seems that Mugabe is up to his old tricks again against the Zimbabwean deputy agricultural minister

Yes as they say a leopard never changes its spots but what I find annoying is that this government is to spend £12million here in the UK to help people cope with losing there jobs but at the same time give £61million to Zimbabwea to help them but how much of your money will end up in Robert Mugabe's pocket ?. As he is suppose to have a personal fortune of £6Billion in Swiss bank accounts !

holstein kid:

give £61million to Zimbabwea to help them

It is a funny world in which we give money to Zimbabwe, a country which was the previous home to a man I met during September whilst on a Cornish holiday. He was Billionaire and showed me his One Billion Zimbabwean $ note to prove it. He said it would buy him about 3/4 of a loaf of bread.

We also give money in aid to a Nuclear Power which has sent rockets into space, has a much bigger army than ours, drives on the left, has more English speakers than us and has a better cricket team. It is, of course, India.

I really do think that our aid programmes (and we should have them) have been devised to satisfy the whims, fancies, consciences and personal aspirations of the great and the good of our liberal ruling elite. It has little to with do absolute need or the wishes of the UK people in general.

Oh boy. Do I sound cynical or am I just 45% wrong and 55% right?

 

There are ongoing back door dealings, both by companies/banks and governments, all of which benefit only Mugabe and his entourage, nothing to the poor, here is the latest e-mail I recieved;                                                                                                                                                                 

It has become public knowledge yesterday that Nestle Zimbabwe is
 buying a MILLION litres of milk a year from Grace Mugabe’s farms in
 Zimbabwe, which were confiscated, ostensibly to resettle the POOR !!!
 
  Nestle SA has issued a stupid statement that they are independent of
 their company in Zim and Nestle has issued a statement that they are
 not subject to EU sanctions against the Mugabe elite as the
 headquarters of Nestle are in Switzerland and therefore not subject to EU rules.
  It IS TIME TO BOYCOTT EVERY NESTLE PRODUCT THROUGHOUT THE WORLD to embarass that organisation.

 I have contacted the international network AVAAZ to help distribute this message.
  Please email it ONTO EVERY person AROUND THE WORLD in your email
 address book and to every politician around the world that you have
 email contact with.

Yes India gets £827million a year from the UK tax payer while India spends £5Billion on its space programme also I know of how Zimbabwe has printed it Billion $ currencey of which is worthless and while its leaders live like kings there fellow brothers and sisters starve to death, its not a perfect world but Africa has had up to date half a trillion pounds in aid of which some of it has gone to line the pockets of there leaders but also you can find this aid being sold openly on the street markets as when the CNN tv crew went into Kenya once to follow a consignment of US wheat of which they found and it wasn't being givern to the people but sold on the open market. I agree we should have aid programmes but up to a point as we can only spend so much and they should be of benifit to the UK as well as the country intended.

Nothing supprises me about Nestles as I left them two years before they closed Ashbourne plant down and then they where in trouble for sending powdered milk to Africa because the people could not read or understand that you had to clean the milk bottles out between each feeding for there children and as a result thousands of children died.

its just alice in wonderland, with ak47,s.

Fair warning to Isabel, she may have to censor this post.

I am increasingly unimpressed and unsympathetic toward Africa.  Mrs. KF and I were watching TV the other evening when a commercial came on for a charity from New York that collects money to drill water wells in Africa to give villagers access to clean water.  It showed first some rather scurvy looking tribesmen getting water from what looked to be a mud puddle, then much happier folks getting it from a water well, it stated it cost about $5000 per well to drill one, not unreasonable.  But, suddenly a thought hit me like a bolt of lightening.  On every single 80 and 160 I own or rent, there is at least one hand dug well, dug by a couple people as soon as this country was settled in the middle and late 1800s.  25 to 60 feet deep, laid up with rock.  There are 2 on this home 80, 2 on the quarter south of us, there were 3 on a quarter west of here and 2 on the quarter west of that.  There are so many in fact that the Farm Bureau puts on well plugging demonstrations from time to time.  Are the Africans so simple minded or so lazy they cannot accomplish themselves what European settlers did here by hand 150 years ago?  Surely there is enough man power in a village to have dug a well over the last 200 years, as far as drilling them goes, these nations all have armies of some type with tanks and fighter jets, and it seems almost all of them have an AK 47, is there not enough cash to drill wells without having to ask those of us in other nations for the money?  Where is the UN in all of this, my understanding is our country foots 25% of the UN bill, what do they do with all that money?

 Then there is the issue of food aid.  When I look at Africa on the globe I see a huge land mass.  Is there really such a harsh climate that farming is doomed to fail and have millions go hungry every year, or are the governments just so mismanaged and corrupt they are incapable of making sure their own people get fed?  They were having a famine in one of those nations a few years ago and turned down free corn from the USA because it was GM, how stupid is that?

I have not been to Africa, I do not know the climate or the fertility of the land, but it appears to be a continent with terrible leadership.  I wonder how many more generations can blame European colonialism for that?

kansas, you really need to go there to appreciate the problems.

point taken about digging wells, but the concept of private property is a white ,european, christian state of mind, which africans, native americans etc strugle with.

if the well wont be mine, why dig it? a big guy from the next village will come and take it.As we are finding in the west, finance for crops is not easy to get, and money for tractors even harder.

the elephants might come and chase us away, etc

Communal ownership was the norm here 500 yrs ago, before the landlords started appropriating it and calling it their own.

glasshouse:

but the concept of private property is a white ,european, christian state of mind

I understand the point about 'private property' you are making glasshouse and within the wider context of a common philosophy the notion of private property is a determinant as to possible future actions. Why indeed should you dig a well for someone else's benefit?

The liberal elite in the UK and US make a great play on the so-called 'african social values' whereby an individual will work on behalf of the 'common good' and yet, here you quote an example of where they will not!

I was in Africa some years ago, and it struck me then that there are two underlying problems. The first is illustrated by the point you have already made viz. Why do something if someone else will take the benefit; and the second problem is that the white liberal elite in the West will not face up to the fact that the human being is basically self centred and is at its most productive when, was it Dr Johnson (or Adam Smith) who put it? "Man is no more innocently employed than when he in pursuit of his own interests."

I agree with KF. The more you do for Africa as opposed to with it the longer their problem will stay around.  Glasshouse makes the other interesting point that, what he calls, the Christian state of mind, is conducive to the kind of effort required to transform Africa as it transformed Europe, the US and much else of the world.

Finally; the concept of private property was around at the time of the Old Testament and the ancient Greeks and so is not particularly Christian.

 

 

 

 

All I know is if I was part of a "proud culture" that had been around for 100s or 1000s of years, and I had to drink water out of a mud puddle every day, I would try to talk a few of my comrades into digging a well, about 25 or 30 years ago.  Sorry to all those out there who disagree.  From my earliest memory I have seen programs on TV about mass starvation in Africa, tribal warfare(remember the Hutus and Tutsis??) African strongmen who lived lives of luxury whilst their subject went without.  Countless collections have been taken up in our church and others all over the country to battle one crisis after another, and still it is the same old thing.  My patience and sympathy is at its end.  My own ancestors were basically driven out of Europe by their elite, came to this country and survived some fairly harsh conditions.  If you cannot figure out on your own you need clean water and do something about it, maybe your culture isn't so great after all.

 These problems are deep seated in history as it was, and history as presented by those manipulating it for personal/political gain.

Native people were the San (bushman) hunter gatherers, displaced by Bantu tribes migrating from the north. These people owned livestock and personal possesions, land was apportioned by local chiefs, along the perenial rivers as no culture of well digging or damming of annual rivers existed, as for 6-7 months of the year there is no rain (dry winter season). Their  slash and burn agricultural practices meant moving every 4-5 years as the soil was exhausted. A trade in copper, gold, ivory and slaves led to the short period of prosperity when the Karanga built the walled settlements.

The Matabele arrived in 1856, raging war on the northern people they called " AMAshona" (people of no account) as they were inferior warriors, the Shona and Manica tribes were being decimated by the Matabele as the Shona ancestors had done to the San. The pioneers settled empty land as they were able to dig wells and dam rivers for water storage, less than 750 000 Bantu people occupied a country of 375 830 square kilometers, no need to displace anyone! 

Rhodes brought in education, brought in Dr Andrew Flemming to start a health program for the Bantu people (1893), at a time child mortality in the first year was 90%+, the 'Rhodesian' pioneers possibly sowed the seed of their own destruction, population growth and political corruption are the real problems in Africa, throwing money at them will not help, ag projects such as that in Kwara province, Nigeria, can work if finance is available directly to the farmers, quality training given to the people who will continue these projects at the end of the developing farmers' tenure, and the personal safety, and protection of property be guaranteed.

Those of us who stayed after independence, hoped against all historical evidence, that we could stay and help build a nation unlike any other in Africa. Africa has the mineral and agricultural potential to be the richest continent on earth, but untill the leadership can learn responsible government, and govern for the people, the poverty will never be alleviated.

kansasfarmer:

All I know is if I was part of a "proud culture" that had been around for 100s or 1000s of years, and I had to drink water out of a mud puddle every day, I would try to talk a few of my comrades into digging a well, about 25 or 30 years ago.

KF puts his finger on the 'spirit' that has made the US what it is today. Despite problems (and who hasn't got them) the US was built into a significant nation by the labours of the settlers, not by the aid agencies and pop musicians of the day.

I liked the last contribution from the guy who obviousely farmed in Zimbabwe and his comment reminded me of a black lady I met on the train home from the FW awards dinner last week. She had moved her family to Britain in the past year because she was fed up with the corruption and crime in South Africa. She has no hope for the country of her birth what can possibly justify my having any?