[This Black professor appeared on SABC TV. It was excellent seeing a Black African standing up and telling it like it is, calling Mugabe a monster. If only more people would do it. Jan]

Nigerian Nobel laureate, writer and activist Wole Soyinka has called for sanctions to be imposed on Zimbabwe.

Calling Robert Mugabe a “monster”, he said tougher action needed to be taken against the Zimbabwean president.

Speaking at the Cape Town Press Club on Wednesday, Soyinka said complicity among African leaders in their apparent inability to take action against members of the African Union who disregarded the organisation’s own protocols, or became “an embarrassment”, should be dealt with swiftly and decisively.

Soyinka, in South Africa to deliver a talk in the Nelson Mandela birthday lecture series organised by the Human Sciences Research Council, said Nepad and other initiatives by African leaders were weakened when they failed to act against “rogue leaders who are like rogue elephants who run amok and trample their own leaders”.

‘I don’t care about the colour of the foot pressing on my neck’

He said it was an affront to those who had struggled and given their lives for freedom in Africa when leaders became “worse than the colonials they replaced in oppressing their people”.

Soyinka, who has campaigned vigorously for human rights, said oppression was evil, no matter who carried it out: “I don’t care about the colour of the foot pressing on my neck – I just want to remove it.”

He added that he was opposed to loans being given to the Mugabe government by South Africa, and that if any were made, they should be attached to very stringent conditions.

Meanwhile a newspaper was quoted as saying on Wednesday that residents of Harare would have to pay hefty fines to save “illegal structures” from demolition when a controversial government clean-up campaign resumes later this month.

Residents of the Zimbabwean capital’s high-income suburbs would have to pay fines equivalent to more than R13 400 to “regularise” buildings on their properties built without permission from the city council, the state-controlled Herald reported.

“The money is like a fine to people who built illegal structures that were not approved at their premises,” a city council official told the newspaper.

On Monday, residents of Harare’s wealthier suburbs were given 10 days to obtain approval for structures on their properties after the government temporarily halted Operation Restore Order, a controversial campaign that has seen houses, shacks and backyard cottages destroyed in poorer suburbs of Zimbabwe’s towns and cities.

The programme, which was launched two months ago, has received widespread condemnation.

Human rights groups say at least 300 000 people have been made homeless by the campaign, which the opposition Movement for Democratic Change says is aimed at driving its urban supporters into rural areas dominated by Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party.

Meanwhile opposition lawmaker Trudy Stevenson on Wednesday said that residents of the low-income Harare suburb of Hatcliffe Extension, who had their houses demolished at the height of Operation Restore Order, had been reallocated plots of land in the same area by the government.

“How will they transport all their furniture and belongings and families back to Hatcliffe Extension?” the lawmaker for Harare North asked.

“And how will they all find out about this, when some have been chased back to their rural areas by the police?”

This article was originally published on page 3 of The Star on July 21, 2005

Source: Independent Online (IOL)
URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click…/p>