May 17, 2008

Dear Family and Friends,
Early one afternoon this week a small town residential suburb grew suddenly quiet as the sound of ‘the youths’ filled the neighbourhood. The voices of perhaps thirty young men could be heard as they ran along local streets singing, chanting and repeating the threatening political slogans so familiar to us all.
The neighbourhood [...]

May 7, 2008

Mugabe is famous for many sayings - including the above where he was openly acknowledging that Zanu PF not only used violence as a weapon but actually boasted that they were violent people. He also once said he admired Hitler for his ruthless establishment of a dictatorship in Europe that nearly dominated half the world.
There [...]

May 6, 2008

The BBC got it right the other day; in news broadcasts they described the Zimbabwe elections and the aftermath as “bizarre”. The elections took place - after a vigorous campaign by all parties and voting was peaceful - as it always is on polling day. Funny how violence is switched on and off in this [...]

April 21, 2008

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary today said that “the constitutional crisis in Zimbabwe continues as President Mugabe persists in his ambition to steal the election.”
Miliband noted in his statement that “it is over three weeks since the elections were held but the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is yet to announce the Presidential results.”
“More worryingly President [...]

April 20, 2008

In the late 70’s I was appointed Chief Executive of a major corporation and about six months into the job I noticed that although we had about 3500 employees and an internal audit department, I never saw anyone being disciplined or prosecuted for theft. I have been in business for about 40 years and in [...]

April 19, 2008

Dear Family and Friends,
Behind every tree, under every bush and around every corner, it seems there is a British enemy waiting to invade Zimbabwe.
“We must maintain the utmost vigilance in the face of vicious British machinations,” Mr Mugabe warned as he spoke at his celebration of Zimbabwe’s 28th anniversary of Independence.
No one that I’ve spoken [...]

April 16, 2008

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon remarked on the post-election situation in Zimbabwe on Wednesday, expressing concern about the failure of the election commission to release the results. He believes the delay could have “serious implications” for Zimbabwe’s people.
At a summit in New York City, which was attended by the UN Security Council and African Union [...]

April 14, 2008

Can you believe these guys! Mr. Mbeki flies into Harare where inflation is raging at 500 000 percent. The wife of the President has fled with enough foreign exchange to feed the whole country for 6 months, an election has been held under totally unacceptable conditions. The results legally due in 6 days, are 14 [...]

April 13, 2008

Dear Family and Friends,
I received a call early one morning this week from a friend in a small country town. Speaking quickly and quietly for fear of being overheard, he told me of the frightening events that were going on all around him. Eight double cab vehicles had arrived in the town. Armed men in [...]

Who said change was easy? Here we are, 14 days after the election and a complete stalemate exists. Tonight Mugabe has announced that he will not attend the SADC summit on Saturday and this completes his admission that the election has gone against him and he is now acting completely outside the law and violating [...]

April 2, 2008

Two foreign aid workers attached to a United Nations (UN) project were kidnapped in southern Somalia on Tuesday. The UN stated that the two men, one British and one Kenyan, were abducted at gunpoint while conducting a survey of local rivers. The men were taken hostage on a road leading to Bu’aale, in the southern [...]

March 31, 2008

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), released premature election results on Sunday, which claim a large victory for their presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangirai against incumbent Robert Mugabe.
MDC leaders said the unofficial tally, based on one-third of the election returns, shows Tsvangirai with 67% of the vote. The results were posted on [...]

A few weeks ago I stood in a small house in a local high-density suburb addressing a meeting of about 150 people crammed into every corner. I said to them that what we needed to end the crisis in Zimbabwe was a political Tsunami. I said a Tsunami could not be detected on the open [...]

March 25, 2008

Comoros, backed by African Union forces, has invaded the island of Anjouan in an effort to topple the rebel leadership of Mohamed Bacar, who has been seeking independence from Comoros.
Around 450 troops disembarked on Monday, landing in the capital of Mutsamudu on Tuesday at dawn, where a jubilant crowd cheered for them. They joined the [...]

March 23, 2008

Dear Family and Friends,
When Mr Mugabe and Zanu PF came to power in April 1980, inflation in the newly named Zimbabwe was 7%.
Twenty years later, Mr Mugabe and Zanu PF were still in power and in June 2000 Parliamentary elections were held in the country. Farm invasions had been underway for nearly four months and [...]

March 8, 2008

A letter from the diaspora
Dear Friends.
I was teaching teachers at a remote training college a few years ago when I first came across Zvido Zvevanhu, a small primary school right out in the rural areas. The school was built shortly after Independence and its name perfectly summed up all the hopes and dreams Zimbabweans had [...]

March 2, 2008

There may well be so-called heavyweights leaving the zanupf-Mugabe sinking ship and running to a new home in the zanupf-Makoni faction. Who wouldn’t leave this sinking ship? With self inflicted inflation running at 100,000% and rising, exponentially collapsing exchange rates, empty supermarket shelves, 95% unemployment, widespread starvation, a refugee crisis of massive proportions and so [...]

February 27, 2008

The country of Sudan has initiated an official boycott of Danish products, after the controversial Muhammad cartoons have been reprinted by a series of newspapers in Denmark and other European countries. Yesterday, President Omar al-Bashir expressed his concerns at a government-backed rally in the nation’s capital, requesting that all Muslims in the world take a [...]

February 26, 2008

A result is expected today on the possibility of an election re-run in Nigeria. Opposition parties claim that current President Umaru Yar’Adua’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) fixed the results of the 2007 election in his favor and are calling to have the result annulled. So far, the tribunal has rejected one out of the two [...]

February 24, 2008

On Saturday, the Ugandan government signed a permanent ceasefire with the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Christian guerrilla army which has been rebelling against the government in one of Africa’s longest running conflicts.
The ceasefire will not take effect until the day after both sides sign a comprehensive peace deal, which is expected to be completed later [...]