The New African's Power 100 List Is An Insult To Zimbabweans & Africa As A Whole

The June issue of The New African has a compilation of a 100 strong power-list of who is who in Africa which includes the illegitimate leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. His inclusion is a direct insult to Zimbabweans and even to Africa as a whole. How can anyone justify the inclusion of this monster who has presided the collapse of a once thriving and rich country to a basket case.

The New African’s editors must be smoking something or are in the pay of Zanu PF and Robert Mugabe to risk their reputation and tarnish their history by including a brutal dictator. Will The New African justify his inclusion as an influential African to surviving families and friends of his bloody Gukurahundi which killed roughly 20 000 victims in a genocide that the world chose to ignore. Can they also tell thousands of Zimbabweans who have disappeared and some whose remains were discovered in disused mines in Mount Darwin since Mugabe lost the referendum in 2000 and the subsequent blood smeared elections. The 7500 people who were displaced from their home and made homeless in 2005 in a guise of urban clean-up but were actually urban dwellers who have been a bane to Mugabe by continually voting MDC. Neither will millions of Zimbabweans who have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in South Africa, UK and all the others in different parts of the world. Today Zimbabwe’s unemployment is 95%, the majority of Zimbabweans left in Zimbabwe live the below the UN Poverty datum. It is unfathomable that the pace of collapse in Zimbabwe has rapidly outstripped even countries at war. Yet the New African has the chutzpah to include someone who has done more damage to any nation in living history as an influential figure.

They have also tarnished the images of real influential figures that have banded together with this dictator names that evoke respect and awe, luminaries such as Mandela, Mo Ibrahim, Desmond Tutu... just to mention a few. The list which if all circumstances are equal should be celebrated as it shows that Africans can hold they own in the dog eat dog world has been reduced to a joke by the inclusion of Mugabe. One starts wondering if The New African is in the pay of Zanu PF PR machine in order to boost Mugabe’s profile. In the absence of such a payment one wonders why, I mean why Mugabe given the body strewn debris he has left in the failed state of Zimbabwe. By publishing this insult the New African has lost its credibility and managed in the same stroke to alienate intelligent African readers who see the inclusion of Mugabe as patronage to his hate-filled diatribe against the whites, that remnant in Africa and the Western governments in ploy to hoodwink the observers.

For a magazine which has been printed since 1966 it’s a shame that they have failed to take their rightful position as guardians of democracy as purveyors of the fearless journalism not ass licking fools with a powerful platform.