$128million from the poor British pensioner to Mugabe...

Zimbabwe: how we aid profligacy

As Robert Mugabe turns 88, David Blair asks if our aid to Zimbabwe is funding the dictator’s excesses.

 Suppose a government chooses to spend nothing on equipping secondary schools, while blowing 1 per cent of public expenditure on trips for the president and the prime minister. Imagine if the two men at the top of this sorry administration reckoned their own offices were more deserving recipients of taxpayers’ money than, say, capital expenditure on health and education for a country of 12 million people.

Step forward the government of Zimbabwe under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe, the ageing autocrat who will celebrate his 88th birthday tomorrow, and Morgan Tsvangirai, the former opposition leader turned prime minister. Leaf through Zimbabwe’s national budget for 2012 and you discover the grotesque sense of priorities of the two men who run one of the poorest countries in the world.

Mugabe and Tsvangirai spent US $45.5 million on travel last year, accounting for 1.2 per cent of total public expenditure (if David Cameron and Nick Clegg followed suit, their bill for foreign trips would be more than £7 billion or $11 billion) (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/zimbabwe/9092548/Zimbabwe-how-we-aid-profligacy.html)

On the same day we read that the Zimbabwe Government cares not a fig for its own children or own infrastructure, much like Lieber Past under Blair Brown in the UK, you can read in the Daily Telegraph that the very same administration are to deport Chiness subjects for eating rare reptilians, tortoises.  Yet in WonderFULL Britian we cannot deport a hate spreading illegal ignoramous back to his homeland.  Hopefully Salmond will get the result he wants and they can get Gordon the Moron back to answer the Midlothian Question.