Tragedy reveals itself as farce in Zimbabwe:
Zimbabwe has come up with a bizarre proposal to solve the food crisis threatening half its population with starvation. It wants to bring in obese tourists from overseas so that they can shed pounds doing manual labour on land seized from white farmers. The so-called Obesity Tourism Strategy was reported last week in The Herald, a government organ whose contents are approved by President Robert Mugabe’s powerful information minister, Jonathan Moyo. Pointing out that more than 1.2 billion people worldwide are officially deemed to be overweight, the article exhorted Zimbabweans to “tap this potential”. “Tourists can provide labour for farms in the hope of shedding weight while enjoying the tourism experience,” it said, adding that Americans spent $6 billion a year on “useless” dieting aids. “Tour organisers may promote this programme internationally and bring in tourists, while agriculturalists can employ the tourists as free farm labour. The tourists can then top it all by flaunting their slim bodies on a sun-downer cruise on the Zambezi or surveying the majestic Great Zimbabwe ruins.”
Sounds pretty great, eh? Fly to Zimbabwe, try to find a farm that hasn't been turned into a moonscape by President Mugabe's hideous "land reforms", work there for free, and then show off your buff new bod on a luxurious cruise up the beautiful Zambezi river.
The article uses this anecdote as a hook on which to hang an observation about Robert Mugabe's continuing detachment from reality, and from there it's the same old miserable story about how a nominal policy of restitution for Rhodesian excess turned into a welfare program for the politically-connected and misery and destitution for everyone else.
Apparently, one-third of the population has fled the country.
As Tim Burke points out, there are legitimate questions about land reform in Africa that need to be confronted, but Mugabe's shenanigans make the answers to these questions even more remote.
Awful, awful, awful.
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Posted by dave at November 29, 2004 11:56 AM | TrackBack