Check out the blogs on New Internationalist if you want to access some refreshing reading. Blogger Jo Lateu recently shared some words of wisdom on homophobia from Desmond Tutu. Of course, the hysterical homophobic elements of society are likely to be as reactive as ever, but more fool them. If there are any pearly gates, the haters among us are certainly going to struggle to gain entry when they pop their sandaks.

Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity – or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.

It is time to stand up against another wrong.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counselling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.

Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

And they are living in hiding – away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offence is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said ‘love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones’. Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.

‘But they are sinners,’ I can hear the preachers and politicians say. ‘They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished.’ My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin colour, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?

The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.

The writer is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

The article first appeared in the Washington Post.

According to an article published on www.africanliberty.org, “Rejoice Ngwenya simply rejects Mugabe’s cohorts anthem of western sanctions being responsible for starvation in Zimbabwe.” Instead, Rejoice demands that Africans stop blaming others for self-inflicted misery.

Robert Mugabe’s brutal thirty year-old reign in Zimbabwe, compounded by a frenzied ten-year mutilation of property rights, is once again on the cover page of the country’s annals of food insecurity.  The pillaging, plunder of strategic commercial farms and national resources by privileged political elite has over the past decade emaciated our country’s productive capacity. At the epicentre of this carnage is central bank governor Dr Gideon Gordon who masqueraded as the benevolent bankroller of the curiously named ‘farm mechanisation program’ that mostly looted NGO funds to prop up Mugabe’s plummeting political fortunes.

To rub salt to injury, habitual ZANU-PF choirmaster Dr Joseph Made, now head of an apparition termed ‘ministry of agricultural mechanisation’ has been spewing brain-damaging propaganda via the Mugabe-owned Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. He trumpets the discredited theory that ‘illegal Western-imposed sanctions’ are to blame for all our harvest misfortunes.

Progressive Zimbabweans know that white farmers were evicted overnight from their properties with no time to pack, and then whole villages frog-marched to vast tracts of arable land that now lie fallow. Confronted with high-value assets but no expertise, these Mugabe foot soldiers looted the once profitable farms, unplugging irrigation pumps, uprooting pipes and stripping electrical fittings for quick disposal on the black market. Now, in a show of award-winning naivety, Joseph Made tells the world that ‘resettled farmers fail to produce because Western-imposed sanctions limit their access to equipment spares’. He must think we Africans are daft!

The Red Cross and World Food Program predict patched lips for Zimbabwe’s legion of rural citizens in 2010. Ironically, sophisticated farmer and MDC agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennet faces the hangman’s noose for a yet-to-be-substantiated terrorism charge while his counterpart, Tendai Biti conspires an epic cap-in-hand safari in search of food aid. My question: if ZANU-PF moguls are hoarding multi-million US dollar diamond mine claims in Marange, why would a sensible government want to further burden suffering citizens with more debts?

The cause of inevitable starvation is not all about scrappy weather patterns and as ZANU-PF apologists would like to claim, ‘illegal sanctions’. For almost a decade, Gideon Gono and Robert Mugabe poisoned our minds with a false doctrine that ‘Government is God’ so much so that dependency became habitual. Now that a more sustainable fiscal management and national accountability system is in place, ZANU-PF’s seemingly eternal pool of benevolence has evaporated. In any case, for all the so-called investment in farming that Gono spearheaded, there is nothing to show for it except a ‘ministry of mechanisation’, de-forestation, the first lady’s Gushungo Dairy Estates and two million vulnerable citizens!  Zimbabwean villagers stare starvation in the eye, yet there is a cruel twist to fate linked with this plot.

It was in the year 2000 that Robert Mugabe and his militant gang of ‘war veterans’ dismantled organised farming. To achieve their sinister political motive, they exploited idle village idiots, wherefore this rhythm of destruction was replicated in subsequent elections, causing internal and external displacement of millions of Zimbabweans. Ironically, these Jurassic ZANU-PF outcasts and their families also now face starvation. Arguing from a pedestal of high moral ground, the Tsvangirayi half of government cannot worry only about the welfare of their supporters, even where most beneficiaries of free land, free fertiliser, free seed and free fuel were ONLY ZANU-PF activists. The machinery of patronage, running right from the president’s office through to provincial governors, district administrators, chiefs, headmen was and still has ZANU-PF imprints. Former military officers control the Grain Marketing Board to compliment this toxic cycle of patronage. Remember that in all election years, Mugabe used to ‘ban’ NGOs from rural areas, claiming that food humanitarian agencies were ‘advancing a regime change agenda!”

Now here is my rationale. In Somalia, Uganda, Sudan and DR Congo, food relief is known to be routinely ‘hijacked’ by insurgents either for re-sale or personal use. More often than not, these are the same clowns responsible for food insecurity in those regions, but are first in handout queues when peace prevails. Now that Morgan Tsvangirayi and Tendai Biti are – to use ZANU-PF lingo – in ‘control of food relief’, Mugabe supporters are screaming ‘murder!’ and yet those are the same marauding gangs responsible for causing the current food production deficit in the first place! My humble submission is that these shameless citizens and members of their families should not be allowed within a fifty-kilometre radius of ‘MDC or NGO-sourced’ food distribution. Instead, Gideon Gono and Joseph Made must be hauled before a court of law to explain how the so-called ‘farm mechanisation’ and the freebies doled out since 2000 have added zilch to our country’s strategic food reserves. What we see, however, is Mugabe and his cronies persistently refusing to allow an official land audit in the hope that this gigantic fraud called ‘land reform’ will remain confined to a sealed black box.  I want to ask: of what use is a land revolution if all it produces is mass starvation, a tattered country reputation, few wealthy political elites, broken families and half a million displaced farm workers?

So what am I saying: the cruel reality is that everyone who participated in the plunder and destruction of Zimbabwe’s food productive capacity must not taste a single morsel of food relief. Those who are in the current echelons of governance like Made, Gono and even Mugabe – must be subject to a Parliamentary enquiry to explain why millions of US dollar investments in free agriculture inputs over the past ten years have failed to yield sustainable food surpluses. The sanctions story will be excluded from the repertoire of defence. It is not only an excuse of small minds but an insult to our intelligence. Community-based organisations and progressive activists can identify ZANU-PF collaborators who beat up, maimed and exiled villagers, publish names to inform them that they will not receive anything from an MDC-inspired humanitarian effort. Just for once, we Africans must learn to be responsible for our actions and refrain from time-worn scapegoats.

When I was trying to explain Zimbabwe’s National Youth Training Programme to someone today, the first words that came out of my mouth were “youth militia” – not youth service. This isn’t surprising given how many youth service graduates have been manipulated into being agents of political violence. Youth Initiative for Democracy in Zimbabwe (YIDEZ) is launching a campaign for the reform of this youth training programme into a non-partisan youth empowerment programme.

The Zimbabwe National Youth Training Program (NYTP) was established in July 2001. Its aim was to instil patriotism and self reliance amongst other values that were never practiced. Training at the camps was stopped in 2007 but graduates from these institutions are still being deployed to carry out partisan political work and some are serving as youth officers and are paid using tax payers’ money. Nine years since its inception, with 80,000 graduates, the curriculum of the program still remains ‘top secret’.

The Global Political Agreement provides that; the program shall be run in a non-partisan manner. The Ministry of Youth Development, Indigenization & Empowerment recently initiated a process that intends to reintroduce the NYTP. Part of the process will include public consultations.

As a member of Civic Society, YIDEZ is concerned by the Ministry’s limited engagement of the key stakeholder (YOUTH) in this process. In 2001 the program was implemented without the input, consent and involvement of young people and the general public.  If this program is intended for the benefit of young people, then this oversight cannot be repeated.  As the youth, we are saying:

• We demand genuine reform and consultations in the development and delivery of the National Youth Service Training Program
• We demand transparency and that our voice, as the youth of Zimbabwe, be heard in the curriculum development process
• Nothing for us without us

To join the campaign and find out more, contact YIDEZ on yidez@zol.co.zw or +263-4-776772

The past times that I have put my thoughts on paper I have been talking woman on this and that. You will have to forgive me for that. I know no other life. If I was a guy, sure I would write about guy issues, but I am not. I am going to write about what I know best which is being a woman and its challenges, and boy are there many in this day and age. We are still pretty much in the stone age if women are being married by a dozen to one man and some women still don’t have a choice about whom they get married to, let alone what age they get married at.

I have come to realize in the past month that I have come back to work at Kubatana that there is more to life than what meets the eye. I did not know that I had so many misconceptions about marriage until it was shown to me. For one, your husband does not need a good reason to want a divorce from you. He can say that he has grown tall and he doesn’t want to stay with a wife who is not growing as tall as he is, for all the court cares. There is no way you can say that’s a silly reason. The court will call it irretrievable breakdown and just like that you are divorced. For those that have not caught my flow I am just trying to highlight some misconceptions that we have as women when it comes to marriage.

The other thing that happens during divorce proceedings is that fifty fifty song that has been sung to us, is quite misleading. When you divorce you don’t get fifty percent, you take what you worked for, and what has your name on it. The fifty percent comes when the two of you had duel ownership. If he was buying cars or bought the house you lived in and your name appears on the title did then you get fifty fifty? And don’t think because you are the mother of the children that you automatically get the kids. The court looks at who earns the most money even though it’s advisable for a child to stay with its mother. For those who did not know, when your husband commits adultery you can file a lawsuit not against him, but his partner. Now how many court sessions are you going to go to, if he is a born cheat? How many women are you going to sue in the lifetime of your marriage?

Crazy isn’t it.

Zimbabwe is just emerging from its worst time ever and though people are not yet content, and are still in the air of uncertainty as to what the future holds for them, it is worth acknowledging that the previous year has been a great relief to many of us. In as much as we wish for the betterment of our country in every walk of life, it is sad to note that the qualities, attitudes, and tendencies that we developed during this negative time are still haunting us. Below are some examples:

- Every morning and evening as people come to and from work, transport operators who demand double the normal fair rob them of their dear dollars.

- Now that it is the season for selling tobacco, farmers are flocking into the city with their produce, and prices of goods in town have gone up.

- It is not even surprising to see people wasting production ours loitering in town, doing absolutely nothing. Yes it was possible to make money out of nothing during the past but now its different.

- If you lend money to someone you find it very difficult to get it back. Not because he/she does not have it, but only that one thinks one day it will be forgotten, just like that.

- If one needs to change from one currency to the other, the bank is the last resort. First people try the next-door, then the street.

- Towards month end it is common to see people spending to the last cent, because inflation scared them that far.

- Even national service providers are still charging speculative prices.

- Everyone has multiple bank accounts, but only a few use even one, fearing that if you deposit cash one day you might not be able to withdraw it. If you close the accounts: ” pamwe ku’burner’ kuchadzoka”.

- Every teacher’s home has a classroom.

- If you commit a crime you just share the proceeds with a policeman.

The caption from The Herald front page on Friday sums up more than this photograph – it seems sadly apt for the progress of Zimbabwe’s inclusive government as well: “Morgan Tsvangirai (out of picture).”