For years, Zimbabwe has been the center of financial humor writing. The perfect, satiric foil to any market economy. Bored financial journalists will be pleased to hear that Mugabe's opponent has, reportedly, won 47.9 percent of the vote, too little to avoid a runoff with President Mugabe.
In celebration, we give you some of Mugabe's classic quotes:
Where money for projects has not been found, we will print it.Cricket civilizes people and creates good gentlemen I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.
It may be necessary to use methods other than constitutional ones.
Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy!
Our votes must go together with our guns. After all, any vote we shall have, shall have been the product of the gun. The gun which produces the vote should remain its security officer - its guarantor. The people's votes and the people's guns are always inseparable twins.
So, Blair keep your England, and let me keep my Zimbabwe.
Some people are contriving ways and means of making us collapse.
The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.
We are no longer going to ask for the land, but we are going to take it without negotiating.
We don't mind having sanctions banning us from Europe. We are not Europeans.
We pride ourselves as being top, really, on the African ladder... We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards.
I will lead my government in the direction where we dismiss the IMF as an institution that we can relate to, and that is coming very soon.
Your vote will ensure you benefit from the agricultural mechanization programme.
They keep raising and raising prices, and we wonder whether they want to raise the prices until the prices reach heaven ... Some are doing it for the elections saying: Let's make life hard for the people so that they cry and blame it all on Mugabe's government. Getting 1 000 percent profit. That's not profit. That's profiteering which is condemned in the bible.
The (black market) is run and supported by a mercenary breed of wily and selfish merchants, a breed that neither sows nor sweats, but harvests millions from base speculative activities that have spawned so much grief and ruin for honest citizens.
The role of the police in this context is not to be an obstacle against the impetus for economic development, but to be the bedrock of this governments drive to mould a citizenry which is mentally, economically and politically liberated in the new millennium.
Posted by guest, May 02, 2008 11:06AM
he really said that white man thing?