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What wonder that every tendency is to excess,- radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some rise, some sink. The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling hell and the brothel...the better classes segregate themselves.... form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. W.E.B. Du Bois
The international corporate media including the BBC could also be spoiling things for MDC and Zimbabweans in particular. They should avoid over sensationalization which may exacerbate the situation in the country. Their increasingly antagonistic approach could be more damaging to the political negotiation process. However, as much as it is important for the foreign media to put Zimbabwe on the international spotlight, sometimes they exaggerate the crisis. Of late there has been a tendency by BBC to show horrific scenes of situations which have little bearing to the current crisis. We continue to see television footage of events that happened in 2000 at the height of land seizures as if it’s happening today. What the foreign corporate media is reporting on Zimbabwe today is exactly what Mugabe wants. He enjoys responding to vitriolic attacks and even gets stronger and more relentless when put in a position to defend what he believes to be colonialist or neo-colonialist agendas.
“Since the British came and went, they have done nothing for us after slavery. All their names are on the streets. You come into Freetown you see them, the only street with an African name is Siaka Stevens street,” says resident Sammy Conteh.
Sooner than one realized it, this shadowy elite group that also controls the music and entertainment industry began discouraging positive musical messages, and went off the beaten track to encourage and glamourize slackness, prostitution, murders, stealing and theiving, drug peddling and the like. There has never been a stronger case made for self-hate, cultural destruction and decadence as has been made in the last 10 years thorugh the instrumentality of the sub-genre of rap music known as “gangsta rap”.
Gangsta Rap was promoted to sub-urban pale skin children as a sort of fantasy excursion trip to the ghetto drug-land warfares. It was promoted to sugar brown children as the only way out of a criminally imposed state sponsored poverty…in other words, either do the drug peddling, do the thieving, do the shooting and become famous like 2live crew, 50cents, and Snoop Dog.
I have seen the horror of the death penalty and the violence it propels. It is time for a global ban. I have experienced the horror of being close to an execution. Not only during the apartheid era of South Africa, when the country had one of the highest execution rates in the world, but in other countries as well.
And I have witnessed the victims of the death penalty the authorities never speak of - the families of those put to death. I remember the parents of Napoleon Beazley, a young African-American man put to death in Texas after a trial tainted by racism. Their pain was evident as the killing of their son by the state to which they paid taxes approached. I can only imagine the unbearable emotional pain they went through as they said their final goodbye to their son on the day of his execution.
Excerpts from the report were given to the news media in advance for release this evening, but an embargo on it was broken by other news organizations. Despite the revised estimates, the epidemic remains one of the great scourges of mankind. This week's analysis predicts that 2.1 million people died of AIDS in the last year, and 2.5 million were newly infected - or about 6,800 every day.
Europe remains Africa's biggest donor, biggest trade partner, and the biggest market for Africa's exports by some distance. But in the new scramble for Africa's resources that supremacy is being eroded at breakneck speed by Beijing's appetite for African oil and other raw materials, and its conquest of African markets by flooding them with cheap consumer goods, soft loans, and huge infrastructure projects.
Unlike the EU, China's operations in Africa are unburdened by colonial hangovers or structures about human rights and good governance. Chinese trade with Africa rose 700% in the 1990s and has quadrupled to around $40bn (£20bn) since 2000, according to Chris Alden of the London School of Economics and Andy Rothman, a China analyst.
The new trade pacts are controversial and have been the focus of a campaign of criticism by NGOs and anti-poverty activists. But yesterday's rejection by African leaders on the final day of a three-day summit in Lisbon means that the EU could be put in the embarrassing position of imposing higher tariffs on African exports from the new year, further enraging the Africans.
"No one will make us believe we don't have the right to protect our economic fabric," said the African Union commission president, Alpha Oumar Konaré. He accused the EU of playing divide and rule in Africa.
Debts are bought and sold all the time, and Western courts have awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments to debt investors. Peru is the best-known example: In 2000, Elliott Associates, whose founder, Paul E. Singer, is a top Republican donor and a backer of Rudolph W. Giuliani's presidential campaign, won a $58 million judgment on debt it had bought in 1996 for $20 million.
Now African countries are in the sights of debt investors. In 1979, Zambia borrowed $15 million from Romania to buy agricultural equipment. Twenty years later, the two governments agreed to settle the old debt for about $3 million. But a hedge fund, Donegal International, bought it first and sued for about $55 million. This year, a British court ruled that Zambia must pay Donegal $15 million.
Emerging alongside this black market trade -- and obvious in the bars and on the sand once the sun goes down -- are thousands of elderly white women hoping for romantic, and legal, encounters with much younger Kenyan men. They go dining at fine restaurants, then dancing, and back to expensive hotel rooms overlooking the coast. "One type of sex tourist attracted the other," said one manager at a shorefront bar on Mombasa's Bamburi beach.
"Old white guys have always come for the younger girls and boys, preying on their poverty ... But these old women followed ... they never push the legal age limits, they seem happy just doing what is sneered at in their countries."
The pernicious effects of this kind of theology are all too evident in Nigeria today: all manner of criminals claiming to be men of God, dangerous armed robbers, thieving governors and political leaders who have wasted our common wealth and even lives suddenly converting and clutching the bible while they wait to 'enjoy' their loot and receive more local and national honours; many millions of Nigerians who fill the churches and revival grounds believing that after a few hours of 'repentance' they will obtain the redeeming grace of God's mercy that instantly gives them the insurance cover for greater future 'risks'.
Essays & Commentaries 
