Friday 22 May 2009

Guantanemo Bay

As readers of the BBC web site are being invited to propose suggestions for Guantanemo Bay, here is mine:

Turn it into a tourist monument to illuminate the consequences of corrupt leadership.

A glass cage in which the top ten of the Bush administration would be displayed for 24 hours a day, in orange suits, for the remainder of their lives would be a fitting return for the harm the Bush men have visited upon the planet and a small step towards rehabilitating Americas image within the expedient of transparent accountability.

I think this would attract huge crowds - this living monument to the extremes to which corrupt power was enabled by the greed of a few and the compliant idiocy of another.

Americans could vote on who the top ten who should occupy this cell would be. I am guessing Dick Cheney would be a shoe in.

Tuesday 19 May 2009

Chikurubi Prison.

'You judge a nation and its people by the way they treat their prisoners.'

Chikurubi prison lies 12 miles east of Harari. Chikurubi prison is a monument to the relationship between Zuma and the guest of honor at his recent inauguration, Robert Mugabe.
Without Zuma's support for Mugabe it is a certainty that Chikurubi prison would not provide so chilling a testimony to Mugabe's malign influence.

Of the 1,300 inmates at Chikurubi in the past year, more than 700 have died of what is described in the Daily Telegraph as 'revolting conditions.'
The revolting condition most affecting the residents of Chikurubi is the inescapable fact that Zuma and Mugabe's ongoing friendship is directly and unavoidably at the heart of every Zuma/Mugabe sponsored death in Zimbabwe.

In a nutshell - while Mugabe quaffs champagne (Imported from France and not the excellent South African variety) with Zuma - inmates of Chikurubi prison are left to ruminate on how Black African leaders continue to demonstrate their inability to rise above the constraints of the Muntuism that is their legacy.

More than half of those admitted to Chikurubi in the past year are dead.

And the irony is that the same ignorant halfwits whose attitude of 'I didn't vote for the ANC - I voted for Zuma, because he understands us' represent the same demographic as those populating Chikurubi prison. The ignorant deluded poor empowering the morally bankrupt rich leadership to kill off the ignorant disempowered poor.

Go Jacob Zuma. Sponsor of Chikurubi, proving every action has a reaction.