Zimbabwean officials have gone giddy at the prospect of attracting Russian investment in what appears to be a diehard attempt at stalling the inevitable failure of their president’s ‘look east’ policy.
Recently an Indian firm pulled out of a massive steel production deal presumably because although they’d come to manage the state-owned iron and steel works, the government felt it best to retain control even after the government had recognised that their management was to blame for killing productivity at the steel producer.
The bottom line is that although the East has shown interest in helping (1, 2) President Mugabe sustain an unsustainable regime by allowing the president to believe that eventually it’ll work, it won’t. In time, the East is going to want to be paid and, given that Zimbabwe can’t even pay its phonebills at the moment, how is it going to pay for all the infrastructure development and loans for oil? Socialism may sound friendly and altruistic, but it's unlikely the Chinese or Russians are going to be too pleased when Zimbabwe can't pay.
So while China may be able to show how socialism and capitalism can be creatively mixed, perhaps the Russians can show Mugabe a thing-or-two about how nationalism failed the world’s biggest country, leaving its people poor and without food.
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2 comments:
This is pretty interesting - seems Zimbabwe has bought itself an antique mail control client.
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MailMarshal (an automated content monitoring gateway) has not delivered the following message:
Message: B4523b9ac0000.000000000001.0001.mml
From: peter@the-blog-wars.blogspot.com
To: zimbabwe@zimbabwe.co.zw
Subject: Eastern 'medicine' may further hurt Zimbabwe
This is due to automatic rules that have determined that the intended recipient is not authorized to receive messages that have political content.
If you believe the message was business related please contact zimbabwe@zimbabwe.co.zw and request that the message be released to its intended recipient. If no contact is made within 5 days the message will automatically be deleted.
MailMarshal Rule: Content Security (Inbound) : Political
Email Content Security provided by NetIQ MailMarshal.
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The solution to the problem is actually quite simple. You can zip the email and send it as an attachment, leaving the Zimbabwean government blissfully unaware of anything “political”, or you can misspell words that would be picked up. Mugabe becomes Mug@be and Zimbabwe, Zimb@bwe. It’s not rocket science, but then again, neither is this feeble attempt at blocking my email. While blocking porn in Singapore makes sense, Mug@be seems to have missed the logic boat in trying to sustain the unsustainable.
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