No more, comrades, no more. Really.

I AM NO LONGER COMFORTABLE TO ASSOCIATE MYSELF WITH THE AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS WHEN THEIR LEADERS ACT WITH ABSOLUTELY NO REGARD FOR THE CONSEQUENCES THEIR SELF SERVING INDULGENCES AND PETTY POWER STRUGGLES WREAK UPON THE MOST VULNERABLE - THE VERY PEOPLE WHOSE DELIVERANCE FROM HOPELESSNESS AND MISERY SHOULD BE THEIR ONLY REAL OBJECTIVE

Outside of the fold...

What does one do when the person you cherish the most in this world is in unbearable pain and you are not adequately in the fold to help carry the load?

Annie said Mandela's rainbow nation was just a hologram...

The joke is on you and me, my darling Mzansi (Picture: Melissa Britz)

FROM: allafrica.com

Posted to the web 23 May 2008
Kampala


This post was written by a Ugandan writer two days ago:

It was looking ugly there for a few days, with mobs of South Africans in townships around Johannesburg randomly murdering several dozen "foreigners" (migrants from other African countries) and injuring several hundred.



But now, President Thabo Mbeki has acted decisively: he has announced the establishment of a panel of inquiry into the violence. That should fix it. Just in case he gets impatient while waiting for the panel's report, however, I can tell him what it will say - or at least, what it should say.



It should say that the root problem was his own government's "non-interventionist" policy on immigration: its refusal to control or even count the number of people arriving in South Africa from other African countries.



The mere fact that the commonly used estimate is "three to five million" illegal immigrants says it all: the authorities really have no idea how many foreigners are in South Africa. But the higher estimate is probably closer to the truth, for some four million people have left Zimbabwe alone to seek work abroad, and almost all of them have gone to South Africa.



This "open borders" non-policy had high motives. Many of South Africa's current leaders are men and women who spent decades in exile during the fight against apartheid, and the migrants come mostly from the countries that gave them shelter at that time. How can they turn away people from those countries - from Zimbabwe, above all - now that the shoe is on the other foot?
It is an honourable sentiment, but more easily experienced if, like South Africa's current leaders, you lead a secure and comfortable life in one of the nicer northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
If you happen to live in Alexandra township (not all that far from those pleasant suburbs) amidst garbage and violence and chronic poverty, and you don't have a job, it's a little harder to access such noble emotions - because one-tenth of the people in the country are illegal immigrants, and lots of them do have jobs.



Miserable, underpaid jobs, for the most part, but in a country where the true unemployment rate is somewhere near half, there are bound to be a great many people who resent foreigners getting any jobs at all.



This is especially because there is some truth in the complaint of poor and uneducated South Africans that the illegal immigrants get the unskilled jobs because employers can pay them less and they won't dare complain.



None of this justifies murder, but it does begin to explain it. Mbeki was incredibly foolish to assume that he could just let foreigners flood into the country and not expose them to a popular backlash. The South African media are filled with self-flagellating editorials that all basically ask "What kind of people are we if we can behave like this?"



The answer is: not saintly inhabitants of some imagined "rainbow nation" that has risen above the normal human plane, just ordinary people under pressure and behaving badly.
Last week in Italy, other ordinary people threw Molotov cocktails into Gypsy camps and burned them down.



Most of those people have jobs, live in comfortable surroundings, and eat quite well, and they still behaved badly. There are only about 150,000 Gypsies in Italy, half of whom have been there since the 15th Century. They are less than a-quarter of 1% of the population, and yet 68% of Italians want them all expelled.



The South African poor have been amazingly patient as year after year went by - 14 years now since the end of apartheid - when so little has changed for the better in their lives.
The black poor still loyally vote for the African National Congress (ANC), but their anger was going to burst out somewhere sooner or later. By holding the door open to so many illegal immigrants, the government has guaranteed that they would be the primary target.
Maybe this is some Machiavellian plan to divert popular anger from the government itself, but probably not. It's just that the leaders do not see what has been happening to ordinary people.
How else could Mbeki go on defending Robert Mugabe, the destroyer of Zimbabwe, year after year, when Mugabe's misdeeds were the main reason that this enormous wave of illegal immigrants struck South Africa?



Justice Malala, whose column appears in The Times (the online version of South Africa's Sunday Times), nailed it on Monday when he wrote: "(Our) people are behaving like barbarians because the ANC has failed - despite numerous warnings - to act on burning issues that are well known for having sparked similar eruptions across the globe...



"The Mbeki government's refusal to even acknowledge the crisis in Zimbabwe has resulted in as many as 3 million Zimbabweans walking the streets of South Africa...
"Mbeki's resolute refusal to address the crisis in Zimbabwe - and his friendship with Mugabe - has brought them here. His block-headedness is directly responsible for the eruption of xenophobia."



Such plain talk is not "blaming the victim." It is recognising realities, which is the first step towards addressing them.



And where the despairing poor of South Africa should be addressing their anger is not at helpless Zimbabweans but at the president who let this human catastrophe happen.



http://allafrica.com/stories/200805230816.html

Shattered lies the jewel of Africa

I am sure by now the whole world has seen our shame. So, there is no need to try and utter words I am too sad to express.



Beneath all the horror of the past days lies the deepest sense of shame that the people, most of them young men who were too young at the time of the struggle against apartheid to have any appreciation for the fact that our neighbours aided us and accommodated our cadres for decades when they were forced into exile, could do this.

Shattered lies the jewel of Africa...

Here is a link to a slide show. Please beware that these pictures are not fit for sensitive viewers.

http://www.24.com/media/news/Xenophobia_22_May/index.html

The hatching of Cynder: probably an ongoing tale...

Pictures and story by Leigh (9) who is not an english mother tongue speaker and who has also never had a single english lesson in her life. She taught herself to read the language fluently and with understanding and is now in the process of learning to write in english as well

(Click on the images to enlarge)

The terrified little fishie

I commissioned Leigh to design my profile picture for my facebook profile. Have you ever seen a more terrified fish. Leigh's ability to generate emotion even in these pictures drawn by mouse on the pc never fails to amaze me.

Click on the image to enlarge it if you want see the actual size picture.

Update on Zimbabwe: where are the angry dragons we pay so much money for?

This picture by my Asperger daughter Leigh is dedicated to the people of Zimbabwe who still wait in vain for the international dragons to come to their rescue

The situation in Zimbabwe is still largely unresolved and the threat of large scale violence or even civil war has not been averted. This is the next big opportunity for so called multinational international organisations to demonstrate whether they actually have the ability as well as the will to do that which supposedly constitutes the primary purpose of their existence: to protect the innocent, to serve the purpose of peace and prosperity for all, and especially to avert threats of civil war...

why, oh why am I not holding my breath?

The opposition won the parliamentary election in Zimbabwe, but is faced with the harrowing prospect of a run-off 2nd election for the presidency while the current ruler's thugs are making it impossible for them to campaign and their leader cannot make up his mind whether he is going to participate or hand the presidency back to Mad Bob on a silver platter by default.


This is a test where the United Nations, the African Union and the regional Southern African Development Community get to convince the people of Africa and the world that they are not the redundant, powerless, costly white elephants in huge fancy glass buildings that we always suspected them to be and it offers an opportunity for them to avoid us starting to think we have no need for them because they are just not worth the cost since they either never show up or, when and if they do, it is always with too little too late - remember Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Darfur (Sudan), Somalia, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, etc etc etc?



Here is a overview of events as published by South Africa's Media24:


It does not include reference to the terror campaign by Mugabe on his own people, his disregard for the rule of law or the dismal failure by the international community to show any tangible interest in the fate of the Zimbabwean people.



Harare - Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change won a March presidential election but faces a run-off vote after its leader failed to garner enough votes against President Robert Mugabe, the electoral body said.
Below is a chronology of key developments since presidential, parliamentary and local elections on March 29.

March 30 - The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) claims victory based on early results.
March 31 - Electoral commission starts announcing results of parliamentary election. Seats are split evenly between the opposition and ruling party. No presidential results emerge.
- Observer mission from regional group SADC says elections were free and fair but expresses concerns over delay to results.
- United States, European Union and former colonial power Britain voice concern over delay to vote counting.
April 1 - Zanu-PF projections obtained by Reuters show opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai would beat Mugabe but not with enough votes to avoid a run-off.
April 2 - MDC says it won presidential and parliamentary elections and calls on Mugabe to concede. Zanu-PF says MDC claims are "wishful" and Mugabe is going nowhere.
- State-owned newspaper, The Herald, says Tsvangirai and Mugabe - frontrunners in a field of candidates - will face a run-off as neither will get 51% for an outright win.
- Latest parliamentary election results show Zanu-PF with 93 seats and the MDC on 91, out of 206.
April 4 - Zanu-PF backs Mugabe to fight a run-off.
April 6 - MDC goes to court to try to force release of presidential results.
April 7 - Tsvangirai meets Jacob Zuma, head of South Africa's ruling African National Congress, after appealing for help from outside powers to end Mugabe's rule.
- Police say they have arrested seven election officials for undercounting votes for Mugabe.
April 12 - Mugabe snubs emergency meeting of SADC.
April 13 - The MDC vow to challenge a partial recount announced the day before, designed to help Mugabe.
April 14 - High Court refuses to order release of results.
April 15 - An opposition general strike to demand the release of results flops.
April 17 - Zimbabwe's leaders accuse Tsvangirai of treason and of working with Britain.
- South African President Mbeki insists talking with all parties is the only solution.
- Western states join the UN in urging action to ensure a fair election outcome but most African states avoid the issue.
- The United States criticises Africa for lack of action; South Africa expresses concern for the first time.
April 18 - Mugabe bitterly attacks Britain in his first major post-election speech to mark independence day, saying London was paying the population to turn against him.
- A court rejects an opposition bid to block a recount of votes in 23 constituencies, which begins the next day.
April 20 - Zimbabwe announces delay in the partial recount. Opposition says 10 of its members have been killed and hundreds arrested. The African Union urges Zimbabwe to release results.
April 21 - Tsvangirai, who has been travelling abroad after the poll, urges UN chief Ban Ki-moon and African leaders to intervene, saying the military were terrorising the people.
April 22 - South Africa's ruling party leader Zuma says delay is not acceptable.
April 24 - The United States and Britain call for arms embargo against Zimbabwe.
April 25 - Riot police raid MDC headquarters and detain scores of people.
April 29 - Verification of the disputed results starts, after a partial recount ended.
May 2 - Opposition Movement for Democratic Change won the presidential election but faces a second-round vote, says the country's electoral body.

Morgan Tsvangirai needs to show political maturity to avoid this Catch 22

Now it looks as if the opposition leader may refuse to participate in a run-off election because he believes (as does the rest of the world) that he already won the outright majority he needed to avoid a run-off in the first poll and was cheated. However, abstinence by Tsvangirai will result in Mugabe retaining his presidency by default in spite of having lost the first round of elections.

Ahhh! Not Thabo again .....!

According to reports that ineffective mediator, Mbeki, is on his way to Zimbabwe to mediate this latest issue ... bruahhahahahaha!