Netters,
This article smells of red herring to me. I kind of read it from the right to the left. But may be it just me. What do you think?
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Wrong timing for Mugabe support
EditorialOct 8, 2004
|
President Yoweri Museveni's statement in support of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's land-grabbing policy has raised eyebrows and set tongues wagging.
Museveni can be a skillful diplomat, but it's hard to resist asking what message he thought he was sending to investors with his public avowal of support for Mugabe.
Even those who share Museveni's instinct to express solidarity with land-deprived Zimbabweans agree that his stance was unwarranted and a blatant attempt to reconstruct Mugabe's tattered image - not worth the price.
Whatever his definitely calculated motive, Museveni's timing could not have been worse.
He spoke in support of Mugabe's brutal, anti-investment policy barely a day after the showcase of our campaign to attract investors, the Uganda Manufacturers Association trade fair, opened in Kampala.
Potential investors from about 30 countries, with 600 exhibitions, were expecte
d to
join local seekers of business opportunity at the weeklong fair that is designed as a one-stop deal-cutting centre.
Unfortunately for the trade fair organisers and the Uganda Investment Authority strategists who have been attempting to lure some of the Mugabe-wary White farmers to Uganda, Museveni appears to have buried the deal.
For many Ugandans, recent TV images of Zimbabwean commercial farms being ransacked and handed over to clueless party youth-wingers, were reminiscent of former President Idi Amin Dada's expulsion of Asian entrepreneurs in the early 1970s.
Many of us watched with anxiety and pity. We knew what would happen even before that economy started to crumble.
So what aspect of the land grabbing policy does Museveni support? Is it the purported empowering of the landless Africans or the forceful deprivation of the White farmers?
Is this the price we must pay for what Museveni claims Uganda owes Zimbabwe as "leaders of the liberation
movement?" It smacks of the same unprogressive streak that drove Libyan leader, Muamar Gadhaffi, to lecture Ugandans about the rights of revolutionaries. |
� 2004 The Monitor Publications
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It seems to me that Yoweri is preparing a place to flee to incase things go terribly wrong which is already pretty clear to him now. Does anyone remember Mr. Aziz in Baghdad when the American bombs were falling from left to right? Yoweri would rather flee to Zimbabwe than anywhere else in Africa or the Wolrd for that matter. The reasons are simple. The main reason is that he would still control things in Uganda, especially through the southern African whites. He failed to court the Kenyan whites. His stakes lie with the white African communities.
BWambuga.
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
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