Mein poor neglected blog...

I’m going to take a short break from ranting about Nepali traffic to rant, in brief, about the politics of other countries.

Every time we think Zimbabwe’s situation can’t get any worse, it does, and now a cholera epidemic that doesn’t officially exist is ravaging Harare. African leaders are beginning to make promising noises about ousting Robert Mugabe, but seriously, guys, couldn’t this have come 5 years ago? He is, with the arguable exception of (the possibly incapacitated or dead) Kim Jong Il, the worst person in charge of a government today. He has overseen the deaths of (at a guess) over a million people, mostly by malnourishment and disease, of his once incredibly promising and self-sufficient country. Zimbabwe is beautiful beyond description, and full of industrious and friendly people who need to have the shackles of the ZANU-PF party permanently removed. In the words of more than one Zimbabwean I met while travelling in South Africa, “We are just waiting for him to die – waiting so we can return home and get on with our lives.”
To the other African leaders who have quietly coddled Mr. Mugabe since he embarked on a rampage of ethnic cleansing in the province of Matabeleland in the mid-1980s, and half-heartedly clucked their disapproval at his spree of land theft early in this decade: it’s time you guys acknowledged a few things. Robert Mugabe is a vicious thug who will never willingly share or relinquish power, and he has already demonstrated his willingness to immolate Zimbabwe rather than give up the reins. His “power-sharing” agreement with rightful president Morgan Tsvangirai will remain a sick joke, as Mugabe will always undermine (or kill) anyone who represents a significant challenge. Every month he remains in power sets Zimbabwe’s development back by years, and all that wasted human potential is increasingly on your heads. He won’t be quietly shuffled aside, or coaxed into leaving the country as Charles Taylor was lured out of Liberia. Even at 84, he won’t succumb to illness nearly as soon as he ought to, displaying as he does the unfortunate resilience of the truly evil. He may have to be removed by force; either way, his continued vicious rule discredits the much-appealing vision of the New Africa.