Zimbabwean police ignored a High Court decision ordering the release of Jestina Mukoko and eight other activists to a local hospital. Reuters are reporting that instead armed police have removed them to an unknown location. As in the case of the decision of the SADC Tribunal on land expropriation, Mugabe and the Zanu-PF are showing the same indifference to the rulings of their own courts as they did to those of the region.
Accordingly law and order, as it is understood by even the most unsophisticated societies in the world, has ceased to exist with Mugabe and his henchmen accepting only those laws they consider dovetail with their own interests.
The South African government’s approach to this latest — in a list stretching back to the Big Bang — outrage is to inspect the submarines … contemplate their navel … something like that.
Of course nobody should be surprised at this development. Indeed, if you are prepared to move heaven and Earth to prop up a genocidal dictator, why would lawlessness concern you?
Problem is it now appears that Mugabe and Zanu-PF’s propensity to blatant lies and deceit seems to be rubbing off on the South African government.
“HARARE/JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe has received agricultural inputs from the South African government worth over R300-million”, Zimbabwean state media reported yesterday.
On Sunday, Thabo Masebe, a spokesman for President Kgalema Motlanthe, told the SABC that Pretoria would provide agricultural assistance of R300-million to Zimbabwe, but only when a new government is formed.
The Herald newspaper quoted Zimbabwe’s Agricultural Minister Rugare Gumbo as saying Pretoria had sent, among other items, maize and sorghum seed, fertiliser and fuel.” (SAPA)
In essence, Motlanthe had confirmed that, until an all-inclusive unity government was formed, this particular aid would be withheld. The reason this was done was because of the enormous internal and external pressure on South Africa to do the right thing and put an end to bolstering the regime responsible for a humanitarian disaster of breathtaking proportions.
As a glance through numerous reports will confirm, up to and including Sunday this was still the position. The interim aid to assist on cholera and feeding the population was a separate and distinct issue.
Until the genius posing as the Minister of Agriculture (by his mother maybe) from Zimbabwe decided to drop a humongous clanger (didn’t anyone explain to him the bullshit the South African public had been told?) and confirm that the aid had already arrived. The office of compounding monumental fuck-ups in South Africa then sprang to life and decided that the best way of dealing with this ridiculous farce was to try and convince everyone that, having lied to South Africans about withholding aid until a unity government was in place, all the while intending to furnish it directly to Mugabe, that in fact this was a fine gesture to assist those in dire need.
Attempt to create a confluence between the aid supposedly being withheld and that being sent as a gesture of goodwill so that in the blur one could not be distinguished from the other?
One of many examples of this intriguing explanation may be seen at News24
Yesterday I asked the question why the ANC was prepared to defy logic and decency to prop up Senor Satan and the Zanu-PF.
Today the question is slightly trickier: are you prepared to test the support of those who believe in the general principles of the ANC — me included — in order to prop up the most evil African dictator and regime of all time? Sacrifice the principles that the great men and women of your party struggled and died for in order to perpetuate this insanity?
Give careful consideration before answering. Better yet, don’t even attempt it.
Michael -
I am not sure if this is appropriate here, but it always seems to me that any restriction on freedom of speech must produce more problems than solutions.
Even to prevent someone expressing a deeply offensive racist view (as many consider Zapiro’s famous/infamous cartoon to be, for instance) is in some awkward sense a curtailment of free speech, presumably justified by the claim that ‘others’, like children, need protection from things they are incapable of handling by themselves.
But how can a watertight case for limitations and bans ever be made where the hope is for an open society of free – and adult – individuals?
Put it like this: we can all think of things that we can probably agree we should not be ‘allowed’ to say. But what things should we not be ‘allowed’ to hear? And who is to take that decision on themselves and make it for us?
It provdies something of a path through these quicksands to shift perspective – to view the subject not in terms of ‘freedom of speech’ at all, but to grasp that the real danger is there is no logical limit to censorship.
Open the door to it and sooner or later it takes over the whole house.
Paul as you can see I allow full freedom of speech to anyone on my site.
Michael,
At what point in a party’s evolution does one say that this is no longer the party it once was – and move on?
Has the ANC in power (after Mandela) ever held true to its democratic ideals? If so, why the support for Zimbabwe ? Why the support for garlic ? Why the gradual degradation of law and order ? Why the banning of the Scorpions ? Why the blue-light empires ?
At some stage, you have to agree that the party is not following its own policies. Just as Mbeki and now Motlanthe were forever excusing Mugabe’s behaviour, you seem to fill the same role saying that the party is not Motlanthe, Mbeki or Zuma. But it is !
I recall many of my Afrikaner friends saying the same about the Nationalist Party. The reality is that Vorster, Botha and company WERE the Nationalist Party.
I’m afraid I see little difference between the old Nationalists supporting apartheid and the ANC supporting Mad Bob. Both are equally morally reprehensible.
Time for change – if SA is to survive.
Michael
I know that. Mine was just a bit of embroidery or an afterthought.
Happy New Year.
Peter Win on January 4th, 2009 at 8:31 am writes, inter aslia,
“Michael,
At what point in a party’s evolution does one say that this is no longer the party it once was – and move on?
Has the ANC in power (after Mandela) ever held true to its democratic ideals? If so, why the support for Zimbabwe ?”
You raise some good questions. I have also posed them. Of course, such questions should be answered. If they are not properly answered, you might conclude that they cannot actually receive a satisfactory response.
A few years ago we entered the twilight era of the post-apartheid democracy. It is an era where nothing can be clearly seen. Subterfuge rules. To be honest, I find it quite unsettling. There is a monster lurking on the horizon and virtually nobody wants to identify it or even admit that it exists. If one takes a pair of binoculars out, one is immediately labelled “racist” “reactionary” or “idiotic”. It is the era of denialism and one where
questions remain unanswered.