Something is afoot in my beloved Zimbabwe. I see it, I can see all the jigsaw-puzzle pieces on the table, but I just can't see exactly how they are going to be put together. We've just had our Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, travelling to Morocco. Now: what is a Zimbabwean doing in Morocco? I doubt our PM had even heard of Morocco, say, five years ago. Our President is 87 and ailing. He only recently visited China and pleaded with the Chinese and Russians to "stop Zimbabwe from being attacked". What does he know that we don't know. Why the urgency to plead for cover from attack from the Chinese and Russians? What exactly is going on?
Right now, the Western nations are lying flat on their backs, with overbearing debt-burdens and double-digit unemployment figures. They've had a three-pronged attack for economic growth for the past thirty years based on (1) Financial de-regulation (2) easily available credit for housing and (3) internet technologies. All three of these ballasts no longer provide the blast needed to keep the boom going. This takes us back to the old way of making money: through (1) making "stuff" and (2) extracting and refining the "stuff" needed to make "stuff". Which in turn closes the circle and brings us back to Africa.
With a growing Chinese presence on the African Continent, the West cannot afford to be complacent. They will go for broke and insert themselves aggressively into Africa's realities. Either through direct military force or through proxies, one way or the other, the West will try to "grow" its way out of economic malaise by forcing Africa into a new "partnership of unequals". With Libya in the bag, something tells me that something is afoot in Zimbabwe, but helplessly, I just can't map out the likely scenario. Lord save my beloved Zimbabwe.
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