Zimbabwe cleric to Britain - "Please invade"

I was talking to my brother the other day and posed the question - if the population of Zimbabwe were given the vote to become a British colony once again or continue as they are what would the outcome be?

We thought that there would be an overwhelming vote in favour of recolonisation.

From the Times Online comes this depressing article which suggests Britain should intervene militarily in the country.

Zimbabwe's leading cleric has called on Britain to invade the country and topple President Robert Mugabe. Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, warned that millions were facing death from famine, unable to survive amid inflation believed to have soared to 15,000%.

Given the brutality of the Mugabe regime, which Morgan Tsvangirai has been just one high profile recipient of, Pius Ncube is certainly a brave man.

Mugabe, 83, had proved intransigent despite the “massive risk to life”, said Ncube, the head of Zimbabwe’s 1m Catholics. “I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe,” he said. “We should do it ourselves but there’s too much fear. I’m ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready.”

One wonders what it takes to make the people "ready".

Some parts of Zimbabwe have seen 95% of crops fail, leaving families with only two or three weeks’ food supply to last a year. Prices in the shops are more than doubling every week and Christopher Dell, the American ambassador, predicts that by the end of the year inflation could hit 1.5m%.

Since Mugabe kicked white farmers off their land - a move roundly applauded by Western leftist elites - Zimbabwe has transitioned from being Africa's bread basket to Africa's basket case.

Ncube said that far from helping those struggling on less than £1 a week, Mugabe had just spent £1m on surveillance equipment to monitor phone calls and e-mails. “How can you expect people to rise up when even our church services are attended by state intelligence people?

“People in our mission hospitals are dying of malnutrition. We had the best education in Africa and now our schools are closing. Most people are earning less than their bus fares. There’s no water or power. Is the world just going to let everything collapse in on us?”

Yes, Mr Ncube, it will. While the world's left are quick to speak out in favour of tyrants, as long as those tyrants denounce the West, they will always turn a blind eye and a deaf ear towards any atrocities or social calamity that might be taking place. Unfortunately, the combined strength of morally superior nations such as the US and Australia cannot overcome the vast number of left wing NGOs, the United Nations and the EU and intervene when it's needed most. One of the advantages of being on the left is never having to say you're sorry. Meaning well is the left's success criterion. On the right we believe that meaning well is all well and good but if you don't get tangible outcomes then you need to recognise the failure and learn from the mistakes made.

The catastrophic situation of the former African economic powerhouse makes a comedy of the UN's decision to appoint Zimbabwe to the position of Chair of the Commission on Sustainable Development and demonstrates what an immoral, ineffective and corrupt organisation it really is.

If you think that things couldn't get any worse then consider the plight of many women who have to prostitute themselves in order to feed their families.

Stella Stithole is a high school teacher with neatly braided hair and a husband who works in a bank, yet in the twisted world of President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe she has to turn tricks to feed her children. Battling to survive the world’s highest inflation, estimated by local bankers to have reached 15,000%, the salary of Z$2.1m she has just received is six times what she got last month. But it is not even enough to cover her bus fares to school and back. In fact, it is equivalent to less than £3.50 a month. So for several days of the week, instead of standing in front of her class in Kwekwe teaching history and geography, Sithole takes the bus 146 miles north to Harare. There, she sits at the bar in clubs such as Chez Ntemba, Chez Mambo and the Stars Studio at Rainbow Towers hotel, waiting for a proposition.

...Not only government ministers and officials from the ruling Zanu-PF party, but also top police and army officers and High Court judges have been cleverly woven into Mugabe’s patronage system, benefiting hugely from his despotic rule. Many have been allotted property that was violently seized from white farmers. But their real wealth comes from access to foreign exchange at less than 1,000th of the rate on the streets. This enables them to buy expensive vehicles such as the Hummers, S-class Mercedes and Toyota Prados that fill the hotel car park – one of which will whisk Sithole to a lodge on the edge of town.

...To show the impossibility of surviving on a teacher’s wage, we take her entire Z$2.1m salary to a local supermarket. All she manages to buy with the two large bricks of notes is one bottle of cooking oil, one packet of salt, one laundry soap, one pack of powdered soup, some milk powder and a pack of sugar.

...Although the Reserve Bank knocked three zeroes off the currency last November, the Zimbabwe dollar has continued to lose value at an astonishing rate. At the start of the year it was 3,000 to the US dollar. Last month it fell from 100,000 to 300,000 in a week on the streets where most people exchange. Yet the official rate is 250. “Imagine the money you can make,” a merchant bank director explained. “Say you buy US$100 at the official rate – that costs you Z$25,000. Then you sell that US$100 on the streets and get Z$30m. With that Z$30m, at the official rate you can buy more than US$100,000 – all for your initial outlay of about eight cents. “And that’s not to mention fuel vouchers,” he added. A litre of fuel for the privileged costs just Z$400 while everyone else must pay Z$185,000. “If you’re one of Mugabe’s cronies, you can live in fantastic wealth.” That wealth is visible not only from the number of new luxury cars on the streets of the capital but from a spin round Borrowdale Brooke, a private housing estate with its own golf course in northern Harare.

...In supermarkets such as the Bellevue Spar in Bulawayo, staff struggle to keep up with the increases. Every aisle has someone busy with a pricing gun and some items have six or seven price labels, one on top of another. The baked beans on sale for Z$66,000 five days ago have just been repriced at Z$125,000. Hardly anyone in the shop seems to be buying anything. People stare at prices and window shop as if they were ata luxury department store.

...Others, such as a white-haired pensioner, walk out with nothing. His monthly pension is not even enough to buy a toilet roll, he tells me.

...The state-owned media blame it all on a plot by British and American governments. Last week the Chronicle wrote: “We can reveal that British and US governments, after failing to incite a public revolt against the government of Zimbabwe, are now working overtime to destroy the economy, mutilate the Zimbabwe dollar, foment civil unrest.”

...A whole community of people whose homes were demolished by the government two years ago now live on the Richmond rubbish dump, surviving by foraging for glass bottles and plastic. Remedio Moyo, 26, shows the black plastic shelter he lives under with his wife and children aged three and five. Small black flies cover everything. “This is not a proper life,” he said. “I went to school and all I wanted from life was a job anda small house, not to be a big man. There is only one person to blame for this situation and I would like that man to die any minute.”

How does the United Nations justify its existence when this sort of thing is going on?

How do so called elites justify their support of this disgusting thug?

Where are all those snivelling, rich hypocrites to sing We Are The World on behalf of the downtrodden of Zimbabwe?

It's up to people with correctly aligned moral compasses to speak out at this time of urgent need in Zimbabwe.