Zimbabwe Elections
Is Comrade Bob done? Stick a fork in him and see. Meanwhile things are looking good for Morgan Tsvangirai. I wish Zach Barbera was around the blogosphere to appreciate this day given his lengthy postings on Zimbabwe in the early days. Zach’s writings stand as some of the best blog posts ever, and his analysis remains spot on.
Here’s what the AP writes about the farm seizures:
The unraveling began when Mugabe ordered the often-violent seizures of white-owned commercial farms turned over to blacks, mainly relatives, friends and cronies who allowed cultivated fields to be taken over by weeds.
Today, a third of the population depends on imported food handouts. Another third has fled the country and 80 percent is jobless. Life expectancy has fallen from 60 to 35 years and shortages of food, medicine, water, electricity and fuel are chronic.
Barnabas Elisha Waweru:
We shall have more jobless in Africa soon as our politiciens are selling our continent to the Chinese. Now I have nothing against the Chinese, they are hardworking people and they suffered a lot under many regimes and now they have the opportunity of forging ahead and they are taking it. But, the problem is that one person’s gain is another one’s loss. This time there are two lots gains, the Chinese who are out to colonise Africa and rip everything out of the ground and in the process they are sending over millions of unemployed to Africa. The other lot is our politiciens who are getting huge bribes for selling out our land and what it produces.
We supposed to have got rid of the colonialists and we shouted UHURU. At least the colonialists employed us and did not take everything from us. Look at Africa. The Chinese are taking all the copper from Zambia, the oil from the Sudan and Nigeria. They are Zimbabwe, they bought into a major bank in SA and no doubt will buy many of the troubled banks. They are in Uganda and in Tanzania. But what do they want in Kenya? The Chinese live on rice which is short supply. The Kenya government established a number of rice projects, which are run like every government project…. badly. So the Chinese are delighted to take them over and work it properly. Why do you think they are building a super highway from Mombasa to Nairobi? To carry our tourists? No!! To transport the rice to Mombasa from Western Kenya. But this will give a lot of agricultural jobs to Kenyans. You are dreaming pal. They are getting blanket work permits, for almost nothing, for thousand and thousands of Chinese peasants to work our ricefields. Try to employ a highly skilled experienced mzungu. You pay 200,000/- for a 2 year Class “A” permit, then immigration wants to have bribes and then his file gets lost. You try to get a lesser skilled muhindi. You pay the same officially and a huge bribe.
The Chinese are having a foreign exchange reserve of 1 trillion US$. Why? Because the Europeans and the Americans are lazy. They do not want to work but they want to use too much. They buy goods from China, much of it is rubbish and do not last, but it is cheap, so they buy more and some of the melted down metals go back to China to manufacture more rubbish.
The EU and the US and Japan are giving us foreign aid. YES, but all the foreign currencies, which is not stolen by our politiciens are finding their way to China for more poor quality goods.
How poor is the poor quality? Sometime ago Delmonte of Thika bought huge quantities of fertilisers from China. They supposed to have been inspected in China and you would think that some chemist in China will take the trouble to run an analysis when such huge quantities are involved. They did not neither did Delmonte or the government chemist or KEBS. That the fertiliser contained a large percentage of cadmium, a highly poisoneous metal, was only reported once some European laboratory has rang the alarm bell that the cadmium level in the pineapple slices and juice are unacceptably high. So, the poison is sold in the Nairobi shops as it is good enough for us.
As you can see we are betrayed by our own black politiciens. We are not even sold, when our labour was wanted in the US on sugar and cotton plantations. We are simply superfluous, rubbish, not wanted. The yellow peril maybe the Chinese, but the black peril are our politiciens.
6 April 2008, 5:23 amScott Kirwin:
I disagree. The heart of capitalism is win-win – I exchange something that I value less for something you value less. If you are an employer you exchange money for my work; if you are a baker you exchange bread for my money. However I’ll admit that when it comes to the Chinese – who are new to capitalism – it’s difficult for me to trust them.
No, Americans and Europeans work quite hard. There is nothing wrong with our work ethic. It’s just that we don’t manufacture as much as the Chinese. Instead we create products that are manufactured elsewhere, we invent and design, we manipulate information and manage business processes. But labor intensive manufacturing has left areas and won’t return. As for their foreign currency reserves, they’ve accumulated that intentionally by keeping their currency artificially low. It’s going to hurt them because inflation in the USA is rising while demand here is falling – so those dollars that they hoard will today not be worth as much in the future. They’ve also developed a bad reputation for quality control by selling poisoned pet food, medicines and even pot stickers!
But I do agree with you completely that the African pols are the greatest threat to Africa. Corruption is endemic and holds African economies back. But how do you change it? Fighting corruption isn’t easy even in East Asia, Europe and the United States. Only Africans can do it themselves; they cannot be forced by outsiders to do it.
6 April 2008, 11:02 am