This is funny, but there is an extent to which the 'Human Rights' and other non-profit have become a trojan horse for Western influence and have largely filled the infrastructural vacuum created by the notorious structural adjustment reforms of the 1980s and 1990s which gutted the parastatal agencies that were ostensibly responsible for addressing the sorts of rural development, health and myriad crisis issues that give many of these NGOs their raison d'etre. In other words, the wide scale presence of these NGO has raised questions about the relationship between the state and the people and there are serious questions about the political accountility of these agencies. Of course the reaction of the Zimbabwean government is in the realm of the absurd, but the deeper context is something worth thinking about.
Joe W.
www.prorev.com
GREAT MOMENTS IN ZIMBABWE
BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL - A new bill, which would criminalize non-governmental organizations working to promote human rights and ban overseas agencies from funding local groups, is set to become law in Zimbabwe before the end of the year. The bill, which had its final reading last week, is being viewed as a further attempt to silence potential opponents of President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party, ahead of the country's elections in March 2005. . . In a similar move Sudanese authorities are believed to have expelled the British directors of Oxfam and Save the Children for referring to increasing violence in the country's Darfur region and calling for more action to stop it. The statements contravene laws that ban interference in the Sudanese political, ethnic or sectarian issues.
TIMES, UK - Zimbabwe has come up with a bizarre proposal to solve the food crisis threatening half its population with starvation. It wants to bring in obese tourists from overseas so that they can shed pounds doing manual labor on land seized from white farmers. The so-called Obesity Tourism Strategy was reported last week in The Herald, a government organ whose contents are approved by President Robert Mugabe's powerful information minister, Jonathan Moyo. Pointing out that more than 1.2 billion people worldwide are officially deemed to be overweight, the article exhorted Zimbabweans to "tap this potential."
"Tourists can provide labour for farms in the hope of shedding weight while enjoying the tourism experience," it said, adding that Americans spent $6 billion a year on "useless" dieting aids.
"Tour organisers may promote this programme internationally and bring in tourists, while agriculturalists can employ the tourists as free farm labour. The tourists can then top it all by flaunting their slim bodies on a sun-downer cruise on the Zambezi or surveying the majestic Great Zimbabwe ruins."
The notion that oversized, overpaid Americans could be enticed into paying to spend their holidays working free for those who seized the country's commercial farms illustrates how far the Mugabe regime has descended into a fantasy world.
This is a government that boasts of bumper harvests when 5.5m of its people need food aid; that negotiates to buy Russian MiG fighter jets when the country is bankrupt; that shows constantly smiling dancing Zimbabweans on state television (known locally as the "Bums and Drums" channel) when two-thirds of the working population has fled.
It was the regime's paranoia about letting anyone see what was really happening that prompted last week's attempt to ban some British cricket correspondents from entering the country to cover the England team's controversial tour.