White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Mugabe, the Jeweled Raptor

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Diamonds are a dictator's best friend. Just ask Robert Mugabe, president
and dictator of Zimbabwe.

When things seemed to be at their worst for Mugabe, diamonds were
discovered at Marange, in eastern Zimbabwe. The old monster was saved
because he got enough money to pay his thugs. One of the first lessons of
dictatorship: Keep the thugs happy.

Mugabe, who had destroyed his currency, starved his people and turned the
breadbasket of Africa into yet another begging bowl, looked as though he
was through, when in 2006 diamonds were found in an unexpected place.

Thousands of itinerants flooded into Marange to lay claim to the riches,
under the colonial-era mining laws. They had few tools, but they had hope.

Sadly, they also had Mugabe.

He sent in his military to evict the miners. They used helicopter
gunships; at least 200 miners were slaughtered and the rest were driven
off. The army took over the diamond fields and Mugabe was renewed in
power.

There has been enough money (about $1.7 billion a year), through official
and unofficial diamond sales, not only to keep the thugs in power and their
Mercedes-Benzes fueled. But there also may have been enough money quiet
Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic
Change and impotent prime minister.

When I asked two very brave women, who have cycled in and out of jail
because they tried to do something about the pitiful condition of
women in Zimbabwe, whether they were hopeful about Tsvangirai and the
opposition, one of them snorted: “Government in Zimbabwe is about who gets
a Mercedes-Benz.”

Peter Godwin, who was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1957 and who has
been a fearless chronicler of the decline and fall of his homeland in
books and articles, has pointed out the evil of these “coalition”
governments. It is, he has said, a spoils system where elections are
negated when the contestants decide they both won; and in a united
government, they can just divide up the spoils instead of fighting over
them.

In Zimbabwe the fear is that Tsvangirai, rather than resolving to get rid
of the Mugabe government apparatus, if he ever becomes president, will
keep it and perfect it. Mugagbe preserved the most repressive colonial 
laws to use at will himself, while blaming the white settlers for them.

One of Mugabe's gambits, detailed by Godwin, is particularly cruel: How you
appear to win elections fairly when you have coerced the electorate
cruelly. Suspected opposition supporters are seized by the police and the
military in the rural areas and then are taken to torture centers -- located in
schools -- where they are beaten and maimed. Often, their feet and legs are
pulped. The children of dictatorships learn their lessons early. The victims 
are sent back to their villages as a perpetual reminder of
what happens if you vote against the “Big Man.” 

Even so, it should be noted the Mugabe lost the last election and simply
stayed. His concession to the winner, Tsvangirai, was to stop bringing 
treason charges against him and to make him prime minister. Not so much 
power-sharing as loot-sharing.

Watch for more of it as faux democracy continues in Africa, south of the
Sahara and possibly north of it.

Like Godwin, I was born in Rhodesia. Like many young people at the
time, inside and outside of the country, we dreamed of a free,
multi-ethnic Africa -- the whole continent a kind of Garden of Eden. Our
template for that was Rhodesia of the time: peaceful, prosperous, idyllic,
but in need of extending the franchise genuinely to all the people -- de
facto ensuring black government.

Instead, we got Ian Smith: a brave fool who tried to extend the status quo
and brought on a race war which brought Mugabe to power.

In his first days as president, while Mugabe was feted around the world
and showered with honors, he sent his dreaded 5th Brigade into
Matabeleland; the stronghold of his opponent Joshua Nkomo, later to be
incorporated into the Mugabe system of government, but not before 20,000
of his Ndbele people had been killed by the Mugabe men.

For 31 years, the government of Mugabe and his “security” men has reduced
Zimbabwe to ruin, driving maybe as many as 3 million people into refugee
status in neighboring countries, starving and beating the people of my
childhood.

The tears of Africa, like diamonds, seem to be forever. 
-- For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

WikiLeaks and Journalism Lore

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“Publish and be damned,” the Duke of Wellington told the courtesan Harriette Wilson, who threatened to publish her memoirs and the general’s love letters in 1825.

In challenging Wilson, Wellington gave publishers and journalists a rallying cry that has echoed down through the years.

The irony here is that “The Iron Duke” despised anything that suggested opening up to the people: Indeed, he may have been history’s greatest elitist. He is not likely to have endorsed the dumping of hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic dispatches by WikiLeaks. As for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Wellington would have had him shot or maybe hanged for better effect.

Yet Wellington gave us the famous phrase and, by and large, it has been a serviceable rule for journalism.

Publications that have sought to censor themselves—sometimes out of fear and sometimes for political reasons–have paid a high price. In 1963, the Profumo affair nearly brought down the Conservative government in Britain. But The Sunday Mirror, which had learned that war minister John Profumo was sharing the favors of party girl Christine Keeler with the Soviet naval attaché and a few others to boot, did not publish for fear of libel.

In the end the scandal leaked out in the United States, and the newspaper was left looking very foolish. I know because I was working at The Sunday Mirror.

A few decades later, Newsweek sat on the Monica Lewinsky–Bill Clinton scandal and inadvertently boosted the fortunes of Matt Drudge.

It is easier to say “publish and be damned” about a sex scandal involving public figures than it is about national and international security, which is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Is WikiLeaks doing a public service in posting hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic dispatches on the Web and hand-feeding them to five major news outlets, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais and Der Spiegel? Or is Assange indulging in a grand act of anti-Americanism; or an equally grand act of anarchy, using technology in furtherance of the petulance of one man and his small band of accomplices?

The measurable good is slight. It may be confined to improved computer security, itself lamentable.

The evil is ongoing and will take years to assess. The first casualty will be in the quality of information sent back from the field to Washington: It will be sanitized, bowdlerized and neutered. The free exchange of ideas and information is compromised. The integrity of diplomatic communications cannot be taken for granted in future.

Then there are those, uncountable, whose careers have been ended because they were friends of the United States; not spies, just friends.

During the first tranche of leaks, I was the guest of the U.S. ambassador in a small country. Although there was nothing incriminating released, our diplomats suffered acute embarrassment and wondered how difficult their jobs would be in the future.

The gravest category is where vicious regimes are exploiting the WikiLeaks information to punish their political enemies: Step forward Robert Mugabe, the savage and ruthless dictator in Zimbabwe who has trashed what was once the jewel of Africa. He has seized on meetings his political rival Morgan Tsvangira held with Western diplomats, seeking to save the people of Zimbabwe from the predations of Mugabe and his band of thugs.

“Treason”cries Mugabe, who is as promiscuous in accusing his enemies of treason as was Henry VIII.

Relying on a law from the colonial days, Mugabe has appointed a commission to rule on whether Tsvangirai should face trial for treason. He has also picked out negative comments about Tsvangirai from various American dispatches to vilify his political rival.

Assange knew exactly what he was doing because he provided early access to his data dump to the five most reputable news organizations he knew. Clearly he hoped they would treat the material gingerly, as they have.

In so doing Assange must have hoped to mitigate the really serious damage–including executions–that might result from his mischief. He was hoping they would save him from the damnation of his own publishing.

Women of Zimbabwe Have Had Enough, Fight Back

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Of all those who have been hurt and died terrible deaths in the Time of Robert Mugabe as prime thug in Zimbabwe, none have been hurt more than the women. They have been beaten, imprisoned, raped and starved; They have watched the bulldozing of their shacks; and they have watched the slow, terrible deaths of their children from malnutrition and untreated disease.

Maybe one of the worst of the hurts suffered by the women is the fear that they will die ahead of their young children, leaving them to die alone of starvation.

Such a tale was told in Washington this week by two of Zimbabwe’s most remarkable women. A mother of three went out to forage for food but collapsed and died. The starving children found some fertilizer she had hidden against the day when she could get some corn to plant. The children thought the fertilizer pellets were grain and made porridge with them. All three were poisoned and died.

Yet Magadonga Mahlangu and Jenni Williams, principles in the nonviolent, grassroots movement WOZA, talked not about privation and murder, but hope. Hope for enough food; hope for an end to violence to themselves; hope for their children; and hope for a free, productive and stable homeland.

Although both women have each been arrested more than 30 times, imprisoned and held without bail for a long period (“on remand,” in the English common law language of the tattered Zimbabwe legal system), they remain optimistic. In hell, they dream of heaven.

WOZA, which stands for Women of Zimbabwe Arise, but is also an Ndebele word meaning “come forward,” was formed in 2002 as a non-violent, non-political group, committed to the protection of women and their families by teaching them to protest for their human rights and by teaching them some basic skills, such as how to avoid violence and rape, whether it is domestic or state-sponsored.

Both Mahlangu and Williams are from the nation’s second city, Bulawayo, in Matabeland, where the predominant people are the Ndebele, an offshoot of the Zulus of South Africa. Mugabe may have reason enough to hate the women because of their activism, but the Ndebele have known his loathing since the first days of his rule in the early 1980s, when he sent his best troops, known as the Fifth Brigade, to effect a genocidal  massacre that is believed to have cost as many as 25,000 Ndebele their lives. Mugabe is a Shona, the largest tribal grouping in Zimbabwe–which is slightly smaller than Texas–and the traditional rivals of the Ndebele.

Mahlangu is a pure-bred Ndebele, with a regal bearing that belies her long suffering at the hands of the police and military in Zimbabwe. Williams is of mixed race–with European as well as African ancestry–and therefore easily accused by the state paranoiacs of treason and crimes against the state. She says she is the subject of racial slurs from the police and security forces. They accuse her of being “white, English and a colonialist” even though she has the same coloring as President Barack Obama.

Although the two women have been frequently arrested and detained without trial, they have never been convicted. The charges most leveled are for threatening public order. Mostly, they have been held in police cells. Once one of them was taken to a men’s prison, where the arresting officer warned her that she needed a strong stomach. When she got there she found 500 men without sanitation, adequate water or food. Some had died, and others were dying of dysentery and starvation.

The women were brought to Washington on a low-key visit, organized by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights to receive its human rights award for 2009, presented to Mahlangu. Williams accepted for the women of Zimbabwe. The prize money, $30,000, will go to a violence and rape prevention program.

Extraordinarily, WOZA is not looking for money. Instead, they want the world community to bombard the police commissioner and the judiciary with faxes and e-mails to protest what Williams calls “persecution by prosecution.” WOZA, now 60,000-strong, can be found on the Web at www.wozazimbabwe.org.

Both women go on trial again Dec. 7. “If they know the world is watching, it helps,” says Mahlangu.

Besides human rights, the women have one other hope. They want to see Obama in person, even if it is across a crowded room.–For the Hearst-New York Times syndicate

 

Mugabe in Winter—Still Powerful and Comfortable

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The devil looks after his own. Or so it would seem in the case of Robert Mugabe, the de facto dictator of Zimbabwe.

Under Zimbabwe’s unity government established last year, President Mugabe, who took Africa’s garden and trashed it, has retained enough power to reverse the optimistic direction the country is taking. He and his ZANU-PF party still control the discredited central bank; the military; the police; the Central Intelligence Organization, which is Zimbabwe’s version of the KGB; and the Ministry of Information.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai who, until the formation of the unity government was Mugabe’s great enemy and rival, has control of the Ministry of Finance. His ally, Finance Minister Tendai Biki, has done the impossible: He has brought the worst inflation the world has ever known to a halt.

The remedy was simple, though extreme. Biki substituted the U.S. dollar for the worthless Zimbabwe dollar. How worthless was it? Would you believe a currency that once had rough parity with the U.S. dollar was trading–if you could find a buyer–for 1 billion (sic) Zimbabwe dollars to 1 U.S. dollar? Incredibly, the Mugabe faction of the government and ZANU-PF party members want to bring back the Zim dollar, as it was known.

Under the new setup, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange has reopened and is prospering. And again, shops have goods on the shelves for those who can afford them. While U.S. dollars have circulated illegally in Zimbabwe for some time, it is unclear where they are now coming from, and what is the plight of those who have no access to them and no employment, which is most of the population.

In fact, many Zimbabweans live in a barter economy without cash. Rural people lead a desperate subsistence life, relying on perhaps a few chickens, sometimes a goat or, if relatively well off, some cattle. Most depend on growing enough corn to feed their families and on the generosity of relief agencies, although these are often the targets of Mugabe’s thugs. Food is power and Mugabe has used his troops, police and secret operatives to control food, starving the opposition and feeding only his political loyalists.

In the face of Zimbabwe’s tenuous recovery, there are many questions about Mugabe and his acolytes, and about Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change.Will Mugabe use his control of the military and the courts to destroy Tsvangirai’s reforms?

Mugabe likes to be the top man, even the reviled top man. His unhinging can be traced back to Nelson Mandela’s release from long imprisonment in South Africa and the deserved global acclaim he was welcomed with. Until then, Mugabe had been the golden African leader. Also he and Mandela were courting Graca, the widow of former Mozambiquan leader Samora Machel. Mugabe lost out and Mandela married her.

Too much praise for the reformers in Zimbabwe might set Mugabe off on another spree of destruction. His favorite charge–if he bothers with charges as opposed to random beatings—is treason, which is a hanging offense in Zimbabwe.

There are also question about Tsvangirai: Some of his early supporters are very critical of his conduct as prime minister. One critic, who does not want to be identified but who played a big role in establishing the unity government, told me: “He has become Mugabe’s bagman. That’s about it.”

This was a reference to Tsvangirai’s recent world fund-raising trip. He did secure minor commitments from doubting donor nations, but most want to see what happens. The money that was raised will go to humanitarian efforts, not the Zimbabwe government.


The success or failure of financial reforms may rest on the diamond fields of eastern Zimbabwe. These were only discovered in 2006 and should have been a valuable source of hard currency for Zimbabwe. But Mugabe had another idea: He allowed the military to massacre itinerant miners (in one case, 80) and seize the mines for their own profit. This has solved a pay problem among soldiers and kept the military faithful to Mugabe. Another gift from the devil for his protégé, Robert Mugabe.

Zimbabwe’s Days of Yore and Plenty

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The pictures are harder to take than the words. The words you can skip over; the pictures take you by the throat. All of my boyhood in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, came surging back to me with choking sorrow when I saw press pictures of Zimbabwean children digging through the roadside gravel, in the hopes of finding kernels of maize–corn in American English–that may have blown off passing trucks.

 

When hunger stalks Africa, maize is more important than gold–the difference between living and dying. It is eaten in several ways; even the stalks are chewed in the way Latin Americans chew sugar cane. Mostly, it is made into a stiff porridge called sadza.

 

Some of my earliest memories of the vital importance attached to maize go back to when I was nine years old and was awarded the job in our household of measuring the weekly maize ration to each employee. By law, every man–and domestic helpers were mostly men–received 15 pounds of maize each week.

 

My job was to watch the precious ground maize—grits to Americans–weighed out of 100 lb. sacks into smaller sacks. The weekly weighing was a jolly time, with much joking and laughing (and you have not laughed, until you have laughed in Africa) while the meal was dispensed, weighed with a scale hung on a tree limb.

 

This weekly ceremony, together with the distribution of stewing beef, was symptomatic of everything that was right and wrong with life in colonial Africa. It was humanitarian; it was generous; and it was patronizing. The amount of meal far exceeded the daily consumption of one person and was designed, although this was not mentioned, to feed more than one hungry mouth. It was a government-abetted welfare; paternalism in action.

 

I have often thought about this conscious food distribution from the better-off whites to the poor blacks as less an act of racism than of British class snobbery: noblesse oblige in the colonial context. It was the same instinct that caused the viceroy of India to pretend to find work for 5,000 people at his palace in New Delhi.

 

Much of the meal ration found its way to extended families in the townships or to peddlers who came around on bicycles. None of it went to waste. The classic meal, eaten with little variation, was sadza, which is a dumpling that diners shape with their hands and dip into a stew made ideally with meat, but sometimes with other protein-rich ingredients like beans, or termites and caterpillars, which were harvested as delicacies. I ate a lot sadza with various stews, but the caterpillars were beyond me.

 

The question I have most often been asked is, “What was it like in Rhodesia?” I have never had a good answer except to say that it was like living in a good London suburb, but with a back story of indigenous people who came and went in our lives without really registering. British author Evelyn Waugh described this phenomenon as far back as 1937, when he wondered at the “morbid lack of curiosity” of the settlers for the indigenous people. He might have been told that it was the selfsame lack of curiosity that his characters in “Brideshead Revisited” had about the workers in the rest of England.

 

At this passage of time, it is almost possible to defend the British in Rhodesia. Their greatest gift, I sometimes think, was not democracy, law, literacy or religion, but the golden maize they brought with them in l890, which replaced rapoco, a low-yield grain grown in the region. Maize was produced in such abundance in Zimbabwe, before President Robert Mugabe destroyed the commercial farms, that it was exported throughout southern Africa.

 

Now the breadbasket is empty; and children sift through roadside gravel for corn kernels blown from trucks. Would I could fix my scale to a tree and weigh out a plentiful measure for those children, who are no older than I was, when I was the quartermaster in another time.

Remembering the Last of the British Empire

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The black Humber Super Snipe, a British luxury car with a soft, American-type suspension, pulled in front of a teenager wearing a coat and tie. The boy dodged around the front of the car and got in next to the driver.

The driver needed a large car because he was a very large man, over 300 pounds. He had a big face to go with his big body and even bigger eyebrows. It seemed that the only exercise the man got was changing gear in the car.

Not only was he a big man in a big car, but he also had a big job. A very big job. His job was so big he could have had a police escort, bodyguards and a chauffeur.

He could have traded up the car to a Rolls or a Bentley, but he liked driving this particular car to work in the bright sunshine. There was nearly always bright sunshine, so no weather forecasts were issued for six months of the year.

The man and the boy were talking animatedly as the car stopped to pick up another passenger: a shoe-less African laborer. After exchanging a few words in the man’s native language, the driver and the boy went back to talking politics.

The driver was well qualified to talk politics. He was the prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, comprising the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia and the British Protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, now respectively Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.

He was Sir Roy Welensky, reviled in much of the world’s press as the last great colonialist: a scoundrel who stood between the legitimate aspirations of the indigenous people of Africa and their white overlords.

The critics missed the substantial difference between the struggle by men like Welensky and the growing evil on the southern bank of the Limpopo River: apartheid in South Africa.

The uncouth boy, who had the temerity to argue with the prime minister, was myself. And the barefoot laborer was part of the great silent majority about whom the white minority was always arguing, including my daily exchange with the prime minister.

I was in my second year as a journalist and Welensky was still giving me a lift, as he had done when I was in school. Sometimes he would chide me on articles that had appeared in English newspapers, but always with good humor.

The prime minister’s office was on the edge of Salisbury, now Harare, but close enough to everything so that a ride to his office was a ride into town.

This day was in 1957. I remember it because I was about to move out of my parents’ house and to lose my daily briefing from the prime minister.

I also remember it because Welensky was being castigated in the British press as a racist, a monster, a white supremacist and a tin-pot dictator, elected only by the white minority. He was none of the former, but the latter was true.

Ever since then, in my travels around the world, I have been asked, “What was it like in Rhodesia then?” The answer is, it was like the weather — a bit unbelievable. There was this small number of Britons trying to recreate the best of the British Isles in the middle of Africa. The impediment was that another people were already in residence: the Africans.

Twenty years before Welensky became my chauffeur, Evelyn Waugh, the English writer, had described the white Rhodesians as having a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. He was right. If the Africans behaved like black Englishmen, well and good — otherwise they were better off as subsistence farmers. The administration of Africans was to be fair, kind and, above all, paternal. The whites were in the intellectual sway of Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill, convinced of an innate moral and cultural superiority.

All this only really applied to Southern Rhodesia. Despite the “federation,” Southern Rhodesia was where the British had chosen to live a special existence as a “self-governing” colony. Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were protectorates, their future independence assured. Another way of saying “protectorate” would be “not suitable for white settlement.”

What the British had wrought was a paternal masterpiece, where all the indigenous people in Southern Rhodesia were in a kind of welfare state. A servant class, people who knew their place.

The state of people in Cuba today is reminiscent: no rights but survival services. Employers had to provide each servant with 15 pounds of cornmeal a week, some meat three times a week and, if the employee was in domestic service, accommodation.

Medicine and schooling was available, as resources allowed, and both were spotty in delivery. Segregation was enforced.

The British withdrawal from India in 1947 signaled the beginning of the end of that way of life in Southern Rhodesia and Kenya.

It also was the end of innocence and 50 years of peace under a system that had developed in an eddy of the once-mighty British Empire

The Men Who Should Stand in the Dock with Mugabe

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It is easy to work up a head of hate against Robert Mugabe, the cruel president of Zimbabwe. He has destroyed a beautiful country and inflicted untold suffering on his people. He has so mismanaged the economy that the country’s inflation rate is the world’s highest–over 100,000 percent. He has expelled the productive people from the country and others have fled. He has given choice land and accommodations to his family of thugs.

 

More, he is a murderer. In the early part of his reign of terror, he killed tens of thousands of the Matabele people in southern Zimbabwe, around the city of Bulawayo.

 

It is not hard to vilify Mugabe, who may now be at the end of his bloody reign. But there are other guilty men who should be named. They are the de facto co-conspirators up and down the continent of Africa, who lead countries, enjoy influence and have, to a man (the arrival of a woman leader in Liberia is recent), remained silent as Mugabe has become more maniacal.

 

The guiltiest are those in the frontline states that surround land-locked Zimbabwe. They are the leaders of Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Each one of them has some of the blood Mugabe has shed on his hands. Because of the silence that they have assiduously maintained, their complicity has been absolute. All four leaders have been the enablers of Mugabe.

 

Each country has suffered from the implosion of Zimbabwe. Each country has felt the pain from the lack of trade; unsatisfied debt; and the surge of people fleeing from the privations of Zimbabwe–once one of the richest countries in Africa, and the breadbasket of the southern region.

 

Botswana, on Zimbabwe’s southwest border, is currently the showplace of Africa. It is a functioning democracy, with a healthy economy based on mining and tourism. But Botswana could have used its economic leverage, as the host of the principle rail line carrying exports out of Zimbabwe into South Africa, and from there to the world, to put pressure on Mugabe. But it did not.

 

To the east, Mozambique hosts many of Zimbabwe’s exports and imports through the port of Beira on the Indian Ocean. If there had been some tightening of this relationship, Mugabe would have listened. Instead, there was silence.

 

Then there is South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki. If there is a judgment day, Mbeki will have much to answer for his connivance in tolerating Mugabe. Mbeki’s guilt extends beyond the suffering of the people to his north to his own people. More than 2 million refugees have fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where they have been no more popular than illegal aliens anywhere. The really hapless live on such charity as they can find; while those who are more capable of organization, particularly deserters from the Zimbabwe armed forces, have formed sophisticated criminal gangs, specializing in bank and armored car robbery.

 

Finally, Zambia has shouldered the burden of watching over the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which provides electricity to both Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia has kept essential goods flowing into Zimbabwe, against the international sanctions; and it has seen its own Victoria Falls tourism plummet because of conditions on the Zimbabwe side of the falls. Yet, Zambia’s leaders have said nothing.

 

If Mugabe is forced from power by the ongoing election, and if he leaves without trying to annul the results of the election, milk and honey will not flow again in the country between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Too much has been destroyed in 28 years of his rule. The infrastructure has been destroyed; soil erosion has carried away an incalculable amount of earth from the fragile plain that once produced corn for all of southern Africa; the professional class is scattered around the world, in what they refer to as the Zimbabwe Diaspora; and the people of Zimbabwe have lost confidence in the future. The most optimistic country in Africa has traded hope for fatalism.

 

Assuming Morgan Tsvangirai really has won the election in Zimbabwe, he will have to preside over a massive reconstruction, which will last decades simply to get the country back to where it was when Mugabe destroyed it through racism, megalomania, and economics so primitive that he thought he could print money and it would have value.

 

Tsvangirai will have to turn to the world for economic aid and technical assistance. But he will have to turn to Zimbabweans for goodwill and to resist corruption. And he will have to turn to another silent partner, China, for a better deal on the contracts Mugabe signed with Beijing.

 

Not since Idi Amin was feeding his opponents to the crocodiles has there been such a catastrophic head of state in Africa. And not since Amin’s days, have the leaders of Africa remained so quiet in the face of such palpable evil.