Poli

Dear Shebeeners and dear readers,


I am not tate Oneword who goes off on a topic or Comrade_007 who waxes lyrically about democracy and the faults of the ruling party.

What I want to do here is to look at some of the global , continental, regional and home issues that make headlines during the day or over a weekend.

Take now the issue of Thabo Mbeki and the alleged letter from Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC where Mbeki is for all accounts and purposes accused of heresy towards Africa and the spirit of the African people. I doubt that the Sunday Times, a newspaper with a massive reputation, would publish such a letter on its front page and make it available to readers on its website.

Mbeki again acted without thinking by denying that there ever was such a letter. Come on, we are not stupid! The full verbatim text is even published on the Shebeen. Does anybody think either Shebeen, the owner of the site, or Oneword, the man with quite a reputation on the Shebeen would stoop so low as to publish something that was not cleared and srccutinised. The Sunday Times, as the most popular English paper in SA, cerainly would not be as naïve if there were any doubts.

So why deny it in the first place? The truth will be revealed at some stage and then Mbeki and his parrotting juniors will have to explain even more. Not that Mbeki has the reputation currently of being the sharpest knife in the SA political drawer anyway!

He should have just acknowledge the damn thing and called it the work of a fruitcake. Immediately the whole issue would have been defuse. Only the MDC and Tvsangirai would have been angry; not the whole nation and the whole world - because today all the papers are full with that story and it will have repercussions everywhere. And his reputation will be even further down the drain.

Windhoek's City Fathers also had their commonsense anywhere except on top of their shoulders in their heads. How did they ever believe that they could get away with not paying? And that with all the media looking for things that go wrong in their administration?

At least the articles in the weekly had the effect of swelling the city's coffers with immidiate effect because everybody else who though himself or herself to be a celebrity probably raced to the municipality to pay of their arrears as well.

So, as from tomorrow everybody will be in Rome to do as the Romans did. Looking for an alternative to fossil fuels is not new; it has just received a greater impetus. I agree that we need to cut down on oil, but not to the detriment of feeding our people on the continent. The easy money that can be had by planting jatropha, maize, wheat and even sorghum to be made into ethanol is definitely counterproductive. The farmers will rather plant that because they know that have a ready and willing market prepared to pay for the crops, instead of tending the crops and making sure they are of the best quality they can get.

For ethanol it doesn't matter if the cob or ear of corn is not as good a quality as the consumer market requires.

Cutting down trees and freeing fields for this is also not on. The rain forests are the lungs of the planet and the fields could have been used to plant food for the close to 1 billion (that is a 1 with 000 000 000 000 noughts) malnourished people in the world, but mainly in the THIRD world. It is the same as cutting off your nose to spite your face - as somebody on the Shebeen has said somewhere.

Moderation in everything is the keyword.

See you tomorrow or so.