Mbeki ignored judges on Mugabe’s stolen poll

President Thabo Mbeki’s role as a mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis took another knock yesterday after disclosures that he ignored the advice of two judges he commissioned to observe that country’s 2002 general elections. Mbeki commissioned judges Sisi Khampepe and Dikgang Moseneke to observe the controversial Zimbabwean election in 2002 - which the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) still claims was rigged. On their return the judges wrote a scathing report on the conduct of the election and submitted it to Mbeki. This was despite the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the government and the Southern African Development Community giving a thumbs up, saying the election result “represented the will of the Zimbabwean people”.

n an article written exclusively for Business Day and published elsewhere in the paper, Gauntlett said the tricks used in the 2002 report are likely to be used again in the presidential runoff necessitated by the lack of a clear winner in the March 29 elections. The details of the report submitted to Mbeki six years ago make it almost impossible he is unaware of the deceptions and illegalities perpetrated by Mugabe to cling to power. His unwillingness to blow the whistle on Mugabe - which dates back beyond the 2002 poll - is the reason Tsvangirai last month asked Mbeki to step down as the lead negotiator for the Southern African Development Community’s mediation efforts on Zimbabwe. But while Tsvangirai has a difficult relationship with Mbeki, behind the scenes meetings between the MDC and Mbeki are continuing. Business Day understands that Mbeki, who visited Mugabe last week to resuscitate his mediation efforts, has been engaging the MDC in behind the scenes talks intended to break the political impasse in Zimbabwe. Business Day, SA

Yobs 1 New Labour 0

So statistics have finally confirmed what we all suspected. Anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOS) are a waste of time. Laughed aside by the majority of those who are handed them (61% of 10-17 years old punished with them have completely ignored them) now the courts have stopped bothering to issue them.

Some Labour ministers have tried to spin the reduction in the numbers issued to show that they work as crime is on the decrease. That highlights why Labour got hammered in the recent local elections. People know that there are more out-of-control teenagers on the loose across the land; why don’t the politicians?

In his own way, Mbeki is as guilty as Mugabe

If anyone was in any doubt that Robert Mugabe was preparing to steal the presidential election re-run, the sight of the appalling President Mbeki of South Africa greeting Mugabe at Harare airport would have made their minds up.

Mbeki, the biggest political embarrassment on the world stage, is supposedly in Zimbabwe to help broker a solution to the crisis. It’s as impartial as asking Tony Blair to arrange a deal between George Bush and Osama bin Laden. Few outside the apologists who seem so prevalent in south African politics believe Mbeki has any credibility or impartiality.

He is being used to give credibility to both Mugabe and his election. South African monitors will again say everything is hunky dory even as the beaten bodies of the MDC supporters are carried past them. In his own way, Mbeki is every bit as responsible for the genocide inside Zimbabwe as Mugabe.

Zimbabwe unfree and unfair electoral run-off

The situation in Zimbabwe continues to deteriorate as the forces of Robert Mugabe do their best to ensure that opposition supporters are bullied, tortured, intimidated and starved into subservience. Despite Morgan Tsvangirai’s correct decision to participate in the second round of the presidential elections, few have any faith that they will be remotely free or fair.

Yesterday it was revealed that the loathsome war veterans were being equipped with police uniforms so they could get inside polling stations with no other intention that to intimidate MDC supporters. The whole weight of the state is being unleashed in a final bid to maintain Mugabe’s dictatorship.

Genocide in Burma

Earlier in the week when Burma was hit by a cyclone, we became aware of an appalling natural disaster. The world’s aid agencies responded well, but they came up against the self-interested and corrupt military regime that runs Burma. The refusal of the faceless generals to allow most of the aid and almost all the aid workers into the country, while abjectly failing to address the catastrophe themselves, means that they are now guilt of genocide.

In fear that any foreign intervention might expose the excesses of their evil regime both to the world and to their own people, their putting themselves before their people may cost hundreds of thousands of lives, the majority of who would probably been saved if the borders had been opened.

The generals are every bit as culpable of genocide as any of the war criminals who have been hauled to justice in the Hague. When the immediate crisis has been addressed, the world needs to ensure they are called to account.

Labour misses the bleeding obvious

A week after their electoral meltdown, Labour appear to have decided that all that is wrong is that their message is not being got across and you can barely move for ministers and those with under-threat majorities spouting about “listening to the people” … which does raise the question what the hell have they been doing for the last 11 years.

If any of them really wanted to know why middle England (and Wales and Scotland) have deserted in droves, they should look at the headlines today.

• UK pays the highest car taxes because of “a 50 per cent increase in the amount of car-related tax since Labour came to power”.
• A convicted rapist sexually assaulted and murdered a teenage girl after a council was told he could not be evicted because it would breach his human rights.
• A plumber with a heart condition spent 18 hours in a police cell after being accused of dropping an apple core while on the way to collect a prescription for his wife.
• A retired postmistress tackled a youth with a rolled-up copy of church council minutes … because she was disgusted with the language he and his friends used when she stopped them playing football near flowers she had nurtured … the 13-year-old boy’s mother complained to police that her son had been slapped. Now Mrs Harding, 63, is facing a police investigation into claims of common assault.

One day, one newspaper. People are fed up with the criminal being given every protection while the victims are penalised; of the petty bureaucrats who interfere in every aspect of their lives; of the massive tax burden facing everyone. Until Labour addresses that, it is heading for a complete drubbing in 2010.

The great telecom rip-off

Finally OFCOM are poised to put an end to the appalling rip-off that are 0870 telephone numbers. Many companies use these or 0845 numbers, and a few variants thereof, which cost the users more than a conventional call, considerably more if you call from a mobile. Every wondered why you are kept hanging on for an age going through a myriad of options only to be held in a queue? Well, it’s in the companies’ interests because they share the income deriving from the call with BT. So the longer they keep you on hold, the more they earn.

One of the best web sites around is the superb saynoto0870.com which lists alternative landlines to bypass the national-rate premium numbers. This is one site that can save you a lot of money.

Ken finally found out

Ken Livingstone has gone. After eight years, one of the slickest manipulators of the media was undone by something way out of his control – Gordon Brown’s leadership of the Labour party. Livingstone has traditionally bucked the trend of national politics and so despite the national meltdown in Labour’s vote, he still might have been expected to hold on against an opponent who polarised voters.

But a combination of the national shunning of Labour, the congestion charge and increasing concerns about sleaze within his own regime did for Ken. It is no bad thing. Anyone who can remember his leadership of the old GLC in the 1980s knows how dangerous he can be, and not much has changed.
The Evening Standard has waged a war against Livingston for some time and, perhaps, in the end, their campaign tipped the balance.

The act was never convincing. For, at heart, Red Ken remained the classic Marxist filled with bitter resentment and a fondness for infantile gesture politics. He never abandoned his radical ideology, whether it be in courting Muslim extremists or in persecuting London motorists. Equally true to his statist outlook, he created a sprawling bureaucracy and doubled Londoners’ tax bills during his ten years in power.

He presided over a soaring increase in the budget for the 2012 London Olympics, up from £3.3billion to more than £9 billion – and then had the cheek to admit that the first estimates had been ‘a con trick’. The real ‘con-trick’, though, was the pretence that he had any real managerial competence.

Throughout his career, his real skill always been in political manipulation rather than administration. ‘I love plotting and meetings,’ he once said. His carefully nurtured reputation as a cheeky, wise-cracking lovable rogue had been tarnished.

As befits a lover of newts, there was always something reptilian about this town hall Machiavelli as he twisted his way to the top of London politics. Now, at last, the curtain has fallen on this saga of socialist scheming and endless extravagance.

Preparing for electoral fraud

There is a growing fear that the recent news from Zimbabwe that the parliamentary election results stood in the 23 disputed results is little more than a ploy by Mugabe so that when the real fiddling happens, which it will in the presidential count, his lackeys will be able to refer back and claim that the earlier decision shows how fair things really are.

The woeful Herald newspaper, the mouthpiece of the regime that makes no pretence to be anything other than slavishly obedient, suggests at as much in a comically inept editorial.

“The recounting was done after some anomalies were discovered amid reports that some officials fiddled with figures to give the MDC-T victory by any means. These fraudsters reportedly received payments in hard currency to tilt the balance in favour of MDC-T. All these years Zanu-PF has been accused of rigging elections. Zanu-PF has been winning clearly because of its policies which are people oriented. If Zanu-PF has been rigging all along, it could’ve rigged these polls, but that is not its game.

“It is the MDC-T and its Western handlers, who were trying to rig their way to power, they infiltrated ZEC to achieve their nefarious agenda.

“The fraud, however, backfired and blew into their faces and everything was exposed. They are now crying foul and blaming the Government. What the MDC-T should realise is that if ever they thought they won these elections, (which they did not) it was because of protest votes.”

It almost takes you back to the long-forgotten days when the eastern European media uttered such tripe.

In the name of vanity 2

We love to laugh at the antics of Americans, often choosing to overlook the reality that what happens there inevitably occurs here sooner or later. So check this out …

In 2007, 11.7 million cosmetic procedures were performed in the USA, with 91% of those procedures done on women; the top five being: breast augmentation, liposuction, eyelid surgery, abdominoplasty and breast reduction.

Parties to share the experience of cosmetic procedures have even begun to rise in popularity. “Coming out” parties—parties in which procedures such as Botox injections are given to guests—have become all the rage for everyone from Hollywood startlets to suburban housewives and many people in between.

It might be a generational thing or a class thing even, but even were I 19 again I would prefer to go out and have a few drinks to having someone stick a needle in my lip to ensure that I spent the next month looking as if I had been punched by a nightclub bouncer.

Click here for the earlier post on botox.