Africa is a Country

While some international media focus on Brangelina’s new babies — or in the case of US media Barack Obama’s sudden lack of a sense of humor – not everyone else has stopped reporting the news. BBC World Service’s Focus on Africa program has a one-hour special on developments in the Southern African country. Its probably the most wideranging broadcast (almost an hour long and with a broad range of guests) coming from a Western media outlet (that I have listened too or seen on TV). It has interviews with Pakalitha Mosisili (prime minister of Lesotho), Kenneth Kaunda (former President of Zambia), Jacob Zuma (leader of South Africa’s largest political party), Ernest Bai Koroma (president of Sierra Leone), Wilf Mbanga (editor of The Zimbabwean, a newspaper based in London), Knox Chitiyo (miitary and security expert), Christopher Mutsvangwa (ZANU-PF central committee member who blows hot air about colonialism), Alex Magaisa (London-based legal analyst), Morgan Tsvangirai (leader of the main organized Zimbabwean opposition), people interviewed on the street (including a farmer who claims to have benefited from Mugabe’s land reform), Phandu Skelemani (Foreign Minister of Botswana whose government has been the most outspoken against Mugabe’s junta), Gordon Brown (UK prime minister), Mark Gevisser (Thabo Mbeki’s biographer who comments on the nature of the South African President’s personal relationship to Mugabe), Dennis Norman (who served as Mugabe’s Minister of Agriculture in the 1980s), the Zimbabwean economist John Robertson, Father Frederick Chiromba of the Heads of the Christian Denominations in Zimbabwe (a Catholic like Mugabe), political scientist David Potty (who used work for an electoral institute in South Africa and is now at the Carter Center in Atlanta) and Kader Asmal (a former minister in Nelson Mandela’s government and a professor of international law). Lots of hot air and platitudes from the pols, but also lots of information and you gets a sense of the real crisis when at one point the presenter notes that by the end of the program inflation — already at 2,200,000%, that’s 2,2 million percent — could go up by another seven million percent. Listen here.