The Wardman Wire

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On the Wardman Wire we covered the atrocities and abuses committed by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU movement in the run up to the 2008 Election. This article is a cross-post from Ekklesia about the continuing plight of refugees evicted by force. The photo is a still taken from the Zimbabwe Election 2008 Campaign video I have embedded at the end of the piece.

What moral standing do we have over Mugabe?
The latest cholera outbreak looks set to kill thousands and one of the most vicious and callous dictators in the world today is standing idly by blaming British colonialism and just about everyone else he can. Surely the time for talking is reaching its conclusion and the time [...]

I’ve wanted to return to covering developments in Zimbabwe.

The BBC reports that a deal has been reached between Mr Mugabe and Mr Tsvangarai:

Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and President Robert Mugabe have reached a deal to share power.

After mediating four days of talks in Harare, South African President Thabo Mbeki said the deal would be signed and made public on Monday.

Mr Mugabe has not yet commented. The two sides had already agreed that Mr Tsvangirai would be prime minister with Mr Mugabe staying on as president.

But negotiations had faltered over how the two sides were to share power.

Mr Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, was first to announce the deal as the talks ended.

Later, Mr Mbeki told a news conference: “An agreement has been reached about all the matters on the agenda of the negotiations.”

We won’t see the detail until Monday. I have no idea whether it will work; I am sure that it will require an enormous commitment from Civil Society to police their government.

One of the few good things that can be said about Mr Mugabe is that he is creating a country of Maths geniuses, and future weightlifting champions.

Nowhere else in the world does your average 6 or 8 year old sent out on an errand to buy a loaf of bread have to deal with numbers in the millions tens of millions without parental help, carrying currency around by the bucketload.

This note is 10 million Zimbabwe dollars. As you can see from the date, it is now obsolete.

Let’s go backwards through history to explain the Mathematical Genuises and look at the price of bread – remember that this staple is price-controlled by the government.