Thursday, June 4, 2009

Economic Sanctions

The ZANU PF regime seems to be obsessed with the ’illegal economic sanctions’ that have been applied to ‘the ordinary people of Zimbabwe’ and have ‘devastated the economy’. A headline in The Herald of Tuesday the 2nd June reads “Sanctions hit local British pensioners’ and goes on to report that ‘the Western imposed economic sanctions have hit pensioners hard prompting the British government to airlift the first 5 of 500 elderly citizens out of Zimbabwe’. No mention of the humungous efforts of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe printing press which is the real reason that pensions have been eroded. I should know. I am a pensioner whose pension has been eroded. Where once my pension was enough to send my son to private school in Matabeleland for a year, now it cannot buy me a beer. And the cause of all this? Inflation. And the cause of inflation? Printing money and even worse, creating electronic money, neither being backed by production.

The Comment on the Leader Page of the same issue relates to EU aid recently channelled into the country to enable some resuscitation of the sugar industry and informs us ‘the country has been reeling from Western imposed economic sanctions which have negatively impacted against all sectors of the economy and social strata’ and implies that once again it is Western imposed sanctions that have been the cause of the collapse of the sugar industry. No mention of devastating farm invasions that have all but ruined the entire agricultural economic base.

One has to ask whether the writers of this Goebbels like garbage actually believe it themselves. If you repeat a lie often enough and loud enough…….!

I wonder how History will record the events of the last 10 years in Zimbabwe.

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