Meanderings on Zimbabwe...

Hello all,

I was pleased to see that, finally, a senior African personage resident in the UK has finally called for the stronger measures against the revolting regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

His Grace the Archbishop of York, Ugandan born John Sentamu, has been waxing lyrical in various media over the last few days about how its time for Britain to shed its “colonial guilt” and for Gordon Brown to take the lead in imposing strict sanctions against Zimbabwe, and to encourage other EU states to put pressure on Mugabe and his cronies through limitations on their diplomatic prerogatives in their embassies (which are being used as fronts to circumvent EU financial and travel restrictions on members of the ruling circle).

Which is all well and good. I am sure that most people would be hard pressed to deny that Robert Mugabe deserves even more pressure than sanctions, that he has destroyed a vibrant, prosperous nation through his megalomaniacal need to retain power over an increasingly poor and decrepit nation-state. I have been amazed that what is going on in Zimbabwe has been allowed to do so for so long, ascribing it to misplaced colonial guilt, much as Archbishop Sentamu has.

But its all too little too late. Why has it taken almost a decade of increasingly blatant oppression and insanity on the part of Mugabe for this point to be made by a senior, globally important African man? (For those of you who don’t know, York is the second most senior Archibishopric in the Anglican Communion – in essence Sentamu is the second most powerful man in the Anglican Communion after the Archbishop of Canterbury).

At a recent summit of African leaders, Mugabe was given a standing ovation. He is seen as a hero by many black Africans, peasant and politician alike, as a stalwart warrior against the legacy of colonialism. His methods and rhetoric are parroted in several countries, most worryingly in Namibia and South Africa, who have thus far managed to avoid the seemingly inevitable slide into anarchy that typifies post-colonial Africa.

Even Archbishop Sentamu himself said that it is “now time” to take action since the diplomatic efforts of African leaders have failed to reign in Mugabe’s excesses. Now time? Come on! Where the hell have influential Africans like Sentamu been for the last decade? Mugabe should have been stamped on hard around the turn of the century, either by major African power players like South Africa, or by the UK and damned be the politically-incorrect fallout.

The Archbishop has even spoken to Gordon Brown, and the general feeling is that some sort of stern worded message will be forthcoming soon. Big deal. A stern worded message that will be ignored, and another opportunity to avert a Uganda/Amin style tragedy in Zimbabwe will be lost.

What we need is someone to take a damned stand against this “boys club” of ex-communist leaders now in positions of national leadership in Africa and let them know that yes, the colonial past does have more than its fair share of injustice and exploitation, and yes part of the responsibility for Africa’s current state can be laid at the feet of the old colonial powers; but that this same colonial past is no excuse for the blatantly racist, corrupt, criminal, short-sighted, malicious persecution and destruction of their own countries.

Archbishop Sentamu is not the first senior black African churchman to make this stand, only the most high profile. Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo has been one of the most valiant and vocal opponents of Mugabe for several years now. But we need more than just Churchmen to stand up and be counted. It is time for the UK and the EU to stop playing politically correct games and get over their un-necessary colonial guilt complexes and treat African nations and leaders as mature peers – which means holding them up to the same standards that are expected in the West. No more excuses. No more unconditional aid. No more colonial guilt cards to be played by either side.

Mad dogs like Mugabe would never be tolerated as a head of a European state. He should not be tolerated as the leader of an African one either, especially as a leader who seemingly can get away with anything he bloody well pleases with the only “sternly worded” diplomatic messages as a punishment. Its time to get tough before we see a spontaneous revolution in Zimbabwe that will leave that shattered country in an even worse condition that it is now – perhaps even see massacres and pogroms that will make Rwanda look like a tea-party spat.

So yes, it is “now time” Archbishop Sentamu. It has “been time” for years, thanks for noticing. Now lets hope someone else does too, someone who is willing and able to do something about it.

I am back, and some meanderings on Climate Change...

Hello all,

I know its been a while since I last posted, and apologize to anyone who was waiting. The passing of my mother-in-law threw everything into a bit of a spin for a while and real life took total priority over everything else I am afraid.

Now, obviously, that has not stopped my mind latching onto things that I feel like ranting about. I could wax lyrical over the most recent of events to get my goat – the way the press handles the hand-over of Basra to the Iraqis, the shocking twist in the search for Madeleine McCann (I never did trust her parents for some reason), the regular diet of health related scare headlines etc.

These are just a tasted of what caught my attention, and I may expound upon my feelings regarding these things in due course, amongst many other topics. However, today I reserve the bile that has built up in my spleen over the last few weeks for one of the most annoying and pointless topics to enthral the chattering classes lately – climate change.

It was while watching a show called “Dumped” on TV a couple of weeks ago that I really started becoming aggravated. The premise was simple – get a bunch of volunteers for an eco-themed TV show, don’t tell them where they are being sent, then drop them off on a landfill site and get them to show everyone how extravagant we are with what we throw away by thriving on the dump.

Throughout the show, contestants who did not buy into the whole ‘make the world a better place through sleeping in piles of crap’ were given a patronising commentary, bullied by the slightly scary hard-core eco-warriors in the group, and harangued for lack of effort and vision by the shows revolting ‘expert guide’, Rob Holdaway, who seemed unable to understand why the group was not building five bedroom palaces using the detritus of society.

The attitudes of Holdaway, and the tone of the show in general, really got to me. The basic fact that we, as a prosperous 1st world society, throw away excessive amounts of rubbish that could be put to further use by someone enterprising, interested, or desperately poor enough to try is no surprise to most people. The implication, however, that those who do not try and use every article of crap left over from our daily lives to the absolute extreme permutations of usefulness are somehow deficient is, frankly, insulting.

Yet this attitude seems to becoming more prevalent in society. Local Councils in the UK force recycling through various methods – sometimes refusing to collect your refuse unless you sort through the recycleables. Others level fines. There is talk about increasing council tax on homes that produce “excessive waste”.

More than just about any other Anglophone country, the UK has bought whole heartedly into the ‘climate change is without doubt our fault’ theory, and this is spreading to all aspects of life, including an increasing fanaticism about recylcing. Once again, the communal societal guilt about our own prosperity that possesses the chattering classes is getting in the way of the lives of the silent majority of normal people in the country.

Not that I am actually against recycling in principle – it makes sense to do so within reasonable limits. What annoys me is that those who are less than rabidly enthusiastic about doing so are labelled as somehow deviant and callous. Likewise, I don’t oppose cutting down on other pollutants, although mainly this is due to a selfish personal desire to lower the levels of carcinogens that I come into contact with on a daily basis.

But the idea that me, as an individual, is responsible for climate change, pollution, and hundreds of thousands of tons of waste every year, that I as an individual am killing our planet and setting us on a course for global apocalypse is nonsense. What is worse is that the chattering classes that control the media would have me think that I can somehow have an impact on solving the world’s environmental problems.

While developing economies such as India, China, Indonesia, Brazil etc continue their rapid and impressive growth with an impressive disregard for pollution output and gas emissions, what possible difference can I make in my modest Buckinghamshire home? Does my not recycling my cans really make much difference when China is throwing up coal-fuelled power stations on an almost daily basis? While the great unwashed of Europe and can fly hither and yon on budget airlines for a financial pittance, generating more pollution in one flight than my car will in an entire year?

Please.

It is amazing though how many people buy into this rubbish. Individuals can have a negligible impact on environmental issues, even if they are inclined to commit themselves wholeheartedly to the effort. As always, its government and big business that truly have the say – and in this case, the worlds ecological future (again, if you believe the hype about global warming) is in the hands of governments and big business in countries which have spent decades getting this far in a quest to achieve the prosperity of the west, and who are hardly going to stop what they are doing because we say so.

Until a scientific community, which is almost evenly split in opinion, can categorically agree that human activity is either causing climate change, or at least speeding up the process we will get no-where. And even then, once the scientific community reaches consensus, it will be up to the developed world to reign in the developing – not up to you and me to cut down on how much crap we throw away every week.

To partially steal a line from Mr Gore, the “inconvenient truth” is that nothing that you, I, or even the UK, can have any effect on the greater global output of pollution, green house gases etc and even thinking that an individual can do anything about it is a terrifying level of hubris and self delusion.