Zimbabwe Heads UN Commission

Zimbabwe has been elected to head the UN’s commission on Sustainable Economic Development. It seems that the developing world has voted for Zimbabwe to take on this post. A slight difficulty could be that the newly elected head, Zimbabwe’s Environment Minister Francis Nheme, might have a problem attending the meetings. He is part of Mugabe’s government, and as such faces an international travel ban.

This is of course a bizarre kind of joke in that Zimbabwe is experiencing a seven year economic decline which seems in some strange way, a mere coincidence of course, to be tied in with the land reforms started in 2000. For land reforms, read, lets take farms from people who own them and give them to people who are unable to farm so that as many crops fail, the people starve and inflation rate becomes the highest in the world. That will be good. Of course, no one expected the bonus of no oil for petrol. And as for rationing of electricity to four hours a day, that will surely benefit the manufacturing industry, if there is any left of course.

How can a country with such abuse towards people, environment, disregard of human dignity and rights etc even be considered for a post as Head of a Commission at the United Nations. As much as the above is quite a story and people from the developed world reading this will nod their heads and say, despicable, disgusting and many more words of general wisdom and will join others in condemning the appointment, is this criticism in itself fair?

So who appointed us from the developed world as the ethics police then? After all we have a president of the United States who arbitrarily invades countries killing thousands of innocent people. We have a prime minister in the UK who jumped on the band wagon to support this maniac.

We also have a president of the World Bank who was caught a few weeks ago awarding his mistress a fat pay increase without any kind of approval or reason. Oh and she said, she shouldn’t be involved in this scandal, she had nothing to do with it. Did anybody see her turn her salary increase down? Thought not. Oh and weeks later Wolfowitz is still the president of the World Bank.

Let’s not mention the Israeli prime minister who launched a fairly bloody and unsuccessful war against a neighbouring country when two of his soldiers were kidnapped. The list goes on. These are just some really quick examples that came to mind. I’m sure we can all come up with a whole string of others of real ‘ethical’ behaviour by representatives of the developed world. What’s that lovely little saying in the old testament about the splinter in the eye? Or people in glass houses ..Yip that one.