Official aid alone runs to about £80 million a year. It is carefully dispersed by the Department for International Development but that’s not good enough for the masochistic Guardian. Things have certainly not got better at the Guardian since Murambatsvina seven years ago – hailed by the newspaper at the time as a visionary approach to urban planning! Strangely, it is an event the Guardian has never re-examined, although it is widely accepted that it destroyed the homes and livelihoods of many hundreds of thousands of people.
So the Vigil was not surprised to find the Guardian publishing the latest addled article on Zimbabwe by Alex Duval Smith. She appears to have lost her foothold in the Guardian’s competitor The Independent. Smith’s incoherent article has everything that would endear it to the Guardian: anti-British, ‘victimist’ and off-the-wall irrational.
Smith appears to argue that Britain should stop funding Zimbabwe’s education, health and social welfare, not to mention the food aid programme which is helping to keep many Zimbabweans alive, and instead hand the money over to unsuccessful farmers settled on land violently seized from their former owners.
The Vigil wonders why Smith does not propose that some of the estimated $2 billion a year from the state-owned Marange mines is not used for this purpose.
After all common sense suggests there must be a lot of money sloshing around since only $19 million appears so far to have been sent to Finance Minister Biti whose ‘pie in the sky’ budget talked of $600 million of diamond revenue this year.
But we agree that Britain’s aid to Zimbabwe should be reassessed. But we are not suggesting that the money should go to Mugabe – some of it should help fund the fight for democracy as proposed by the Treasurer General of the MDC Roy Bennett.
Post published in: World News