Zimbabwe Light

“If my people want me to go, I go,” says Mugabe. The ruthless dictator does not even acknowledge that he is using brute force to stay in power.

What I find really disappointing is the way the West has failed to flex their economic muscle and really turn the screw on the regime. The targeted sanctions have hardly affected the regime. Indeed Mugabe has used the sanction as the excuse for the country’s economic melt down and to justify further political repression. The sanctions can and should have been fine tuned so that they had some effect on the dictator and his cronies. For ten years now there has been no effort to focus the sanctions.

By letting the token sanctions drag on for ten years the West is actually punishing the ordinary Zimbabweans whose lives the regime has turned into a hell-on-earth. I am particularly disappointed with President Barack Obama.

All Africa wanted from President Obama is to be treat us as humans worthy of all the human rights and dignity the rest of the world enjoy and take for granted. For some one with even one drop of black blood in their veins; that would not have been too much to ask!

So far the West has, at best, patronised Africa. For example, it is normal for the West to cheer and applaud an African election in which there was vote rigging and violent even when hundreds of innocent people were murdered. Of course the same Westerners would be up in arms if there was so much as a whiff of cheating in their own country. The yard stick the West use to measuring Africa’s democratic credentials and the worthy of an African’s life is but a few inches long!

Mugabe has become even more repressive than he was in 2001 when the targeted sanctions were imposed by President Bush. Instead of the West turning the screw on the regime to reflect this; they have done nothing. President Obama’s Administration is even considering softening the sanction! The dictator turned the whole nation up side down in 2008; destroying property, beating, raping and over 500 Zimbabweans were murdered and no one has ever been arrested for all this. This was all done to force people to vote for him. What else does Mugabe have to do, how many more murders to finally convince the Americans that he is a tyrant?

For all the sweet nothings President Obama has done for Africa: Africa would have been better off if he did not have a single drop of black blood in his veins!