If you don't heart unchecked corporate globalisation, does that mean you love Robert Mugabe? A hero of the anti-apartheid movement asks
Pilger:
“How are we going to stop this seemingly irrevocable ‘progress’ of South Africa to a totalitarian one-party state?”
Pilger cites the ANC's purchase of 24 Hawk fighter jets at £17m each, “by far the most expensive option”, according to a House of Commons report. Then he looks at Britain’s Department for International Development:
Although required by law not to spend money other than on poverty reduction, DfID is, in reality, a privatising agency that greases the way for multinationals to take over public services. In 2004, the department paid the Adam Smith Institute, an extreme right-wing think tank, £6.3m for plans to “reform” the “public sector” in South Africa, promoting “business-to-business” links between British and South African companies whose singular interest is profit.
Once the wretched Robert Mugabe is gone, Zimbabwe will get the same treatment. Offering a billion pounds’ worth of “aid”, the British government will lead the return of capital, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to restore what was, long before Mugabe’s wrecking, one of the most exploited and unequal societies in Africa.
Western hypocrisy explains why Mugabe can still get a standing ovation from impoverished black Africans.
This was not so much an endorsement of his despotism as a reminder that most South Africans had not forgotten one of the ANC’s “unbreakable promises” – that almost a third of arable land would be redistributed by 2000. Today the figure is less than 4 per cent.
