It took me a moment to realize why a jet should be flying low over my work this morning. It, yes only one, was practising for the Independence Day Celebrations on Monday. I suppose I should look up my notes for a year ago but really I couldn’t be bothered – I think there may have been 3 jets then. Whatever, 30 years down the line we are broke, importing just about everything from South Africa or China and the fat cats are stealing the place blind as fast as ever despite continuous “calls for sanctions to be removed”. I really don’t believe they even believe it themselves!
Nobody has been around begging for donations for the celebrations – yet. They will get short shrift from me. No doubt the masses will be coerced and forced onto busses to go and hear Comrade Bob spout the usual and the government media will fawn and exaggerate the numbers and the rest of us will take the day off. Maybe the Chinese will listen; after all he did go and celebrate his birthday this year at the Chinese Embassy!
Zimbabwe Absurdity 
Wow, 30 years…
Wow, your Bob sounds like such a patriot! =L
Comrade Bob is merely a symptom, or perhaps, as the doctors would say, a proximate cause of the decay. Changing him changes nothing. Check back in a few years and see if I’m right.
What has happened since 1980 is simply a reassertion of deep genetic/cultural patterns that are tens of thousands of years old, after a 100 year blinking of the eye.
If you change the people, you change everything that flows from it. (Demography=destiny. See Australia/Europe/U.S. in years to come. Plan accordingly. You’re welcome.)
Very little is for certain in Africa but it IS certain that nothing is going to change with Bob in charge. It MIGHT change when he goes. It’s like changing the captain of a football team – much better to change the whole team of course.
The new generation elsewhere in Africa is showing some promise (Ghana and Paul Kigame in Rwanda) but they are still some distance off here and there are disturbing signs that “plus de change, plus de meme chose” is all too true here. But hey, we LIKE clutching straws! I have noted elsewhere that there seems to be a drift of the next generation back to Zimbabwe and they are the very middle class that Bob so successfully managed to drive out over the years.