Posts by Charles Rukuni

Zimbabwe is once again in the spotlight. The Southern African Development Community will this weekend review progress in resolving the Zimbabwe crisis and will be under a lot of pressure to be seen to be reining in President Robert Mugabe under control. But as we argued just a few days after the signing of the Global Political Agreement, it might not have been ideal but the agreement was the best Zimbabwe’s leaders could come up with.

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Only yesterday Finance Minister Tendai Biti said Zimbabwe’s economic growth could exceed the government’s forecast of 9.3 percent in 2011. “I genuinely believe the growth rate could be higher, mainly because of the strong performance of international commodity prices. The food crisis is helping us as we are in a surplus position in grains.”

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The International Monetary fund has predicted a slow-down in Zimbabwe’s economic growth from 9 percent to 5.5 percent this year and attributes this to “an inefficient composition of expenditure, rising vulnerabilities in the financial system, and the recent announcement of the fast-track indigenisation of the mining sector”.

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Anyone who says elections in Zimbabwe are coming up this year, next year or in 2013, is out of his mind, so says Zimbabwe’s Finance Minister and Movement for Democratic Change secretary-general Tendai Biti according to the Financial Times. 

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Firebrand Edgar Tekere said President Robert Mugabe was to blame for 90 percent of the country’s problems. In his book, A lifetime of struggle, Tekere said people should not blame one man for all that had gone wrong in the country, but in the case of Zimbabwe Mugabe was at the centre of the country’s problems.

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Former Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front secretary general and founder of the Zimbabwe Union Movement, Edgar Tekere, has died. At one time he was President Robert Mugabe’s number two but he was expelled from the party in 1988 after opposing the drive towards a one-party state and condemning increasing corruption with the party and the government. Although ZANU-PF readmitted him to the party in 2005, he was fired again after writing his book: A lifetime of struggle. In the introduction to the book, he mentioned who his true friends were. Here they are:

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