Love is all around
OK, I admit it. I’m in love with Michela Wrong. Do yourself a favour and check out her regular column on the NewStatesman web site. Her latest essay is about the dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Sections of her writing reminded me of our situation here in Zimbabwe. All over the world we are more alike than we care to realize or admit.
Quite often efforts on the part of foreign governments and international development organizations to ease poverty or conflict in other countries are neutralized by their active involvement in maintaining the status quo through the delivery of foreign aid and humanitarian assistance. Wrong highlights this when she says
Diplomats like to present themselves as powerless in the face of Ethiopia’s famous obstinacy. It’s an argument I have never accepted. Ethiopia’s government, which receives an annual £1bn in aid, relies on donors to feed its hungry, build its schools and provide clean water. Throw into the pot Ethiopian ambitions of seeing Addis Ababa crowned as Africa’s diplomatic and political capital, and you have a perfect scenario for applying pressure. Not inviting Meles to sit on Blair’s Commission for Africa would have been a start.
The other love of my life right now (tomorrow will be a different story) is Violet Gonda, one of SW Radio Africa’s presenters. She recently interviewed Morgan Tsvangirai, president of one of the Movement for Democratic Change factions. Her hard hitting questions were right on the mark – what a pity Tsvangirai couldn’t rise to the occasion.
Violet: OK, you said it was the agenda of the Congress, and one example was the Winter of Discontent, these are the timelines that you give as the opposition, so when …
Morgan Tsvangirai: But it was not a timeline, that’s where you make a mistake. It was not a timeline, it was a metaphor making sure that people are mobilised as a discontent but not on a time-frame as to say that because winter is June to May therefore it should happen during that period. I said as a programme of action the democratic resistance of the MDC will start immediately as we finished our Congress in March and it’s an on-going programme and we haven’t abandoned that.
Violet: But it’s over a year now since you said those things. When are we going to see the programme of action?
Morgan Tsvangirai: Well you wait and see, it’s going to happen.
Don’t know about you but I’m dead keen to tune into this programme of democratic resistance. Can anyone tell me which frequency its on?