Here Comes The HotStepper...

Religion is the Opium of the People

Karl Marx wasn’t kidding. Police in the Parisian suburb of La Verriere failed find a trace of any other hallucinogenic drug after a family of 12 leapt from their second floor balcony claiming to be fleeing Beelzebub. According to police, the incident occurred when a wife awoke to find her husband moving about naked in the room. She began screaming 'It's the devil! It's the devil!' and the man ran into the next room where the others were watching TV. One woman grabbed a knife and stabbed him before others pushed him out through the front door. When he forced his way back in, the terrified lot leapt from the balcony screaming 'Jesus! Jesus!' Inexplicably, the nudist also leapt from the balcony. Detectives are treating it as a case of mistaken identity.


Zimbabwe’s Governor of the Reserve Bank, Gideon Gono, likes to portray himself as very religious. He is apt to quote the Bible in his speeches, sometimes adding a few revelations of his own, such when he divulged God’s advice to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: "My Son, take it like a man …" Last week, however, it was reported that Sabina Mugabe, the younger sister of octagenarian president Robert Mugabe, had had a revelation of her own to make regarding Gono. Shortly before she died three months ago, she reportedly told her brother that Gono and Mugabe’s wife of 14 years, Grace, had been making a cuckold of him. Though the President is said to be "ready to go to war," things might still turn out OK for the former tea-boy. As one intelligence official put it, "once Mugabe hears something like that, I think someone will go and meet God."

Many self-declared religious types abhor any discussion of sex outside the home. In keeping with this, an Australian church has kicked out a woman who dared to act in an impotence treatment ad. Libby Ashby told the Melbourne-based radio station, 3AW, that she had been “disfellowshipped” from her local congregation, following her starring role in a commercial where seems to use her husband’s erect penis as a stepping stone to higher things. In the ad, after she asks for his help to reach a container above the fridge, he opens up his dressing gown to reveal a sight which the viewer can’t see – but which she is clearly happy about. Ashby then steps onto the hidden prop and gets the jar. The single mother said she knew the advert would be controversial with church-goers but a lack of funds left her with little option. “My Visa was calling out for mercy,” she revealed. The church is unlikely to be so charitable. “They have said I will not be reinstated until the advert comes off air,” Ashby said.

In a bid to restore morality and fight the vice of sexual harassment, the mayor of the Italian sea-side town of Castellammare di Stabia, south of Naples, has ordered his police to fine women who wear 'very short' miniskirts or tops that display too much cleavage. Luigi Bobbio, who was elected on Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party ticket, won a council vote to ban anything that doesn’t fully cover underwear. Police, who now have the authority to hand out fines of up to $450, were however cautioned against being too zealous identifying offenders. "They won't need to carry out checks up close. One glance will be enough to judge," said mayor Bobbio, who also wishes to criminalize blasphemy and playing football in public parks.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s sermons about the evils of corruption have a decidedly hollow ring to them. While campaigning for re-election three years ago, he promised to run a clean government. Now, barely a week after he and Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, were forced to suspended William Ruto, a cabinet minister facing graft charges, another, Foreign Affairs Minister Moses Wetangula has resigned (or in the parlance of the day, stepped aside to allow for investigations) after he was named in a parliamentary report looking into shenanigans surrounding the acquisition of property by Kenyan embassies abroad. And that may not be the end of it. Other members of the “clean” cabinet with the proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads include Kiraitu Murungi (under whose watch $100 million worth of oil disappeared in the Triton Oil scandal), Prof. Sam Ongeri (in charge when another $100 million in free education funds went missing) and Naomi Shaaban (whose ministry was blamed for the loss of $2.5 million meant of resettling the internally displaced).

The Fat Lady Sings

What does Robert Mugabe have in common with 1990’s fake pop stars, Milli Vanilli? “Blame it on the rain” was the duos last number one hit before their lip-synching scandal broke. It also happens to be Uncle Bob’s go-to explanation for Zimbabwe’s food shortages. During his recent visit to the World Expo in Shanghai, China, the octogenarian president said his country’s poor harvests were as a result of “inclement weather.” Many would however blame it on his 20-year reign, citing the disastrous land reform programme which crippled the agricultural sector, the bedrock of Zimbabwe’s economy, and bankrupted the country. Mugabe, though, is not one to dwell on his countrymen’s misfortunes. He was later photographed engaging in some retail therapy in Hong Kong, where he owns a house and his daughter attends university. He reportedly spent the weekend shopping for high-end suits and shoes in the city's Kowloon district.

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"When you're in love with a beautiful woman, you watch your friends" goes a popular 1970s single by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. Africa’s last absolute monarch, King Mswati III of Swaziland, should have been paying heed. While he was attending to State business in Taiwan, his childhood friend, Justice Minister Ndumiso Mamba, was nabbed in bed with the Mswati’s 12th wife, Queen Nothando Dube, a former Miss Teen beauty contestant. The pair were busted by state security agents, who had apparently been following them for weeks, at the lavish Royal Villas Hotel. Though Swazi laws prohibit dishonouring the monarch, this did not stop the agents snapping photos of Mamba emerging head first from underneath the 22-year-old royal's bed where he was attempting to hide. The images later made their way onto the web. Mamba was immediately arrested on the orders of the King, whose mother - the Indlovukazi or Great She-Elephant - has reportedly sent a delegation to Mamba's village to lay charges of "trespassing into another man's home". He could face the death penalty if found guilty, while mother-of-two Dube would be banished from the kingdom.

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In 2003, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, the Dixie Chicks, a Texas based country group, declared: “We don't want this war, this violence." Seven years, and over a million Iraqi civilian casualties later, the last US combat troops have left the devastated country. However, 50,000 are staying behind to, according to their commanding officer, Gen. Ray Odierno, “prevent foreign powers from meddling with the new government.” Apparently the Americans do not consider themselves a foreign power in a country six thousand miles from home.

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The US musical duo, Wilderland, and some top music industry veterans recently released a new song titled “Fragile Day” which was written about two years prior to the BP Gulf oil spill, and features lyrics about fish swimming and dying in an oil-filled ocean. To counter such impressions, US President Barack Obama had a White House photographer take a picture oh him and his daughter, Sasha, swimming in the sea off Florida last weekend. The official picture was intended to provide evidence that the region's beaches are back to normal. However, it soon emerged that the President was actually trying to pull a fast one. The private beach on which it was taken, off Alligator Point in St Andrew Bay, north-west Florida, isn't technically in the gulf.

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South Africa’s journalists may soon be singing the blues following government plans to institute a so-called “media tribunal” as well regulate what can be reported on and what constitutes a state secret. The government claims the law under consideration is necessary to limit the damage caused by media houses and their newspapers which they claim represent only a narrow, predominantly “white” interest. Predictably, the controversial head of ANC’s Youth league, Julius Malema, who has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, declared that the media must be regulated because "they think they are untouchable". The move comes in the wake of news reports that Ebrahim Rasool, who in 2008 was fired as Western Cape premier partly because of allegations that he had bribed journalists to report favourably about him, had been appointed South Africa's ambassador to the United States.

The Great Migration

Is Zimbabwe Africa's Iraq?

The similarities are uncanny. Two nations, both led by megalomaniacal demagogues with delusions of grandeur, both involved in costly (and ultimately failed) foreign adventures, both considered international pariahs and both subject to debilitating international sanctions. And if Prime Minister Raila Odinga has his way, Robert Mugabe's Zimbawe may soon have something else in common with Saddam Hussein's Iraq: US-style regime change this time delivered by African Union troops.

The proposal, which has received Archbishop Desmond Tutu's blessing, is unlikely to succeed on two counts. First, it is unclear whether the famously spineless AU is up to the task. Its record and that of its predecessor the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) hardly inspires confidence. The deployment of an under-resourced and undrmanned AU peacekeeping force in Darfur in 2004 did little to quell the violence there and the peacekeepers frequently became targets themselves. Even faced with Zimababwe's unpaid and unmotivated army (which resembles its DRC counterpart by the day), it is by no means certain whether the AU could muster enough troops and resources to get the job done. 

Secondly, while Zimbabwe's economic problems have undoubtedly been exacerbated by the undeclared sanctions imposed upon it by the US, it is also accurate to say that it is Mugabe's myopia and greed that led to the crisis in the first place (the economy was in free-fall way before the enactment of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act in December 2001, through which "Zimbabwe’s access to finance and credit facilities was effectively incinerated"). Many of the African countries that would be contributing troops to unseat Mugabe are similarly affleicted, even though the symptoms of economic malaise have not been demonstrated in as dramatic a fashion. It is unlikely that the likes of Meles Zenawi, Yoweri Museveni and Mwai Kibaki (to name but a few) would have anything constructive to add to a discussion on restoration of democracy in Zimbabwe.

Perhaps Africa's rulers should first remove the straw from their own eyes before tackling the log in Mugabe's?

In the meantime, I think the continued denial of international finance and credit facilities to Zimbabwe is abominable. Just like the 12-year Iraqi sanction regime, it hurts the people while doing little to dislodge the regime. While I support continued international pressure to oust Mugabe or at the very least secure a transitional power-sharing agreement, inducing a full-scale collapse of the country's economy is beyond the pale.