Mugabe is worse than the white supremacist leader, Ian Smith, who he overthrew. He has murdered more black Africans than the apartheid villains Hendrik Verwoerd, John Forster and P W Botha. Reading this I come away with a clear view that Peter Tatchell disapproves of Presidents Mugabe and Mbeki. Is […]
As Titanic-Mugabe steams urgently towards the rocks one asks oneself: what is really going on here? The key ‘deep’ point to remember in all this is that Zimbabwe leader Mugabe is not (like South Africa President Thabo Mbeki) a Communist, but rather an Africanist. The European Communist tradition stressing class struggle as […]
Rian Malan’s book My Traitor’s Heart about South Africa is a towering classic. It describes in a raw way which much rattled ‘liberal’ opinion at the time just how African and ‘other’ most of South Africa in fact is, and just how unimaginably and painfully far ‘whites’ have to go […]
The option of throwing the Bad Leader overboard of course is not the only one available to the Bad Leader’s nearest and dearest. They instead can strap the old villain to the wheel, aim the ship firmly at the rocks and scream "full steam ahead". The bland assurances of South […]
When Bad Leaders finally realise that their hold on power is slipping (as looks to be the case in Zimbabwe), various things happen. The ‘mood’ abruptly changes, from Maybe This Time We Can Bring Him Down to When He Goes… The immediate entourage round the Bad Leader are affected. Some […]
Poor Zimbabwe. According to the BBC it has been ‘plagued’ (origin of said plagues not described) by the world’s highest inflation, as well as acute food and fuel shortages. Newsflash: These phenomena are not caused by ‘plagues’. They are caused both in general and in Zimbabwe’s case in particular by truly stunning and […]
Mr Mugabe is still there, seemingly ducking and weaving – and haggling? From the point of view of diplomatic technique, this is another awkward Bad Leader moment. When a Bad Leader finally runs out of road, he (it is almost always a he) above all wants to save his own […]
Perhaps my finest career moment came late on Sunday 24 September 2000. I was in my office at the FCO waiting for the first results to arrive in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s elections, where we hoped to see Milosevic fall. My computer showed a first result from a tiny […]
This makes depressing but convincing reading. South Africa’s problem is that it is mainly a vast desert. Keeping the water and power systems working across a space that size requires amazing sharp-end engineering technique and sustained policy and operational discipline. And if top-end skills are undervalued or eroded by bungled government policy […]
This article makes grim reading. The human cost of Mugabe-ism is soaring to nightmarish levels. Zimbabwe is a case-book study in the cost of Bad Leaders – leaders who for one reason or the other lose all sense of perspective and responsibility, and who then grab all the controls and […]
