seem to not have learned from what happened just north of Zimbabwe a few months ago.

I am sure there are cases of government (ZANU PF) rigging happening too, but I think ZANU's mischief would more have been done before the election, in the process leading up to it rather than during or post the election. But I am sure others elsewhere have their own reports and perspectives to share on this, especially those participating or observing the election for places that overwhelmingly support ZANU PF, of which Matabeleland isn't traditionally one of them.

Contrary to 'popular' expectations
Most commentators outside the country expect the ruling party and president to lose the election. The economic situation and an environment that actually allows more of a freer expression of people's will are cited as some of the influencing factors in those calculations. This is plausible thinking to some degree. I did not expect the president to have any support in Matabeleland at all. Given the history of this region, given the economic situation and the strong support the opposition has always had here, I was surprised to see the results in some places.

You would see results in a polling station where the president won by a significant margin over his opponents. You would get some where he lost by a very wide margin, and others that were close. I certainly expected him to lose everywhere in this part of the country. It's not turning out that way. In most areas here where I observed things up close, except for Bulawayo and urban centers, the presidential contest seems to have been between Robert Mugabe and Simba Makoni. Surprisingly, there is not much traction for Morgan Tsvangirai (which may be different in the northern and eastern regions of the country). In one entire constituency, Robert Mugabe beat Simba Makoni in the final tally of about 55 polling stations! It was a small margin but extremely surprising. In general, I think he will lose Matabeleland, but not by the wide margins people predict.

Where there is the greatest volatility in the election has been the local councils. That's where you get the most surprising results with many, many incumbents being thrown out. In retrospect, it makes sense because those are the candidates they know the best, that have the most direct contact and influence and that people have some form of control over. Again, that surprised me, given that the elections have always been billed as a presidential contest primarily.

The funny thing is that, you have external commentators surprised by the victories that the government achieves despite the situation economically. I feel that most people who vote for the president or governing party candidates have really done so out of their will. Many have chosen not to vote [hence the low voter turn out] for whatever reasons. When you have a 'democratic' election, and the candidate that outsiders don't prefer wins, there is always a problem. Ironically, those are the people who become hypocritical and do not accept the results. When Hamas won the elections in Palestine we saw the same thing happen. It's really funny watching the perspective of the 'western media' on Zimbabwe. BBC, CNN et al have been giving some pretty hilarious (and infuriating reporting). Partly because of their obvious biases, but also because of their location – they are not on the ground in Zimbabwe (for various, debatable reasons).

There are all sorts of notorious reports out there:
The president has left the country – Not True
The Military has been ordered to announce the president the winner – again, I don't think this is true. (http://www.swradioafrica.com/news300308/military300308.htm)

And so on … Most of these are not really true from what we can acertain, although confirming anything like that isn't really easy to do.


There are reports of civil unrest, and the military and police on the street. That is CERTAINLY not the case. Definitely not the case in Bulawayo and from what friends are telling me, it's not the case in Harare. It's one thing to look for an interesting story. It's mischief to say things that could lead to a tense (but calm) situation becoming tense and volatile.

I think if I called the BBC and claimed that I was being attacked by a Sabre Tooth Tiger sent by the government, I'd be on the front page of their website and on satellite TV within the hour!

It's a pretty close election – I think it could go either way. You'll probably get nothing more dramatic than a 55% -- 45% margin in the final result as far as parliament is concerned. The same may hold for the presidency.

I don't think Robert Mugabe is going to lose. If he does, I think he will probably accept the result, but expect some trading to take place about a way forward depending on his margin of defeat. But I don't think he will lose.

Well, my 'few thoughts' did become rather long and protracted – but other than that, we are all fine and awaiting the completion of the process with as much anxiety as everyone else.

Actually, the REAL result we are awaiting has NOTHING to do with the election. At around 3am this morning my sister, Mvuse, went into labor with her first pregnancy! So we are all on edge because that will be my parent's first biological grand child!!! It's a girl, that we know – but we're super excited to have her finally arrival. And what perfect timing, in time for the election results and on April Fool's Day no less!

do the math. see if you can work out how hypocritical the media can be in this democracy thing .... this is just one [respected] publication.... but the hypocrisy i find across the board not just in The Economist.

http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9032254
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10430289
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10328986
http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10328292
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9079815
http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10880693
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8929019

This Article is called the Fakebook Generation and recently appeared in the New York Times - rather interesting... I wonder how many young people can identify with Mathias's points, which i think are a very good reflection on our generation and emerging global on-line, interconnected culture!



Op-Ed Contributor
The Fakebook Generation

By ALICE MATHIAS
Published: October 6, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06mathias.html?ref=opinion

Chicago

THE time-chugging Web site Facebook.com first appeared during my freshman year as the exclusive domain of college students. This spring, Facebook opened its pearly gates, enabling myself and other members of the class of ’07 to graduate from our college networks into those of the real world.

In no time at all, the Web site has convinced its rapidly assembling adult population that it is a forum for genuine personal and professional connections. Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has even declared his quest to chart a “social graph” of human relationships the way that cartographers once charted the world.

Just a warning: if you’re planning on following the corner of this map that’s been digitally doodled by my 659 Facebook friends, you are going to end up in the middle of nowhere. All the rhetoric about human connectivity misses the real reason this popular online study buddy has so distracted college students for the past four years.

Facebook did not become popular because it was a functional tool — after all, most college students live in close quarters with the majority of their Facebook friends and have no need for social networking. Instead, we log into the Web site because it’s entertaining to watch a constantly evolving narrative starring the other people in the library.

I’ve always thought of Facebook as online community theater. In costumes we customize in a backstage makeup room — the Edit Profile page, where we can add a few Favorite Books or touch up our About Me section — we deliver our lines on the very public stage of friends’ walls or photo albums. And because every time we join a network, post a link or make another friend it’s immediately made visible to others via the News Feed, every Facebook act is a soliloquy to our anonymous audience.

It’s all comedy: making one another laugh matters more than providing useful updates about ourselves, which is why entirely phony profiles were all the rage before the grown-ups signed in. One friend announced her status as In a Relationship with Chinese Food, whose profile picture was a carry-out box and whose personal information personified the cuisine of China.

We even make a joke out of how we know one another — claiming to have met in “Intro to Super Mario Re-enactments,” which I seriously doubt is a real course at Wesleyan, or to have lived together in a “spay and neuter clinic” instead of the dorm. Still, these humor bits often reveal more about our personalities and interests than any honest answers.

Facebook administrators have since exiled at least the flagrantly fake profiles, the Greta Garbos and the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butters, in an effort to have the site grow up from a farce into the serious social networking tool promised to its new adult users, who earnestly type in their actual personal information and precisely label everyone they know as former co-workers or current colleagues, family members or former lovers.

But does this more reverent incarnation of Facebook actually enrich adult relationships? What do these constellations of work colleagues and long-lost friends amount to? An online office mixer? A reunion with that one other guy from your high school who has a Facebook profile? Oh! You get to see pictures of your former college sweetheart’s family! (Only depressing possibilities are coming to mind for some reason.)

My generation has long been bizarrely comfortable with being looked at, and as performers on the Facebook stage, we upload pictures of ourselves cooking dinner for our parents or doing keg stands at last night’s party; we are reckless with our personal information. But there is one area of privacy that we won’t surrender: the secrecy of how and whom we search.

A friend of mine was recently in a panic over rumors of a hacker application that would allow Facebook users to see who’s been visiting their profiles. She’d spent the day ogling a love interest’s page and was horrified at the idea that he knew she’d been looking at him. But there’s no way Facebook would allow such a program to exist: the site is popular largely because it enables us to indulge our gazes anonymously. (We might feel invulnerable in the spotlight, but we don’t want to be caught sitting in someone else’s audience.) If our ability to privately search is ever jeopardized, Facebook will turn into a ghost town.

Facebook purports to be a place for human connectivity, but it’s made us more wary of real human confrontation. When I was in college, people always warned against the dangers of “Facebook stalking” at a library computer — the person whose profile you’re perusing might be right behind you. Dwelling online is a cowardly and utterly enjoyable alternative to real interaction.

So even though Facebook offers an elaborate menu of privacy settings, many of my friends admit that the only setting they use is the one that prevents people from seeing that they are Currently Logged In. Perhaps we fear that the Currently Logged In feature advertises to everyone else that we (too!) are Currently Bored, Lustful, Socially Unfulfilled or Generally Avoiding Real Life.

For young people, Facebook is yet another form of escapism; we can turn our lives into stage dramas and relationships into comedy routines. Make believe is not part of the postgraduate Facebook user’s agenda. As more and more older users try to turn Facebook into a legitimate social reference guide, younger people may follow suit and stop treating it as a circus ring. But let’s hope not.

Alice Mathias is a 2007 graduate of Dartmouth.

It's ridiculous how the US justifies its agricultural policy at the
expense of other peoples' livelihoods.

nothing really new in this article, but it's good to see this issue
getting media attention.



From http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/06/africa/web0406-zambia.php

For the hungry in Zambia, U.S. law may hinder urgent food aid
By Cecilia W. Dugger
Friday, April 6, 2007


MULONDO, Zambia: Traveling to school in wobbly dugout canoes, Munalula
Muhau and her three cousins, 7 and 8 year olds whose parents died of
AIDS, held onto just one possession: battered tin bowls to receive
their daily ration of gruel.

Within weeks, those rations, provided by the United Nations World Food
Program, will run out for them and 500,000 other paupers, including
thousands of people wasted by AIDS who are being treated with
American-financed drugs that make them healthier - and ravenously
hungry.

"Not to put too fine a point on it," said Jeffrey Stringer, an
American doctor who runs a non-profit group treating 50,000 Zambians
with AIDS, "but it will result in the death of some patients."

Hoping to forestall such a dire outcome, the World Food Program made
an urgent appeal in February for cash donations so it could buy corn
from Zambia's own bountiful harvest, piled in towering stacks in the
warehouses of the capital, Lusaka.

But United States law requires that virtually all donated food be
grown in America and shipped at great expense across oceans, mostly on
vessels that fly American flags and employ American crews - a process
that typically takes four to six months.

For a third year, the Bush administration, which has pushed to make
foreign aid more efficient, is trying to change the law to allow the
United States to use up to a quarter of the budget of its main food
aid program to buy food in developing countries during emergencies.
The proposal has run into stiff opposition from a potent alliance of
agribusiness, shipping and charitable groups with deep financial
stakes in the current food aid system.

Oxfam, the international aid group, and other proponents of the Bush
proposal, say it would enable the United States to feed more people
more quickly, while helping fight poverty by buying the crops of
peasants in poor countries.

The U.S. Agency for International Development estimated that if
Congress adopted the Bush proposal, the United States could feed at
least a million more people and save 50,000 more lives.

But Congress quickly killed the plan in each of the past two years,
cautioning that untying food aid from domestic interest groups would
weaken the commitment that has made the United States by far the
largest food aid donor in a world where 850 million go hungry.

Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California and chairman of the
House Foreign Relations Committee, warned last year at a food aid
conference in Washington that decoupling food aid from American
maritime and agribusiness interests "is beyond insane."

"It is a mistake of gigantic proportions," he said, "because support
for such a program will vanish overnight, overnight."

But James Kunder, acting deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for
International Development, said in an interview that the
administration proposal - which would affect less than half of one
percent of American agricultural exports - would not undercut American
interests.

"The burden of proof is on producers and shippers to show this is
going to significantly damage their interests," he said, "because we
can provide compelling evidence that allowing local procurement is
going to save lives by speeding up delivery of supplies."

Here in Zambia, population 11 million, more than a million children
are already orphaned, mostly because AIDS killed their parents. Life
expectancy has plunged to 38 years, and countless sickened adults,
unable to work, can no longer feed their families.

On a recent day, patients on U.S.-financed AIDS drugs and their
families streamed into a food distribution point at the Lewanika
Hospital in Mongu town. Already, as the World Food Program's stocks
have run low, rations have been almost halved. Some were so hungry
that they scooped handfuls of corn-soy powder into their mouths
without even adding water to make porridge.

One of the patients, Annie Mubita, a 32-year-old mother of six, said
her strength is returning, and so is her appetite, which had shriveled
when she was sick. Mubita assumes her children are also HIV positive,
she said, but has not had them tested because if they, too, go on the
drugs, they will be as hungry as she is.

"If the children have an appetite like me, the food won't last even
two weeks," she said. If the rations end, she said, "me and my
children will die."

Kandundu Litia, a 12-year-old orphan with AIDS, also fears a cut-off
of food. Before the rations began, she said, her aunt, uncle and
cousins would eat when she was at school. "There was none left when I
got home," she whispered, her head dropping. The short shock of hair
springing from her head still had the telltale reddish tint of the
malnourished.

David Stevenson, who heads the World Food Program's Zambia office and
has worked for the organization in Africa for 15 years, through war
and drought, says he has never seen a crisis on the scale of what AIDS
and drought have wrought in Zambia. He worries as supplies dwindle.

With cash donations, the World Food Program could get Zambian corn to
the hungry in a month, far faster than the United States could
typically act.

The cash would also stretch further than in-kind food. In recent
years, the World Food Program has procured 75 percent more food for
Zambia, Kenya and Uganda by buying corn grown in those countries,
rather than shipping American food, according to Michigan State
University agricultural economists who studied crop and shipping data.

There is hope that Zambia, a relatively stable democracy, can become a
bread basket in a region roiled by conflict, disease and economic
collapse, at least in years when it is not devastated by drought.

In lean years, the World Food Program shuts down its buying operation
here for fear of driving up the prices of corn, the main staple,
beyond the reach of poor consumers. It imports food instead.

But during bumper harvests, the World Food Program has become a major
buyer of Zambian-grown corn. Since 2001, it has bought more than $1
billion worth of food in some of the poorest countries on earth.

For farmers like Catherine Hangama, 36, that money makes all the
difference. She works a small plot with her husband in the village of
Nakandyoli in Mumbwa district. For the first time last year they sold
a small surplus of maize for $53 to the Zambian government's Food
Reserve Agency, one of the World Food Programs biggest suppliers here.

That money bought soap and paid for uniforms and fees to send three
children to school. This year, she and her husband have planted more
and hope to sell 15 bags after this year's harvest.

"If I don't plow well, the children won't be able to go to school,"
she explained, with one twin baby at her breast and the other on her
back.

What Hangama earns is a pittance compared with the billions at stake
for the main players in American food aid.

Over the past three years, the same four companies and their
subsidiaries - Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Bunge and Cal Western
Packaging - have sold the American government more than half the $2.2
billion in food for Food for Peace, the largest food aid program, and
two smaller programs, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Shipping companies were paid $1.3 billion over the same period to move
the food aid overseas, the USDA figures show.

And nonprofit groups received over $500 million in donated American
food, which they sold at market rates in developing countries to raise
money for antipoverty programs, according to U.S. AID and a recent
study by Emmy Simmons, a retired U.S. AID official.

Agribusiness and shipping groups vigorously oppose the Bush
administration proposal to buy food in developing countries with cash,
which they argue is more likely to be stolen. They say American food
is safer and of higher quality and that the government can speed
delivery by storing it in warehouses around the world.

And they defend the idea that federal spending should benefit American
business and farming interests, as well as the hungry. Without support
from such interest groups, food aid budgets from Congress would
whither, they say.

"It would be at extreme risk of being diminished," said Paul Green, a
consultant to the North American Millers' Association, a trade
association for the milling industry that counts Archer Daniels
Midland, Bunge and Horizon Milling, a joint venture of Cargill and CHS
among its members.

Gloria Tosi, a lobbyist and immediate past president of the American
Maritime Congress, an association of U.S.-flag ship owners, agreed.
"There's no constituency for cash," she said.

Many charitable groups involved in food aid share that worry, and also
warn that a badly managed program to buy food in poor countries could
drive up food prices and worsen hunger.

The Alliance for Food Aid, 14 nonprofit groups involved in
distributing and selling American food aid overseas, maintains that
the Bush proposal is too ambitious and advocate a modest pilot
program.

"Do a demonstration," said Robert Zachritz, a senior policy adviser at
World Vision. "Does it work? Then you can go from there."

For now, the World Food Program is hoping other rich nations or
individuals will donate cash to keep rations flowing for the half
million needy Zambiams, among them Manaluna and 135,000 children fed
through community schools.

The pupils in this grass hut schoolhouse are from families so poor
they cannot afford the flip flops and $6 uniforms required to attend
public schools.

Beatrice Nyambe, 64, a retired public school teacher who serves
without pay as principal, worries that when food from school runs out,
most of the children will go back to day work in the fields so they
can buy a few handfuls of corn meal to fill their bellies.

Munalula, whose own mother was an untrained teacher before AIDS took
her, is the best student in the school and wants to be a teacher as
well. She helps her cousins with their homework, scratching out sums
in the dirt with a stick.

At school, she and 50 other children in the dirt-floored classroom in
the village of Nalusheke fell silent but for the smacking sounds they
made eating a boiled mush of American bulgur wheat. Each bowlful,
topped with split peas from Canada, cost 12 cents. The bulgur came
from sacks emblazoned with the words, "Gift of the People of the
United States of America."

Munalula and her barefoot cousins scraped their bowls clean, savoring
each unsweetened bite. But some children barely touched theirs.

Sisi Negenda, a six-year-old with little braids, shyly explained why.
She has a younger sister, 3, and several orphaned relatives at home.
She said she wanted to share with them. She carried off the bowl,
still heavy with porridge, as though it were a precious, breakable
object.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=304054&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/

US reveals its efforts to topple Mugabe

The United States admitted openly for the first time on Thursday that
it was actively working to undermine Robert Mugabe, the President of
Zimbabwe.

Although officially Washington does not support regime change, a US
state department report published on Thursday acknowledged that it was
supporting opposition politicians in the country and others critical
of Mugabe.

The State Department also admitted sponsoring events aimed at
"discrediting" statements made by Mugabe's government.

The report will be seized on by Mugabe, who has repeatedly claimed
that the US and Britain are seeking regime change.

The comments are contained in the state department's fifth annual
Supporting Human Rights and Democracy report. It sets out in detail
actions the US government is taking worldwide to promote human rights.

The report has had a troubled history. Three years ago publication had
to be hastily delayed when details emerged about US human rights
abuses at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

The US, compared with the United Kingdom, was initially slow to
criticise Mugabe, but has since adopted an increasingly critical
stance, most recently at the Human Rights Council in Geneva last
month.

In an unusual piece of candour, the State Department report says: "To
encourage greater public debate on restoring good governance in
[Zimbabwe], the United States sponsored public events that presented
economic and social analyses discrediting the government's excuses for
its failed policies.

"To further strengthen pro-democracy elements, the US government
continued to support the efforts of the political opposition, the
media and civil society to create and defend democratic space and to
support persons who criticised the government."

While the US and British governments still insist their aim in
Zimbabwe is not regime change, they have been encouraging the main
opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangarai, who was beaten up last month.

The report says that while Zimbabwe is nominally democratic, the
government of Mugabe is "now authoritarian".

At a press conference to launch the document, the Assistant Secretary
of State, Barry Lowenkren, said the US goal was not necessarily regime
change but to create a level playing field for all parties. He added
that where there was a country with record levels of inflation, denial
of basic human rights and other abuses, the US had a duty to speak out
so that people in Zimbabwe knew they had support.

Asked whether US efforts to promote human rights worldwide were being
undermined by the hundreds of of people being held at Guantánamo,
Lowenkren insisted the issue was not raised by non-governmental groups
at conferences he attended and participants were more interested in
what the US could do to help them in their own countries.

He also denied the report was softer on authoritarian governments
allied to the US, such as Belarus, than to Zimbabwe.

Lowenkren said $66-million was being spent on promotion of democracy
and human rights in Iran, about half of which was devoted to
broadcasts from outside the country and the rest spent on support for
non-governmental exchanges, cultural exchanges such as the visit by
the US wrestling team and a Persian internet service.

The report is critical of Russia, noting the killing of the journalist
Anna Politkovskaya.

It says: "Political pressure on the judiciary, corruption and
selectivity in enforcement of the law, continuing media restrictions
and self-censorship, and government pressure on opposition political
parties eroded the public accountability of government leaders.

"Security forces were involved in additional significant human rights problems."

University considers revoking degree
Meanwhile, the University of Massachusetts (UMass) is considering
revoking an honourary doctorate of law it awarded Mugabe in 1986.

Some students at the Boston campus have circulated a petition asking
for the university to revoke the degree, and officials say they are
considering doing so.

"Mugabe's actions during the past decade show he's fallen from being a
good citizen of the world," said Shauna Murray, a graduate student who
helped circulate the petition. "He has a track record of suppressing
basic human rights like free speech and the right to protest, and that
doesn't represent what students here stand for."

The issue also has surfaced at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland
and Michigan State University, which gave Mugabe honourary degrees in
1984 and 1990, respectively.

Terry Denbow, a Michigan State spokesperson, said administrators have
received letters requesting that Mugabe's degree be rescinded.

"There have been discussions, but I know of no formal process for
rescinding the degree," Denbow said.

Officials at Edinburgh said the issue of Mugabe's degree was under review.

According to the UMass policy, honourary degrees are handed out to
people "of great accomplishment and high ethical standards".

Recipients have included former South African president Nelson
Mandela, former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, author
Toni Morrison and comedian and educator Bill Cosby.

Once lauded as a model for African democracy, Mugabe has tried to
crush opposition to his power and has threatened to expel Western
envoys for criticising his government.

The country's Roman Catholic bishops said last month that health,
education and other public services "have all but disintegrated".

"Mugabe has become a scourge of his people and a scourge of Africa,"
said Michael Thelwell, a professor in the UMass Afro-American studies
department.

But Thelwell and others cautioned against revoking the degree just to
appease Mugabe's critics.

"The task of intellectuals is to seek the truth, not to be swayed by
pressures of the moment," said Bill Strickland, a UMass politics
professor. "If they take away the degree, they have to look at all the
facts surrounding what is happening in Zimbabwe and not simply blame
just one person." - Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian News and Media
Limited 2007, Sapa-AP

i never thought i'd say this about an article from the Daily Mail or Mail on Sunday from Britain - but this is a great article :-) it's so well written that i don't think i need a comment to contextualize it.

enjoy it!



http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/03/fake_caring_abo.html
Fake caring about Zimbabwe

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

Do I care about Zimbabwe? Should you? Every few months, the British media, together with a certain number of politicians, make a fuss about the misery now afflicting that sad country. They sympathise with its ill-fed, oppressed people and with the leaders of its opposition movements. Pictures and reports are published of the horrible beatings given to those who dare to oppose the country's tyrant, Robert Mugabe. The BBC makes a great to-do about how it is banned from Zimbabwe but still manages to get information out.


Nobody can read these accounts without a feeling of outrage and a desire to do or say something. But in my view this is in fact a selfish impulse, unless you are prepared to act personally in some way that will improve matters. We become inflamed with righteous anger about these things, only to prove to ourselves that we are nice, civilised people. In truth, we have absolutely no intention of doing anything about it.


And if we did, it would probably fail. I don't know how many of those who call for intervention in Zimbabwe could find it on a map, but the fact that the country has no coastline could present a small problem to anyone who wanted to invade it. In any case, this is all futile stuff.


The disastrous and irreparable defeat of British arms by the Japanese in Singapore in 1942 finished the British empire for all time, though it would take a little while for this truth to become obvious. India went first, and, after a pause ended by the Suez fiasco, the rest followed soon afterwards. Not only could we not afford the empire any more. Our reputation for invincibility had been smashed by Japan, and we had lost the psychological advantage we had gained in the 18th century and had reinforced by our merciless crushing of the Indian mutiny in 1857.


All over Asia, the Japanese had been careful to see that captured British officers and soldiers were visible to their former colonial subjects, reduced to the status of humiliated, suppliant slaves. The effects of this were enormous and permanent in Asia, and word spread to Africa quite quickly.


Britain, which during the war against Hitler was understandably paying less attention to the Empire than it would otherwise have done, was slow to realise how much things had changed. But by the end of the 1950s, its leaders decided it could not afford an African colonial empire.


Its influence in the area has been in decline ever since, replaced by the USA, China, Cuba and - to a surprisingly small extent - Russia. The problem with Zimbabwe, formerly Southern Rhodesia, was that it was already semi-independent and self-governing in any case, with a white minority that did not wish to lose its privileged way of life because of Britain's decline. It was very difficult for a British government, trying to soothe the feelings of the United Nations and to scrub away all traces of unfashionable colonial supremacy, to force the Southern Rhodesians into giving up their power. They had good reason to suspect that, when they did, they would swiftly lose their pampered way of life.


So London devoted much of the late 1960s and all the 1970s to trying to force a settlement there that would enable the British government to avoid all future responsibility and appear in tune with modern thinking. This ended in 1979, under the Thatcher government but endorsed by the whole British establishment, with the Lancaster House agreement.


This handed Zimbabwe to the sinister Robert Mugabe - mainly because he was too politically and militarily strong to be denied. there were better men available, but they were not strong enough, and the rigged elections which followed confirmed the Lancaster House settlement


The history of that process is long, complicated and not specially honourable on any side. It involves, as so often, the curious paradox that the campaigners for 'freedom' turned out to be tyrants themselves once they had power, and that life under the 'colonial oppressors' was in many ways more prosperous and peaceful than it was to become later. You do not have to be a sympathiser of Ian Smith, the leader of the Rhodesian Front and the chief opponent of majority rule, to recognise that Robert Mugabe has done terrible damage to the country and its people. You do not have to be a partisan of Robert Mugabe to recognise that Smith's Southern Rhodesia was a state based on racial discrimination, that could not survive and should not have survived as it was. Was this unavoidable? Possibly.

Mugabeepa2102_228x197

Intelligent British politicians and diplomats knew, or at least suspected back in the 1950s and 1960s that the end of empire might well mean severe suffering for the people involved. Most of them probably privately admitted that - as in India in 1947 - this country simply no longer had the strength to rule, and that it must make the best of a very bad bargain by trying to leave behind as much democracy, law and freedom, and as strong an economy, as it could manage.


Many of the British colonial administrators, in Africa and Asia, were genuinely devoted men who had worked very hard to bring incorruptible justice, education and prosperity. Such men did all that they could to leave good things behind - and I am always greatly moved by two legacies that seem to have lasted specially well.


Even where elections are rigged and parliaments fail, and civil servants are corrupt, it is amazing how often African judges defy the new tyrants of Africa, releasing political prisoners and halting torture. And it is equally amazing how often African journalists continue to print the truth, despite the very real danger of torture and death, or the smashing of their presses. Free speech and law, interestingly enough, may be more important and enduring than democracy in securing justice and liberty.


What practical conclusions can we draw from this? First, that our power in these parts of the world is gone for good, and it is just posturing to imagine that a protest in London will make any difference there. Comrade Mugabe's response that his critics could 'go hang' is rude and brusque, but also an accurate estimate of how things stand. He doesn't care what we think, and what's more he doesn't even pretend to care.


That's embarrassing of him. We would much prefer an expression of concern, some sign that we matter, even if don't. In fact, his taunting of us for our powerlessness may be his greatest offence against those interventionist liberals who like to imagine that a tough leading article in the Guardian will make Harare tremble.


Second, that the worst crimes of empires often come at the finish of them. Having persuaded people to rely on our power and our ability to protect them, we abruptly change our minds and disappear over the horizon, leaving them with a parliament building, a flag, an anthem, several unresolved territorial disputes and (quite often) a Mugabe figure who, if not very pleasant, is at least strong enough to take over the state.


This is, so far as I have been able to work out, the most powerful argument against empire - which in its British form was often highly benevolent so long as it existed. It has to end, and when it does, there is almost always tragedy. People often say, without thinking, that the winding up of the British empire was a civilised and creditable episode. I completely disagree. the scuttle from India, 60 years ago this year, and the smaller but more poisonous scuttle from Palestine soon afterwards, are among the most shameful episodes in British history. Our departure from Africa was not much better. The USA, and its ring of loyal client states in the former Soviet Union, from the Caucasus to the Baltic, should beware of a comparable bout of shameful departures, probably in the next 30 years, when Washington loses interest in this part of the world and Moscow reasserts its ancient dominance.


Third, that other countries do not exist to provide broad open spaces in which we can exercise our constipated, under-used consciences. It is incredibly easy, and rather enjoyable, to rail against tyrants and injustice a long way away. The tyrants cannot get at you, and if you travel to these places on a Western passport, the worst you are likely to face is expulsion. But it is so much harder, and less glamorous, to challenge the power-grabbers and would-tyrants, and petty but persistent injustices, in your own home country - where your targets can take revenge.


Fourth, that intervention cannot permanently alter the balance of power in foreign lands. Unless you are prepared to stay forever, the 'improvements' you achieve will not survive your departure by more than a few years. Worse, people who trusted you and relied on you will be left to dreadful fates.


Caring about a foreign injustice is futile unless you have the means to express your concern through effective, sustained action. It is an impulse designed to make the carer feel good to himself, and look good in the eyes of others, rather than to do good. So the honest answer, for most of us, is that we do not really care. But who dares say so? To say in a public place that you do not think Britain should intervene in Zimbabwe is to court shocked disapproval. Yet those who say they think we should intervene are applauded - even if they have no intention of doing anything.

All comments are moderated by the community team. Please contact community@dailymailonline.co.uk with any queries about moderation

i found these two articles in South Africa's Sunday Times to be
somewhat refreshing and worth reading as opposed to most of the
sensational pieces floating over the internet and other newspapers.

Complicated times over here - but we're living through them... somehow!



From http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Insight/Article.aspx?id=414960

Peering through Zimbabwe's layers of deception

18 March 2007
Mohau Pheko


I have become jaded over the Zimbabwe issue.

I've been reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins,
which describes how highly paid professionals lurk in the shadows to
cheat countries around the world out of trillions of dollars. When
they emerge, their modus operandi includes overthrowing heads of
state, rigged elections, manufactured terrorist attacks, payoffs, sex,
murder and extortion.

It has me wondering whether recent events in Harare are not the
makings of an over- productive mastermind trying , through make-
believe scenarios, to evoke sympathy and outrage for what may actually
be seeds of deception.

Frankly, the reported situation in Zimbabwe has become the perfect
script for a spy movie.

On October 12 2005, Morgan Tsvangirai precipitated a fatal split in
his six-year-old opposition when he stormed out of a Movement for
Democratic Change meeting, prompting the faction led by the party's
deputy secretary, Gibson Sibanda, to suspend him .

In return, Tsvangirai supporters suspended Sibanda and members of his
faction. Stunned by their party leader's dishonesty and dictatorial
tendencies, the MDC found itself divided.

It has to be said that Tsvangirai's bizarre behaviour that day left
many formerly enthusiastic supporters baffled. Why, some question, was
he committed to boycotting the election? Why would he not countenance
an alternative plan? Why was he dogmatic and unyielding in his view,
prepared to trample on the MDC's constitution, lie to the media and
even declare to the national council, "If the party breaks, so be it"?
Why has he not done anything since to reconcile the two opposing
factions? Could a secret meeting with Zanu-PF kingmaker Solomon Mujuru
— husband of vice-president Joyce Mujuru — have changed his mind?

In the tradition of the espionage movie, conspiracy theories abound.
The Gibson Sibanda faction has been accused of secretly conniving with
President Thabo Mbeki to undermine Tsvangirai. On the other hand,
there are those who believe that President Robert Mugabe and
Tsvangirai are colluding on a blueprint that is mutually beneficial.
There are accusations that Tsvangirai has been colluding with Zanu- PF
in a plot by Mujuru's husband, betraying the MDC by pulling out of
senate elections in exchange for undisclosed political rewards.

If one links these events, recent statements by various leaders of the
ruling Zanu-PF make perfect sense. The government of Zimbabwe declares
its innocence in recent events by implicating opposition forces within
the MDC for the latest calamity. In essence, it is said the opposition
came with pangas to the recent march to deal with each other. In the
interest of public safety, the police had to intervene to stop the
altercation.

In the mind of many, this ongoing war within the opposition in
Zimbabwe is a perfect cover for the country's Central Intelligence
Organisation to meticulously deepen divisions within the opposition,
and undermine any credible opposition or threat to the ruling party.

The government's response to recent events is consistent with the
words of Emmerson Mnangagwa, shortly after the deployment of the Fifth
Brigade in Mata beleland North in 1983. As minister of State Security
responsible for the CIO, he stated: "Blessed are they who will follow
the path of the government law, for their days on earth shall be
increased. But woe to those who will choose the path of collaboration
with dissidents for we will certainly shorten their stay on earth."

In trying to discover who is culpable in the Zimbabwe crisis, Mugabe's
statement is instructive: "I would like to see an African country that
has gone this length in those directions ... abiding by the rule of
law, accepting the reign of human rights and establishing democracy.
You also have nongovernmental organisations here telling them [the
British government] the opposite of what we are. In the meantime, they
are enjoying the freedom of organising our people without hindrance."

It is clear from this that Mugabe perceives accusations levelled
against his government as baseless and unfounded.

As the plot thickens, the sad ending is that after 26 years as
distinguished architects of their own liberation, Zimbabweans pin
their hopes on the retirement of one man. Even more disappointing,
conversations in Zimbabwe have centred on dubious characters for
leadership. It is time Zimbabwe ended the personality cult in
politics. It is time to pause and not blindly follow popular and
charismatic personalities who have already shown that they are
seriously flawed as leaders. For outsiders to support and intervene in
Zimbabwe, solidarity needs to be built on a vision of a new Zimbabwe.

The lesson to be learnt from Zimbabwe is that a construction of
democracy, where the majority vote and the minority elites govern,
does not lend itself to participatory democracy where citizens can
recall their leaders. Perhaps the real lesson is, presidents do not
assume power through an exam. They are the product of the choices made
by the governed.

It is incumbent upon all Zimbabweans to elevate the level of debate to
provide a vision of their new society. This will reinforce solidarity
in the region in such a way that those who find themselves in wrong
jobs after 26 years of rule will be conscious of the pressure to step
aside in the interest of a new national vision and thereby end the
seeds of deception.

----------------------------------------------------------------

From http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Insight/Article.aspx?id=415095

Inaction lets Zimbabwe crisis play itself out

18 March 2007
Francis Kornegay


Second opinion Francis Kornegay says SA and the region have little
choice but to let Robert Mugabe's country stew

The arrest and brutal detention of Movement for Democratic Change
leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his colleagues have refocused the
spotlight on South Africa's "quiet diplomacy" towards Zimbabwe.

The assumption, as reflected in Mondli Makhanya's recent commentary
"The joke will be on us if we don't wake up to Zimbabwe's pain" (March
4), is that diplomacy is not working, though what may be the real
source of frustration is Pretoria's lack of effective public diplomacy
regarding Zimbabwe.

This becomes especially apparent during episodes of overt repression
as witnessed over the past week, though the South African government
did counsel Harare on the need to observe the rule of law and the
rights of all concerned.

If diplomacy has failed, perhaps a closer look at what is unfolding in
Zimbabwe is in order, accompanied by suggestions of what more South
Africa and/or the Southern African Development Community (SADC) should
undertake.

At the same time, it is useful to note observations about the recent
Franco-African summit to which Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was
not invited and at which his fellow heads of state made not a peep.
The loud and clear message from their silence was that they had
"washed their hands" of and were not willing to go to bat for their
tarnished icon.

Silence can be golden and, in the Taoist tradition of "dynamic
inaction", the best approach to certain intractable situations. Here,
South Africa and the SADC are not alone. Witness the equally lengthy
stalemates between China-North Korea, the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations and Burma or even the US and Cuba.

Given the fact that the military option is ruled out and cutting off
electricity and a border blockade are equally unpalatable for what
these would convey to our neighbours — the return of the neighbourhood
bully — a protracted crisis-management containment strategy has been
the only realistic option.

Pretoria has gone the extra mile in searching for a negotiated
internal settlement to Zimbabwe's crisis, to no avail. As this
diplomacy interacted with the dynamics within and between the ruling
Zanu-PF and the opposition MDC, there was less and less scope within
which to work such a settlement. Both parties became internally
divided. But these internal divisions, especially within Zanu-PF, are
what may eventually bear fruit as the country's economic meltdown,
underneath the apparently loosening grip of Mugabe, seems to be
pushing the party's rival factions towards the exit as they search for
a way out of Zimbabwe's predicament.

Once the negotiating phase of quiet diplomacy had run its course, the
only thing Pretoria and the SADC could do was sit back and, in effect,
let Zimbabwe stew in its own juices.

South Africa and the SADC must prepare for whatever emerges from this
current "dynamic inaction" phase of quiet diplomacy, which allows
Zanu-PF's internal contradictions to play themselves out towards the
long-awaited "endgame".

As a result of the growing flood of desperate Zimbabweans streaming
into Zambia — not to mention South Africa, Botswana and Malawi —
Zambian Foreign Minister Mundia Sikatana has suggested that the next
SADC summit in August take up the Zimbabwean crisis. This may signal
the need for a more highly profiled diplomacy on Pretoria's part.

Sikatana's suggestion that the SADC facilitate dialogue between
Zimbabwe and the European Union could complement some of the
diplomatic outreach being reportedly attempted by some among Zanu-PF's
divided elite. His suggestion would also be in line with the
International Crisis Group's recommendation that Pretoria engage the
EU and the US in devising a strategy to resolve Zimbabwe's crisis.

Rather than hammering Pretoria without knowing all the facts about
what is and is not happening between South Africa and Zimbabwe, the
media need to focus on breaking developments, with the aim of
stimulating constructive dialogue on Zimbabwe's future and the role
that South Africa and others should play to ensure an internally and
regionally stabilising post-Mugabe transition.


Francis Kornegay is senior researcher in international affairs at the
Centre for Policy Studies

The ICG has yet again released a STUPID report on Zimbabwe. The
summary to their report is below and has some pretty out of touch
synopses of things over here. Below are a few highlights. What country
are these people talking about…? Sometimes I just feel that these
think-tank and advocacy and journalistic types will really never get
it!

The country is in a very fragile condition: the economy is near
meltdown, and discontent among underpaid police and troops, combined
with the willingness of opposition parties and civil society to
protest in the streets, all increase the risk of sudden major
violence
The economy is really really bad. I don't know what they mean by
'meltdown' because predictions of a meltdown have been in place since
2000. but it is rather horrific. So perhaps on that, I'd agree with
them. Public servant are well underpaid but the government seems to
manage to ease their pain whenever it gets too much. Both teachers and
doctors have now called off strikes and are back at work. The cops and
the military going on strike or protest - now that would be something!

President Mugabe must give up efforts to extend his term, and the
opposing parties must negotiate a compromise
This issue of the president's term being extended is really reported
on badly. The other option which the government is weighing is to cut
the term of parliament by two years and have harmonized elections for
the executive and legislature next year - which very well might
happen. Nothing is a done deal yet. But also, it's rather simplistic
to look at this in terms of just the president hanging on to power. If
mugabe wanted to remain president, he would keep the election on next
year and win another six year term. Why have two years when you can
have six ... if staying in power is really your end objective..? this
whole issue is taken out of context and ignore the importance of the
succession debate and process within ZANU PF. It can be critiqued all
we want, but the reality is that they are zimbabwe's dominant
political force at the moment. The opposition couldn't organize a mud
fest in a mud bath and couldn't govern Zimbabwe in its current state.
(not to say the current performance of the entire zim government
leaves much to be desired). The "opposing parties" that "must
negotiate a compromise" are all in ZANU PF. The opposition party just
loves to make itself useless to the whole political future of
Zimbabwe. And speaking of people not extending their terms, the
leader[s] of the opposition my also give up their terms of office
because they have quite frankly failed. A new start at the top level
across the board may not be a bad thing...


Pressure by the European Union and the U.S., through targeted
sanctions and isolation, has helped divide the ruling party, ZANU-PF,
persuading key figures whose business interests have been hard hit by
the current crisis, that change is needed.
Again - whoever reached this conclusion does not really understand how
the "key figures" in ZANU PF are making their money. This crisis
enables the rich to get richer more than ever. Disengagement never
helped to address a situation like the one we have in Zimbabwe. Keep
the sanctions on, and normal people suffer, are closed off from
accessing key parts of the economy because shortages mean that those
with power access the much needed resources (most of the time) and you
get a case where people made millions. The prohibition in America (a
form of sanctions) taught us all how much money is made when you try
and restrict things to achieve some idealistic pie in the sky
objective. Al Capone died a millionaire. These "key figures" are
millionaires in US dollar terms thanks to these 'targeted' or 'smart'
sanctions. Easy money. Why would they just want to let that go...? get
rid of these sanctions. Allow the economics to normalize and perhaps
most of the country will once again be interested in political
engagement. Survival as an M.O doesn't leave much room for political
analysis and participation.

These sanction also affect Zimbabwe more than anyone else because the
government runs a lot of state enterprises that are starved off
foreign investment. These enterprises (electricity, fuel, transport,
health services etc) serve a lot of normal, average Zimbabweans. Their
failure to perform because of the indirect results of these sanctions
means that the majority of Zimbabweans suffer. Not the small elite
driving gas guzzling cars which never run out of gas or have
generators to work through power outages. When a zimbabwean government
official cannot talk to potential investors in Europe or the US or any
other place, how is the economy not expect to 'meltdown' ... ? that
coupled with internal mismanagement...? so yeah, these sanctions and
isolation are really helping us. Not at all.

This pressure should be increased if ZANU-PF does not cooperate
with the opposition to implement a transitional government and restore
democracy.
And beating a dead donkey always arose it from the dead! NO! increased
pressure will ultimately help ZANU PF on a number of fronts. The
opposition will probably not get consulted or involved in any
transitional government process primarily because they take some of
their queues from thinkers people who wrote this report. They
unfortunately need to find a way to engage with the government - not
the other way round. We're being practical here, not academic. The
truth is, as much as ZANU PF is failing to administer things, for a
number of different reasons, most people in Zimbabwe today would vote
for ZANU PF (also for a number of varying reasons) regardless of how
much external forces increase pressure on ZANU.



The Southern African Development Community (SADC), the organisation
of regional countries, should work as a mediator for negotiations
between ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC) and join the EU and the U.S. in defining a clear sequence of
benchmarks leading to a genuinely democratic process
SADC has tried that. Hasn't worked. The opposition leaders themselves
have helped to foil some of these efforts. I think we should stop
seeing the MDC as an alternative because most Zimbabweans just don't
think that it is. They can not govern this country effectively in
their present state. SADC is unlikely to place sanctions on Zimbabwe.
Could the writers of this report try to at least understand African
Politics 101.

"The situation today is reminiscent of the last stages of Mobutu's
reign in the Congo", says Crisis Group President Gareth Evans.
"Zimbabwe has the potential to fall into chaos and bring large chunks
of the region down with it unless both domestic and international
parties act now".
The Congo...??? the Congo...??? and Zimbabwe are similar? Mugabe and
Mobutu (who was placed in power by the US government in place of
Lumumba-which is fact and not conspiracy?) how do you compare Mugabe
and Mobutu and their situations. They ran/run two totally different
countries in very different contexts with very different approaches,
systems, achievements, etc. how can the situation in Zimbabwe (where
there is no rebel army fighting the government amongst other things)
compare to that of the Congo?

Final Comments if I was a donor to the International Crisis
Group I would be very embarrassed with the results of my
contributions. The major international crisis is the one that they
create through putting forth such ignorant, ill-informed and unhelpful
reports on countries and situations they clearly seem to know very
little about.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--

From: International Crisis Group [mailto:notification@crisisgroup.org]
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 6:29 PM
Subject: Zimbabwe: An End to the Stalemate? - New Crisis Group report

INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP - NEW REPORT
Zimbabwe: An End to the Stalemate?
Pretoria/Brussels, 5 March 2007: The long political stalemate in
Zimbabwe may be breaking at last, but regional intervention and
continued Western pressure are needed to ensure a peaceful restoration
of democracy.
Zimbabwe: An End to the Stalemate,* the latest report from the
International Crisis Group, examines the deadlock in Zimbabwe and sees
in the current moment a chance to resolve the situation through the
retirement of President Robert Mugabe when his term ends in 2008 and a
power-sharing deal to create a transitional government tasked with
preparing a new constitution and holding elections by 2010.

The country is in a very fragile condition: the economy is near
meltdown, and discontent among underpaid police and troops, combined
with the willingness of opposition parties and civil society to
protest in the streets, all increase the risk of sudden major
violence. For Zimbabwe to begin to recover, President Mugabe must give
up efforts to extend his term, and the opposing parties must negotiate
a compromise. The months leading to the July parliament session, when
decisions will be taken on Mugabe's fate or transition, are
crucial.

"The prospect of President Mugabe's retirement has created an
exceptional rallying point among varied constituencies within the
country", says François Grignon, Crisis Group's Africa Program
Director. "There is widespread agreement that he must leave so that
the country can finally make progress on the needed economic and
political reforms".

Pressure by the European Union and the U.S., through targeted
sanctions and isolation, has helped divide the ruling party, ZANU-PF,
persuading key figures whose business interests have been hard hit by
the current crisis, that change is needed. This pressure should be
increased if ZANU-PF does not cooperate with the opposition to
implement a transitional government and restore democracy.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC), the organisation of
regional countries, should work as a mediator for negotiations between
ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and
join the EU and the U.S. in defining a clear sequence of benchmarks
leading to a genuinely democratic process. SADC leaders have an
opportunity to talk to Mugabe now about a retirement package to be
implemented not later than 2008 – and at last get him to listen. The
MDC needs urgently to reconcile its feuding factions.

"The situation today is reminiscent of the last stages of Mobutu's
reign in the Congo", says Crisis Group President Gareth Evans.
"Zimbabwe has the potential to fall into chaos and bring large chunks
of the region down with it unless both domestic and international
parties act now".
________________________________________
Contacts: Andrew Stroehlein (Brussels) 32 (0) 2 541 1635
Kimberly Abbott (Washington) 1 202 785 1601
To contact Crisis Group media please click here
*Read the full Crisis Group report our website: http://www.crisisgroup.org
________________________________________
The International Crisis Group (Crisis Group) is an independent,
non-profit, non-governmental organisation covering over 50
crisis-affected countries and territories across four continents,
working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to
prevent and resolve deadly conflict.
________________________________________

from the Financial Gazette... a weekly newspaper in zimbabwe

http://www.fingaz.co.zw/story.aspx?stid=2031


Forget about hunger, Zimbabweans just love sex
*Charles Rukuni Bureau Chief *
**
*BULAWAYO — Forget about rampant inflation, high unemployment, or the fact
that more than one million people need food aid. *

Forget that you are lucky to live beyond 34. Zimbabweans just love sex. That
is the impression one gets when one looks at the amount of money being
poured into HIV/AIDS when an estimated 1.4 million are said to have no food.

The major food
donor, the World Food Programme, last month said it might cut down on the
number of people it was feeding because it did not have enough food for an
estimated 1.4 million hungry people until the end of March next year when
the current season's harvest is expected to start rolling in.
It said that it would require US$16 million to purchase 26 000 tonnes of
grain needed to meet the anticipated shortfall.
At about the same time, Britain said it
had awarded 20 million pounds (US$38.7 million) to Zimbabwe to fight the HIV
and AIDS epidemic.
The disease currently affects 1.8 million people. The money would be used to
distribute more than 250 million condoms through 700
hair salons over the next five years. International Development Secretary
Hilary Benn was quoted as saying: "People should not die because they have
sex."
As if to support the appropriateness of the donation, The Sunday Mail
reported that Zimbabwe led the world in the use of condoms. Some 163 million
male condoms and 3.8 million female condoms — the highest in the world — had
been sold in Zimbabwe over the past five years.
While the HIV/AIDS epidemic has devastated the country, Zimbabwe is now
reportedly winning the war against HIV/AIDS. Prevalence is reported to have
declined to 18.1 percent from over 30 percent at one stage.
But some 3 200 people are still reportedly dying each week, a figure
controversial Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube says is higher than the
deaths in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.
This has prompted some AIDS activists to question why so many people are
still dying while the prevalence rate is reportedly declining. Others are
questioning the efficacy of aid, who this aid actually benefits, and who
determines who needs what.
South African AIDS activist, Theo Smart, in an article entitled: Zimbabwe
observes a reduction in HIV prevalence, but why said while there had been a
substantial reduction in national HIV prevalence, it could not all be
attributed to the ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful and Condoms). The extremely
high mortality rate could also have contributed greatly to the reduction in
prevalence, he argued.
"Mortality plays more than one part in this, because it doesn't only
decrease prevalence directly, it can decrease incidence as well, by
decreasing the pool of infectious individuals who can spread the
infection," Smart argued, citing several case
studies that were released at the 2006 HIV/AIDS Implementers Meeting
of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that was held in Durban
early this year.
"This is particularly the case when most of those who have died are men
because infected men are much more likely than women to spread the infection
to more than one partner."
He also said Zimbabwe's economic decline over the past seven years could
have played a part.
"The collapsing economy could have additional effects that could decrease
mobility, and therefore risk of HIV infection," he said. "Unemployment has
sky-rocketed in Zimbabwe, and there have been major fuel shortages."
"The commercial mining sector has collapsed, and factory work has
evaporated. Cities no longer offer much work. So as a result of Zimbabwe's
economic contraction, many of the old hotspots for HIV transmission — near
the factories and mines, at truck stops along the highway — could be
dwindling or people no longer have a reason or the means to go there . . .
"It's important to remember that this is, after all, Zimbabwe. Since the
year 2000, Zimbabwe's economy has ground to a halt; the country suffered
from floods, followed by severe drought and endemic food insecurity. In this
context it is odd, to say the least, that the official mortality rate
reportedly peaked before all that trouble began. But even if famine and
inflation didn't increase the numbers of people dying, the calamity would
have increased the costs of caring for a person with HIV tremendously."
Smart argued that the stigma attached to people with HIV/AIDS was an
effective deterrent on its own as people with HIV/AIDS had been variously
described as being "in the departure lounge", or having "crossed the red
robot" or "bewitched by goblins". These were all things very few people
wanted to be associated with and therefore would not take that route.
He, however, stressed that this was not to say that ABC strategies did not
work. But a balanced prevention campaign was needed.
Those who argue that aid is not working in Africa, even in the case of Aids,
said most of the money reportedly being poured into the disease was
trickling back to the donor countries.
Michael Holman, former Africa editor of the Financial Times said in an
article in The Africa Report of last month that the irony about the aid
industry into Africa was that an estimated US$4 million was spent annually
to recruit 100 000 expatriates while at the same time about 70 000 skilled
Africans such as doctors, nurses and engineers, left to work abroad.
"The multi-billion dollar aid industry has largely failed in Africa. Not
only have they failed along with others in the aid industry, most
nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have become part of the problem," he
wrote. "Not that they will admit their failure. They refuse to share the
blame for the grim record. Instead they have closed ranks - along with UN
development agencies and bilateral agencies — and all sing from the same
hymn sheet: 'Aid works', they claim. 'Give us even more money and we will
complete the job . . ."
A British-based non-governmental organisation, Action Aid, painted an even
grimmer picture. It said of the US$79 billion aid that was meant for Africa
this year, US$37 billion was "phantom aid" which meant that it was not
genuinely available to the countries which were supposed to benefit. It said
too much aid continued to be haphazardly allocated with little reference to
need. It was tied to requirements that it be spent on donor countries' own
companies. It was double counted as debt relief, or was lost through
cumbersome and poorly coordinated procedures and systems.
Condoms available in Zimbabwe, for example, are "specially imported" from
Britain by an American organisation Population Services International.
Action Aid said about two-thirds of aid from the world's biggest donor, the
United States, was phantom aid. In Zimbabwe, most of the programmes being
sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
are implemented by United States-based organisations such as the Futures
Group, the Centres for Disease Control, Population Services International,
the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation and John Snow Inc.
"Too much (aid) continues to be identified, designed and managed by donors
themselves, (is)tied to donor countries' own firms, (is) poorly coordinated
and based on a set of often untested assumptions about expatriate expertise
and recipient ignorance," Action Aid said. As a result, this aid was often
overpriced and ineffective "and in worst cases destroys rather than builds
the capacity of the poorest countries".
Social commentator Claude Mararike agreed. Zimbabweans had to realise that
the West had its own agenda which was not necessarily that of Zimbabweans
and should therefore question what was in it for those countries that
provided aid to the country, he said.
"Anyone who puts his or her money into any activity, gets mileage from that
activity," he said. "Governments in Europe have always been interested in
numbers in Africa and to some extent Asia. How are they increasing? What is
the mortality rate and so on? The question is resources. The fewer the
people in Africa, the better for Europe."
"People must realise that our survival is more important than sex.
Munozofunga the sex madya (You will only think about sex after eating)," he
said.

Continuing my theme for this week, an interesting article from Business Day, a leading South African daily newspaper.

In other news, the BBC put together excerpts from leading african newspapers commenting on
Botha's death. Notably, they are not very polite about the passing of
P.W. Botha. one of the few South African 'leaders' to say something of
value on this issue was Tokyo Sexwale [former Premier of Gauteng
Province and a political prisoner on Robben Island] who is quoted on
the BBC website as saying:
"We should not forget the kind of regime he represented, he was
ruthless, he was brutal, he was a leader of apartheid during the
harshest years of that regime, the sad truth is that he is leaving
with many secrets which he should have revealed perhaps during the
time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission."

I agree a lot with the article below by Mvoko and also feel that the
South African government and civil society has missed a great
opportunity to deal effectively with the negative history that their
country is still trying to succesfully emerge from.



Groot Krokodil: when moving on obscures historical perspective
by Vuyo Mvoko
________________________________


THERE are times when I do get to appreciate just how lucky I am. In a
country of more than 40-million people, I'm one of very few people who
have the privilege to occupy, and sometimes command, a public space
many other South Africans only dream of.

Every week, through this column, I get to speak to elected public
representatives, as well to business people who have every right to
conduct their affairs and spend their millions the way they deem fit.
Members of the public greet me and are sometimes full of praise for a
job they say I sometimes do well.

It can only be good for a fragile but extraordinary ego of a boy from
an Eastern Cape township, brought up by a domestic worker
grandmother and a "painter's boy" grandfather. I have sat in front of
presidents and other world leaders, and now tell them what they should
be thinking, saying and doing.

But I must also say that secretly I often battle with under- or
overplaying my role and influence, to say nothing of the discomfort
that sometimes comes with thoughts such as: What if I get proven
wrong? and, Am I imposing my "narrow" world view on others? It
particularly struck me this week, as I listened, watched and read what
everyone was saying about PW Botha, following the apartheid SA prime
minister's death. I felt an awkward sense of betrayal when people I
regard ay my leaders — Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Desmond Tutu —
chose to say very little, if anything, about the atrocious man that we
came to know as Die Groot Krokodil.

Born in the ordinary Free State town of Paul Roux and of ordinary
Afrikaner parents, Pieter Willem Botha died this week with a solid
reputation of being one of the most appalling men to have presided
over the apartheid machinery. He chose to be evil, killing and maiming
thousands of innocent black people, and imposed his narrow world view
on all of us. Until the second he died, we took care of his basic
needs, his health, welfare, security and comfort: privileges which
still remain beyond the reach of millions of black people.

I was ready to dance on Botha's grave when, on behalf of all citizens,
including me, Mbeki expressed "heartfelt condolences" to the Botha
family. Botha's death, I sincerely believed, should have been used to
teach generations that may have never directly experienced his
viciousness that we would have indeed gone very far as a nation had we
not had people like that finger-wagging racist.

Albeit temporarily, Botha made apartheid succeed where it could have
failed. His relaxation of some laws — such as the Immorality Act and
for which some, FW de Klerk included, now believe Botha deserves
credit — were never about a change of heart but were dismal attempts
at buying time. Botha's half-hearted "reforms" remain inconsistent
with everything he did afterwards. For me, there were no obvious
reasons for a liberation movement that the African National Congress
(ANC) says it still is to be as kind to Botha and his rotten legacy.

It prompts the question: does being "a nation at work" now mean that
when opportunities arise for us to put our history into perspective,
we will shy away from that because we need to "move on"? And if that
is the case, is it the sort of thing that the ANC leadership will,
from now on, seek to impress on the minds of its cadreship that it has
deployed in every sphere of our public lives? Will the ANC leadership,
for example, tell its deployees in the SABC that what they committed
themselves to after meeting a parliamentary committee early this week
is perhaps not the right thing to do?

SABC board chairman Eddie Funde, still pissed off at the leak of the
"blacklisting" report implicating news head Snuki Zikalala, apparently
made an undertaking to investigate the source of the leak. This means
that there is still another sideshow in the Zikalala saga — before the
SABC even begins to deal with the issues raised around Zikalala's
management style and journalistic integrity.

Long after everybody else was reporting on Botha's death, the SABC's
10pm news bulletin was still leading with a Helen Zille piece. If the
SABC board focused on the real issues, it could start by confronting
the challenges facing the national public broadcaster, which have a
lot to do with journalism. While the SABC is not really short of money
or bodies it can call journalists, getting scribes with skills, and
keeping them, remains an elusive goal, something that is not helped by
Zikalala's management style and (mis)conception of what a journalist
should do.

My ego notwithstanding, and my thirst for dead Botha's blood refusing
to go away, I am, for once, prepared to let bygones be bygones.
Focusing on the past; hunting down those who may have wronged you;
listening to your ego; abusing your privileged public position;
wanting to be right all the time — all those things may be good for
revenge and point-scoring, but they may just keep your eyes away from
your goal.

Time to let any old and poison-filled Groot Krokodil die, lest we wake
it up only to destroy our future.

Mvoko is an independent media and political consultant.

So there's actually more to the P.W. Botha thing. This guy gets a
State Funeral!!! The BBC just reported that South Africa will be giving this guy a state
funeral... are you kidding me! what is the ANC smoking! We actually
have a debate about whether it's appropriate to name South Africa's
main international airport after O.R. Tambo, a giant in making South
Africa the country that it is today, and then we have a crazy dictator
get hero status? People like Botha and Ian Smith and Adolf Hitler
cannot get state funerals, at least not from the same states that they
have helped to destroy.

(note how the BBC article does use the word racist or racism not even
once. call a spade a spade. this dude was a racist dictator. when will
we all wake up...?)

so PW Botha, one of the worst leaders of an African country EVER died
last night. it's interesting how the NY Times gives this extra long
obituary, but doesn't even paint him in the negative light that he
deserves. the whole thing tastes like a cucumber. plain and bland.
this guy, who was responsible for one of Africa's most brutal regimes
EVER gets this, as an obituary? He is not even refered to as a racist
in this article. not once. infact, the WORD "racist" comes up once to
refer to "racist policies." When people like Idi Amin died, i bet
their obituaries didn't read this rosy. when other african 'dictators'
died, there are articles of good riddance to bad rubbish. this guy was
a dictator. let's call a spade a spade. he was a horrible, cold, mean,
racist, unrepentant brutal dictator who led one of africa's worst
governments ever... let's see what the NY Times will say about robert
mugabe when he dies. i bet the title of their obituary will not say
"R.G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe's ex-leader dies at [age]." the word dictator
will be mentioned. is that because there are different shades of
african leaders and dictators. how does Pik Botha not fit in amongst
the WORST...?

perhaps we should be the ones calling the NY Times racist, because
this is just sickening, to see the subliminal endorsement of what
Botha stood for.

CNN had a little clip they showed on TV (at least on CNN
international. i know CNN in the US is different) and its tone was the
same. not hard hitting, not standing against the values this man
represented. at the end the voice over said "until the very end, the
crocodile (and Botha was known) was unrepentent, unrelenting..."
what!?

can someone turn up the al jazeera...?



P.W. Botha, South Africa's ex-leader, dies at 90

By JOSEPH R. GREGORY The New York Times

Published: October 31, 2006



P.W. Botha, the hard-nosed South African leader who struggled vainly
to preserve apartheid rule in a tide of domestic racial violence and
global condemnation, died today at his home in South Africa. He was
90.

His death was reported by the South African Press Association in Cape
Town, quoting security staff at Mr. Botha's home on the southern Cape
coast.

Mr. Botha was a combative, irascible son of a well-to-do Afrikaner
farm family who dropped out of college to work for the right-wing
National Party, then rose through the ranks of South Africa's
political establishment, gaining a reputation as the "Old Crocodile"
for his ability to charm, outwit and crush his opponents.

In 1978, Mr. Botha became prime minister and proceeded to engineer the
creation of a new constitution, one that held out the promise of a
limited relaxation of the nation's apartheid policies and paved the
way for him to become president in 1984. "We must adapt or die," Mr.
Botha told his constituents after becoming Prime Minister.

But the constitution only roiled the battle over race. Though it
allowed Asians and people of mixed race to be represented in a
white-controlled Parliament, it continued to exclude the nation's
black majority. Some apartheid laws, like a prohibition on mixed
marriages and a requirement that blacks carry special passes, were
relaxed. But the measures only fueled the anger of apartheid's
opponents. One opposition leader, Frederik van Zyle, said Mr. Botha's
changes in apartheid were the political equivalent of rearranging the
deck chairs on the Titanic.

Holding out the promise that apartheid would eventually be dismantled,
he opened negotiations with Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of
the African National Congress. The talks went nowhere, and Mr. Mandela
remained confined.

At the same time, Mr. Botha, who first achieved national prominence as
defense minister, gave the military and police unprecedented power.
His government repressed dissent, encouraged rivalries among Zulus,
Xhosa and other tribes and ethnic groups, and tried to destabilize
neighboring countries opposed to white rule.

Mr. Botha used the climate of the cold war to justify his actions. He
portrayed a growing Marxist threat in southern Africa and warned that
Communists had infiltrated the anti-apartheid movement at home. South
Africa, he said, was engaged in a "total war" and must develop a
"total strategy" to fight the battle.

As opposition to apartheid spread, Mr. Botha's room to maneuver
shrank. "He was caught in a bind between wanting to show the
international community that he was not inflexible, and not wishing to
appear weak within his own country," the journalist Allister Sparks
wrote in his 1995 account of the end of apartheid, "Tomorrow Is
Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa's Road to Change."

In 1985, Mr. Botha was supposed to announce a giant step away from
apartheid, but his proposals, which offered black Africans the vote
under a legislative system that gave them no real power, disillusioned
South Africa's few remaining friends in the world.

Yet for a while Mr. Botha's methods seemed to belie Alexis de
Toqueville's dictum that "the most perilous moment for bad government
is when it seeks to mend its ways." Mr. Botha was re-elected in 1987.
Two years later, amid growing opposition within his own party to his
intransigent style, the president suffered a stroke and resigned. He
was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk, who legalized opposition parties,
freed Mr. Mandela and other political prisoners, and made the
agreements that eventually brought apartheid down.

Pieter Willem Botha was born on Jan. 12, 1916, in the Orange Free
State to a Boer farm family with deep roots in southern Africa's
"White Tribe" - descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who had had been
living on the continent's southern tip for more than three centuries
and who referred to themselves as Afrikaners.

Beleaguered, stubborn and insular, they saw themselves as heirs to a
promised land watered with the blood of their ancestors in wars
against Zulus, Ndebele and other tribes.

The Boers and the British, with their imperial aims, were also old
enemies, rivals for land, diamonds and gold. Their enmity culminated
in the Boer war of 1899-1901, which ended in a British victory and the
eventual consolidation of the country under the empire.

Mr. Botha's father fought the British, who burned his mother's family
farm. She and her family fled but were eventually captured and
interned. Their experiences forged their son's attitudes. Raised in
the traditions of the Bible and the gun, he learned to ride and shoot
and to embrace the embattled self-image of the Afrikaner.

"I grew up on a farm where I came to know black people very well," Mr.
Botha told Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times in an interview in
Mr. Lelyveld's 1985 book "Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and
White." "I played with them, I worked with them. I was taught by my
father to be strict with them, but just."

As World War II approached, tensions mounted among those who believed
South Africa should side with Britain, those who advocated neutrality
and those who sympathized with the Nazis. Mr. Botha sided with the
latter, joining the right-wing Afrikaner nationalists in the
Ossewabrandwag, or Ox Wagon Fire Guard, which was closely related to
Daniel Francois Malan's Reunited National Party. A paramilitary group
within the Guard, modeled after the Nazi Brown shirts, agitated
against the pro-Allied government of Jan Christian Smuts.

But Mr. Botha, who in 1935 had left the University of the Orange Free
State to become an organizer for the Nationalists, did not like the
Wagon Guard's "emphasis on national socialism instead of Christian
nationalism," a South African biographer, Brian Pottinger, wrote in
1988 in "The Imperial Presidency: P.W. Botha, the First 10 Years."
"With some courage and a fine nose for the prevailing wind," Mr.
Pottinger wrote, Botha publicly condemned the Ossewabrandwag, charging
it with "interference" in national politics.

By 1944, with victory looming in Europe, the Wagon Guard had become an
embarrassment to Mr. Malan, and he banned National Party members from
associating with it.

A year earlier, Mr. Both married Anna Elizabeth Rossouw, who went by
the name Elise and who died in 1977. They had two sons and three
daughters. He married Barbara Robertson in 1998.

In the postwar years, economic and social uncertainty eroded the
popular base of the Smuts government, which had advocated a
comparatively liberal approach toward race relations. In the 1948
general election, Mr. Malan's Nationalists, campaigning on a platform
of white supremacy and racial segregation, were swept to power. Mr.
Botha, who had become secretary of the party's National Youth League
in 1946, won a seat in Parliament.

Over the next six years under Mr. Malan's leadership, the foundations
of the Apartheid state were laid. The Nationalists imposed segregation
on almost all aspects of South African life. They passed laws
prohibiting mixed marriages and extramarital sex between races and
regulated almost all other social relations. Freedom of movement was
limited: most blacks were required to carry passbooks. And
"independent" homelands, or tribe-based states, were created to make
the various African ethnic groups easier to control.

Throughout the 1950's there were protests and other forms of passive
resistance. In 1960, some 70 protesters were killed and nearly 200
wounded when the police opened fire on a demonstration in Sharpeville,
near Johannesburg. The climate changed after that.

Within the African National Congress, founded in 1912 to advance the
cause of blacks, the leadership diverged, with men like Nelson Mandela
advocating violent opposition to the racist state. By 1970, many
anti-apartheid leaders, including Mr. Mandela, were either in jail or
living in exile.

Meanwhile, Mr. Botha rose through the government ranks. In 1961, he
became the minister of colored affairs; in 1966, minister of defense.
His rise coincided with the country's deepening political isolation.
In 1961, South Africa left the Commonwealth of Nations, whose members
were strongly critical of apartheid policies. As the country's
neighbors achieved independence from colonial rule in the 1960's and
70's, many cut off diplomatic, cultural and commercial ties with South
Africa.

In 1974, the United Nations revoked South Africa's seat in the General
Assembly. Three years later, it imposed a weapons embargo. In the
West, particularly in the United States, debate over imposing trade
sanctions on South Africa reached a fever pitch.

But the disciples of apartheid hung tough. Huge reserves of gold and
diamonds fueled the Afrikaners' ability to circumvent economic
embargoes and political sanctions. As defense minister, Mr. Botha
increased military spending to 20 percent of the government's budget,
conducted a clandestine weapons trade with Israel and other states and
pushed for the development of nuclear weapons.

In the early 1980's, Mr. Botha's government launched military strikes
on the forces of the African National Congress and other insurgent
groups in neighboring countries where they had taken sanctuary. Air
and ground forces struck at targets in Angola, and South African
commandos conducted raids in Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Zambia and
Zimbabwe.

South African forces also equipped and trained rebel movements against
the left-leaning African governments that had replaced the ousted
Portuguese colonialists. Moreover, under the direction of the State
Security Council, created in 1972, Mr. Botha's government carried out
a program to kill anti-apartheid activists.

Racial violence and political protests continued to rise. Increasing
numbers of white South Africans joined the demonstrations. Although
Mr. Botha had come to power with the pledge to uphold apartheid as
well as improve race relations, the two goals were mutually exclusive.
Despite a seeming willingness to relax some apartheid laws, he
remained adamant in his refusal to grant blacks political power.

The situation deteriorated. Police stations and other government
installations were attacked. In 1985, the government announced an
indefinite state of emergency. In 1986, the Anglican anti-apartheid
campaigner Bishop Desmond Tutu addressed the United Nations and urged
further sanctions against South Africa.

Mr. Botha grew defiant. "We are not a nation of jellyfish," he
declared in a party speech in 1986. An aide, Hendrik Jacobus Coetsee,
recalled: "The Old Crocodile was obsessed with looking tough and in
control. He never wanted to show any sign of weakness."

But even within the Botha government, pressure was growing for
negotiations with the African National Congress. Clandestine overtures
were made to Mr. Mandela, who had been in prison since 1963. The Botha
government, hoping to appear reasonable to the world, was looking for
a way to free Mr. Mandela without appearing weak to its own Afrikaner
constituency.

In March 1989, Mr. Mandela offered to negotiate a political
settlement, reversing the African National Congress's commitment to
overthrowing the white government by force. Mr. Botha, who had had a
stroke that January, replied that the two men should meet. The did so
on July 5, 1989.

In the end, the encounter turned out to be little more than a courtesy
call. "Yet, in some subtle way a line had been crossed," Mr. Sparks
wrote. "After that there was no stopping the process. It was just a
matter of time and the man."

Mr. Botha's days in office were numbered. Increasingly ill-tempered
and authoritarian, he remained reluctant to move on with reforming the
nation's apartheid policies. In February 1989, a month after his
stroke, for reasons that are unclear, he had renounced his position as
National Party leader while keeping the presidency. The move left him
open to younger rivals. That August, at a cabinet meeting, his
successor as party leader, Mr. de Klerk, followed by other ministers,
suggested that he step down. That night, in an angry, rambling
broadcast, the president announced that he would resign.

Under the new government, led by Mr. De Klerk, apartheid unraveled. In
1990, Mr. Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison and the African
National Congress became a legal political party. In April 1994, the
republic's first multiracial election was held. The African National
Congress won an overwhelming victory, and Mr. Mandela became
president. In May 1996, a new national constitution was adopted.

Apartheid was finished. In the late 1990's, the brutal methods to
prolong its existence were exposed during hearings of South Africa's
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Actions by the country's security
forces and police during Mr. Botha's years in power had killed 4,000
people; as many as 50,000 others were held without trial.

The aging Botha derided the commission as a witch hunt. After failing
to attend a hearing in Cape Town on Dec. 19, 1997, he was found guilty
of contempt of the law, fined 10,000 rand and sentenced to a suspended
12-month prison term. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and the
Old Crocodile remained as intransigent as ever.

"I have nothing to apologize for," he said. "I will never ask for
amnesty. Not now, not tomorrow, not after tomorrow."


P.W. Botha, the hard-nosed South African leader who struggled vainly
to preserve apartheid rule in a tide of domestic racial violence and
global condemnation, died today at his home in South Africa. He was
90.

His death was reported by the South African Press Association in Cape
Town, quoting security staff at Mr. Botha's home on the southern Cape
coast.

Mr. Botha was a combative, irascible son of a well-to-do Afrikaner
farm family who dropped out of college to work for the right-wing
National Party, then rose through the ranks of South Africa's
political establishment, gaining a reputation as the "Old Crocodile"
for his ability to charm, outwit and crush his opponents.

In 1978, Mr. Botha became prime minister and proceeded to engineer the
creation of a new constitution, one that held out the promise of a
limited relaxation of the nation's apartheid policies and paved the
way for him to become president in 1984. "We must adapt or die," Mr.
Botha told his constituents after becoming Prime Minister.

But the constitution only roiled the battle over race. Though it
allowed Asians and people of mixed race to be represented in a
white-controlled Parliament, it continued to exclude the nation's
black majority. Some apartheid laws, like a prohibition on mixed
marriages and a requirement that blacks carry special passes, were
relaxed. But the measures only fueled the anger of apartheid's
opponents. One opposition leader, Frederik van Zyle, said Mr. Botha's
changes in apartheid were the political equivalent of rearranging the
deck chairs on the Titanic.

Holding out the promise that apartheid would eventually be dismantled,
he opened negotiations with Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of
the African National Congress. The talks went nowhere, and Mr. Mandela
remained confined.

At the same time, Mr. Botha, who first achieved national prominence as
defense minister, gave the military and police unprecedented power.
His government repressed dissent, encouraged rivalries among Zulus,
Xhosa and other tribes and ethnic groups, and tried to destabilize
neighboring countries opposed to white rule.

Mr. Botha used the climate of the cold war to justify his actions. He
portrayed a growing Marxist threat in southern Africa and warned that
Communists had infiltrated the anti-apartheid movement at home. South
Africa, he said, was engaged in a "total war" and must develop a
"total strategy" to fight the battle.

As opposition to apartheid spread, Mr. Botha's room to maneuver
shrank. "He was caught in a bind between wanting to show the
international community that he was not inflexible, and not wishing to
appear weak within his own country," the journalist Allister Sparks
wrote in his 1995 account of the end of apartheid, "Tomorrow Is
Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa's Road to Change."

In 1985, Mr. Botha was supposed to announce a giant step away from
apartheid, but his proposals, which offered black Africans the vote
under a legislative system that gave them no real power, disillusioned
South Africa's few remaining friends in the world.

Yet for a while Mr. Botha's methods seemed to belie Alexis de
Toqueville's dictum that "the most perilous moment for bad government
is when it seeks to mend its ways." Mr. Botha was re-elected in 1987.
Two years later, amid growing opposition within his own party to his
intransigent style, the president suffered a stroke and resigned. He
was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk, who legalized opposition parties,
freed Mr. Mandela and other political prisoners, and made the
agreements that eventually brought apartheid down.

Pieter Willem Botha was born on Jan. 12, 1916, in the Orange Free
State to a Boer farm family with deep roots in southern Africa's
"White Tribe" - descendants of mainly Dutch settlers who had had been
living on the continent's southern tip for more than three centuries
and who referred to themselves as Afrikaners.

Beleaguered, stubborn and insular, they saw themselves as heirs to a
promised land watered with the blood of their ancestors in wars
against Zulus, Ndebele and other tribes.

The Boers and the British, with their imperial aims, were also old
enemies, rivals for land, diamonds and gold. Their enmity culminated
in the Boer war of 1899-1901, which ended in a British victory and the
eventual consolidation of the country under the empire.

Mr. Botha's father fought the British, who burned his mother's family
farm. She and her family fled but were eventually captured and
interned. Their experiences forged their son's attitudes. Raised in
the traditions of the Bible and the gun, he learned to ride and shoot
and to embrace the embattled self-image of the Afrikaner.

"I grew up on a farm where I came to know black people very well," Mr.
Botha told Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Times in an interview in
Mr. Lelyveld's 1985 book "Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and
White." "I played with them, I worked with them. I was taught by my
father to be strict with them, but just."

As World War II approached, tensions mounted among those who believed
South Africa should side with Britain, those who advocated neutrality
and those who sympathized with the Nazis. Mr. Botha sided with the
latter, joining the right-wing Afrikaner nationalists in the
Ossewabrandwag, or Ox Wagon Fire Guard, which was closely related to
Daniel Francois Malan's Reunited National Party. A paramilitary group
within the Guard, modeled after the Nazi Brown shirts, agitated
against the pro-Allied government of Jan Christian Smuts.

But Mr. Botha, who in 1935 had left the University of the Orange Free
State to become an organizer for the Nationalists, did not like the
Wagon Guard's "emphasis on national socialism instead of Christian
nationalism," a South African biographer, Brian Pottinger, wrote in
1988 in "The Imperial Presidency: P.W. Botha, the First 10 Years."
"With some courage and a fine nose for the prevailing wind," Mr.
Pottinger wrote, Botha publicly condemned the Ossewabrandwag, charging
it with "interference" in national politics.

By 1944, with victory looming in Europe, the Wagon Guard had become an
embarrassment to Mr. Malan, and he banned National Party members from
associating with it.

A year earlier, Mr. Both married Anna Elizabeth Rossouw, who went by
the name Elise and who died in 1977. They had two sons and three
daughters. He married Barbara Robertson in 1998.

In the postwar years, economic and social uncertainty eroded the
popular base of the Smuts government, which had advocated a
comparatively liberal approach toward race relations. In the 1948
general election, Mr. Malan's Nationalists, campaigning on a platform
of white supremacy and racial segregation, were swept to power. Mr.
Botha, who had become secretary of the party's National Youth League
in 1946, won a seat in Parliament.

Over the next six years under Mr. Malan's leadership, the foundations
of the Apartheid state were laid. The Nationalists imposed segregation
on almost all aspects of South African life. They passed laws
prohibiting mixed marriages and extramarital sex between races and
regulated almost all other social relations. Freedom of movement was
limited: most blacks were required to carry passbooks. And
"independent" homelands, or tribe-based states, were created to make
the various African ethnic groups easier to control.

Throughout the 1950's there were protests and other forms of passive
resistance. In 1960, some 70 protesters were killed and nearly 200
wounded when the police opened fire on a demonstration in Sharpeville,
near Johannesburg. The climate changed after that.

Within the African National Congress, founded in 1912 to advance the
cause of blacks, the leadership diverged, with men like Nelson Mandela
advocating violent opposition to the racist state. By 1970, many
anti-apartheid leaders, including Mr. Mandela, were either in jail or
living in exile.

Meanwhile, Mr. Botha rose through the government ranks. In 1961, he
became the minister of colored affairs; in 1966, minister of defense.
His rise coincided with the country's deepening political isolation.
In 1961, South Africa left the Commonwealth of Nations, whose members
were strongly critical of apartheid policies. As the country's
neighbors achieved independence from colonial rule in the 1960's and
70's, many cut off diplomatic, cultural and commercial ties with South
Africa.

In 1974, the United Nations revoked South Africa's seat in the General
Assembly. Three years later, it imposed a weapons embargo. In the
West, particularly in the United States, debate over imposing trade
sanctions on South Africa reached a fever pitch.

But the disciples of apartheid hung tough. Huge reserves of gold and
diamonds fueled the Afrikaners' ability to circumvent economic
embargoes and political sanctions. As defense minister, Mr. Botha
increased military spending to 20 percent of the government's budget,
conducted a clandestine weapons trade with Israel and other states and
pushed for the development of nuclear weapons.

In the early 1980's, Mr. Botha's government launched military strikes
on the forces of the African National Congress and other insurgent
groups in neighboring countries where they had taken sanctuary. Air
and ground forces struck at targets in Angola, and South African
commandos conducted raids in Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Zambia and
Zimbabwe.

South African forces also equipped and trained rebel movements against
the left-leaning African governments that had replaced the ousted
Portuguese colonialists. Moreover, under the direction of the State
Security Council, created in 1972, Mr. Botha's government carried out
a program to kill anti-apartheid activists.

Racial violence and political protests continued to rise. Increasing
numbers of white South Africans joined the demonstrations. Although
Mr. Botha had come to power with the pledge to uphold apartheid as
well as improve race relations, the two goals were mutually exclusive.
Despite a seeming willingness to relax some apartheid laws, he
remained adamant in his refusal to grant blacks political power.

The situation deteriorated. Police stations and other government
installations were attacked. In 1985, the government announced an
indefinite state of emergency. In 1986, the Anglican anti-apartheid
campaigner Bishop Desmond Tutu addressed the United Nations and urged
further sanctions against South Africa.

Mr. Botha grew defiant. "We are not a nation of jellyfish," he
declared in a party speech in 1986. An aide, Hendrik Jacobus Coetsee,
recalled: "The Old Crocodile was obsessed with looking tough and in
control. He never wanted to show any sign of weakness."

But even within the Botha government, pressure was growing for
negotiations with the African National Congress. Clandestine overtures
were made to Mr. Mandela, who had been in prison since 1963. The Botha
government, hoping to appear reasonable to the world, was looking for
a way to free Mr. Mandela without appearing weak to its own Afrikaner
constituency.

In March 1989, Mr. Mandela offered to negotiate a political
settlement, reversing the African National Congress's commitment to
overthrowing the white government by force. Mr. Botha, who had had a
stroke that January, replied that the two men should meet. The did so
on July 5, 1989.

In the end, the encounter turned out to be little more than a courtesy
call. "Yet, in some subtle way a line had been crossed," Mr. Sparks
wrote. "After that there was no stopping the process. It was just a
matter of time and the man."

Mr. Botha's days in office were numbered. Increasingly ill-tempered
and authoritarian, he remained reluctant to move on with reforming the
nation's apartheid policies. In February 1989, a month after his
stroke, for reasons that are unclear, he had renounced his position as
National Party leader while keeping the presidency. The move left him
open to younger rivals. That August, at a cabinet meeting, his
successor as party leader, Mr. de Klerk, followed by other ministers,
suggested that he step down. That night, in an angry, rambling
broadcast, the president announced that he would resign.

Under the new government, led by Mr. De Klerk, apartheid unraveled. In
1990, Mr. Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison and the African
National Congress became a legal political party. In April 1994, the
republic's first multiracial election was held. The African National
Congress won an overwhelming victory, and Mr. Mandela became
president. In May 1996, a new national constitution was adopted.

Apartheid was finished. In the late 1990's, the brutal methods to
prolong its existence were exposed during hearings of South Africa's
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Actions by the country's security
forces and police during Mr. Botha's years in power had killed 4,000
people; as many as 50,000 others were held without trial.

The aging Botha derided the commission as a witch hunt. After failing
to attend a hearing in Cape Town on Dec. 19, 1997, he was found guilty
of contempt of the law, fined 10,000 rand and sentenced to a suspended
12-month prison term. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and the
Old Crocodile remained as intransigent as ever.

"I have nothing to apologize for," he said. "I will never ask for
amnesty. Not now, not tomorrow, not after tomorrow."

So, South Africa has new leadership in its national AIDS programs and in managing the policy of dealing with HIV. The Deputy President of the Country, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, some one I have high regard for and totally have confidence in as a politican, is leading the new initiative. This new article has an obvious bias against Thabo Mbeki (South Africa’s President) and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. The line that’s been (wrongly) repeated world wide is that Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang (aka, Manto) deny that HIV causes AIDS, and some reports are ridiculous enough to suggest that they completely deny that AIDS exists and hence you have had the blind leading the blind on AIDS.

I think that this is a wrong interpretation of the situation. First of all, Thabo Mbeki is probably one of the most intelligent heads of states in ANY country in the world. I’d like to have any one suggest anything else. There is no way he would deny obvious science, but rather, the mistake he made, as a head of state, was to apply some critical thinking. It was to ask clever questions which could lead to some other response. Obviously that’s not something that you can encourage heads of states to do [hence some other countries have really really stupid people leading them. They don’t think, they just do as they are told.] the main thrust of Mbeki’s inquiry was on the overall causes of AIDS and its devastating impact. The article in the Washington post actually does mention this but I believe, glosses over it and actually misinterprets what Mbeki meant/means:

"President Mbeki said, 'It cannot be the virus alone, we must look at other, other issues that predispose people to the immune system being depressed,' and I am of the same view also," Tshabalala-Msimang said on "Nightline."
The main point is that, people are not dying because of the “virus alone.” So Mbeki’s argument was really, only supposed to lead people to look at the wider system that was causing the extreme impacts of HIV and AIDS. In Africa, poverty is probably the worst killer. Poverty is that parent of violent conflict, disease—including HIV/AIDS, malaria and many others, corruption, dictatorships, hunger and malnutrition. So to have a rallying call to pour millions of dollars into repainting one side of a house falling apart is not doing much justice to the situation either.

I am not saying ARVs are not important or urgent, or that treatment must not be a priority. But we must answer the question of why are the conditions that “predispose people to the immune system being depressed.” These are questions of nutrition and health care systems more than anything else. If the South African government spend all of its money on treatment (i.e. paying global pharmaceutical corporations that own the patents to ARV) millions of dollars to provide the wonder-drugs, what is the real impact…? People will continue to live in environments that do not really compliment the effectiveness of the drugs.

So perhaps one of the greatest blunders of Mbeki’s presidency has not being ‘doing nothing’ about HIV and AIDS, but rather, miscommunication the complexity of the issue. We live in a world where the media simplifies every issue to much for its average reader or viewer that we often fail to understand the multiple dimensions to some of the world’s most complex problems. You need to be able to communicate complexity, with simplicity. Not an easy task. So I actually see the whole “beetroot and lemon” show that Manto has been pushing over the years as a tongue in cheek way of getting people to see beyond the complexity of it all. I am not sure it work so well because, hey, government officials dealing with serious issues are not supposed to have a sense of humor.

But let’s look at bit closely at the beetroot message. What Manto and Co are saying are, let us find simple ways, accessible to people for them to mitigate some of the impacts of AIDS through addressing nutritional issues. Getting South African tax payers to boost the stock prices of Merck, GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer isn’t always the best way to go. Of course just giving people beetroots and lemon juice won’t solve the issue, but how do you make the ‘cocktail’ more than just plastic capsules, but also basic issues that people can do something about. So there was a lot of mismanagement in how to communicate these issues. I don’t think the SA government will reduce their emphasis on the nutritional side of things, but this article is really more about changing tune and direction in engaging different stakeholders, especially on the treatment end of things. It’s not about replacing health and nutrition with treatment. It never has been. It’s been about finding the strategy that best compliments other efforts and the deals with the systemic dimension of the problem, and not just the sound bite friendly aspect of free pills for all.

I hope with this ‘new’ take on the AIDS issues, we’ll see less tension around the issue and more partnership and solidarity to really make a difference on a situation that is causing a lot of death, pain, and suffering.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/26/AR2006102601874.html?referrer=email

In South Africa, a Dramatic Shift on AIDS
Treatment, Prevention Get New Emphasis as Deputy President Takes Key Role

By Craig Timberg

Washington Post Foreign Service

Friday, October 27, 2006; Page A01

JOHANNESBURG -- The South African government is seeking to shake off years of international denunciation for its handling of the AIDS epidemic -- including a fixation on the supposed protective powers of beets and lemons -- while expanding treatment, testing and prevention programs, officials and activists say.

In public comments and private meetings over the past six weeks, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has emphasized that the government now believes unequivocally that HIV causes AIDS, a connection that President Thabo Mbeki once publicly questioned. She has also said that antiretroviral drugs must be the centerpiece of the government's response while playing down the dietary recommendations long cited by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang as key to fighting AIDS.

"The beetroot and all that lemon stuff is out the window," an adviser involved in recasting the government's policy said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it. "These guys are now serious about getting it right."

Driving the recent change is a growing realization of the severity of AIDS in South Africa -- an estimated 5.4 million of 47 million citizens have HIV, among the highest totals in the world -- and concern that the controversy surrounding the disease was damaging the country's international reputation.

The Treatment Action Campaign, the country's leading AIDS activist group, said that after years of hostility and legal battles, government officials were working cooperatively with members to realize some of their long-standing demands, such as setting targets for dramatically expanding the availability of antiretroviral drugs through the public health system. Mlambo-Ngcuka, who has taken control of the national AIDS commission, has met privately with the group.

"There's clearly a shift taking place," said Zackie Achmat, the head of the Treatment Action Campaign.

Officials say that Tshabalala-Msimang, often ridiculed as "Dr. Beetroot," will maintain some role in AIDS policy, but activists say they are confident she has been effectively marginalized by the appointment of Mlambo-Ngcuka to oversee the government's response to the disease. Government officials privately acknowledge that Tshabalala-Msimang had become an embarrassment, and activists say the tenor of conversations with the government has changed dramatically since the deputy president took over.

"I'm still skeptical, and I'm still waiting for the proof," said Francois Venter, head of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society. "But there's been a switch, the most hopeful switch in years, over the past four or five weeks."

Mbeki's comments questioning the relationship between HIV and AIDS stirred international outrage in 2000, and the government lagged even some less developed African nations in introducing subsidized antiretroviral drugs, which can prolong the lives of those with the disease by many years, perhaps decades. The first government program distributing the drugs began here in April 2004. South Africa's far smaller northern neighbor, Botswana, began two years earlier.

The South African program has grown steadily in the past 2 1/2 years and now reaches about 200,000 people with AIDS -- roughly one-quarter of those estimated to need the medicine immediately. But the demand for the drugs has grown faster than the program could handle despite major new government spending, including $400 million for AIDS programs this year alone.

"There were weaknesses on the implementation side of things," a government spokesman, Themba Maseko, said from Pretoria.

A turning point came in August, at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto, where Tshabalala-Msimang sponsored a display featuring lemons, beets and garlic but no antiretroviral drugs. An interview that Tshabalala-Msimang had with ABC's "Nightline" that same week renewed fears that she and Mbeki did not accept the two-decade-old scientific consensus that HIV causes AIDS.

"President Mbeki said, 'It cannot be the virus alone, we must look at other, other issues that predispose people to the immune system being depressed,' and I am of the same view also," Tshabalala-Msimang said on "Nightline."

The following day, Stephen Lewis, the U.N. special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, denounced the South African government's view as "wrong, immoral and indefensible." Two weeks after that, 81 AIDS scientists from South Africa and around the world signed a letter calling on Mbeki to fire Tshabalala-Msimang.

The president refused. But those events, combined with a government report blaming AIDS for a massive surge of deaths among South Africans in their 20s, 30s and 40s, prompted Mbeki to appoint Mlambo-Ngcuka to lead an urgent review of AIDS programs, pushing Tshabalala-Msimang out of the spotlight, officials say.

In a speech to labor leaders on Sept. 19, Mlambo-Ngcuka said, without qualification, that HIV causes AIDS. She acknowledged "shortcomings" in the government's response to the disease so far. She mentioned the value of a sensible diet but made clear its limits.

"It should be stressed that a healthy lifestyle and good nutrition are not alternatives to treatment," she said, according to a transcript.

Mlambo-Ngcuka also called for peace between the government and its many critics on AIDS. "Our collective response has for too long been undermined by finger-pointing and despair. I appeal to you that we change that," she said.

AIDS activists said they initially reacted warily, but after meeting privately with Mlambo-Ngcuka, including a session Tuesday in Cape Town that lasted nearly two hours, they have grown more confident of the government's desire to improve its handling of the disease.

The activists say they are pushing for several concessions, including a target of treating 1 million South Africans with antiretroviral drugs. They also want targets for expanding HIV testing and for cutting the rate of new infections. Prevention efforts have largely failed in South Africa, experts say, even as Zimbabwe and several East African countries are showing success in curbing new infections.

Maseko, the government spokesman, said that after years of resisting calls from activists, officials have decided to set firm targets for expanding prevention programs and the availability of antiretroviral drugs in the five-year government plan due for release Dec. 1, celebrated around the globe as World AIDS Day.

"We will be accelerating implementation to make sure those who need treatment are getting it," he said.

As discussions continue, activists say the shift in the government's intentions is tangible and hope officials are capable of carrying through on their new promises.

"They have lost at least five years," said Mark Heywood, head of the AIDS Law Project at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. "They're behind on prevention. They're behind on treatment. They're behind on planning for the social impact of HIV. But it's not too late to prevent a whole other generation of people from getting HIV."