It could build a couple of new clinics It could be the cost of one birthday party. Does it surprise you that "the international community" can have different opinions on that last item?
When Muammar Gadaffi's son spent a million on a birthday party, that was an excuse to remove his father from power and murder him. But when an old man we all know holds such a party, the same people who killed Gadaffi just laugh as if it was another performance by their favourite clown.
Of course this shows that the people who call themselves the "international community" places less value on children going to school, sick people getting treatment and people getting jobs to support themselves than on giving them rulers who don't present any real challenge to their way of running the world.
Libya under Gadaffi had no unemployed citizens and a good number of immigrants working, a functioning health care system and universal education. Incidentally Gadaffi's Libya educated a far higher proportion of its girls than do such friends of the West as Saudi Arabia or indeed almost any Arab state.
Now you could say, as the Brazilian ambassador did recently, that Zimbabwe is so rich in resources that we should be able to provide those necessities for all our people without holding out a begging bowl to anybody, West or East, North or South.
What the West and our Old Man's friends in the East agree on is that he can starve his people, condemn us to yet another cholera epidemic and shut the poor out of school as long as they get their cut of our diamonds, platinum, gold and any other resources they want including vanadium to make high-temperature steel for all the industrialised countries. For the Chinese, baby elephants and tropical hardwood are also on the list.
Gadaffi's mistake was to abolish poverty in his oil-rich country before his playboy son picked up a million dollars out of the small change to hold his party. Abolishing poverty is an attack on the capitalist system that cannot be tolerated.
On the other hand, our chefs (you can't put all the blame on one man) behaved like civilised tools of their capitalist masters when they held that obscene orgy in Vic Falls using the small change left in the state's coffers when they had already looted those coffers of anything more valuable.
A lot of fat people eating elephant and buffalo while their people starve reinforces foreign images of Third World elites who are greedier than their foreign masters. That makes it easier for them all to share the looting now but to feel free to dump their local stooges if anybody turns a spotlight on us.
Remember Noriega, dictator of Panama with US backing till he started getting an idea or two of his own? He disappeared into some US prison and for all I know he might still be there.
And our guys are up for sale to the highest bidder. I still see a little hope because there are among the lower ranks a number who believe the slogans they are told to chant. They aren't as flexible as our First Vice-President, who makes no bones about his need to "re-engage the West", while many of his loudest supporters are allowed to go on shouting the old slogans.
One of these days, one or more of them will trip up because they can't change step as neatly as their boss, and that fall will be more significant than an old man tripping on an airport carpet.
Post published in: Analysis