15 April 2005
	OVERTHROW MUGABE - HOW? Ken Owen, Claremont. Face reality: the psychopath Mugabe will misgovern until power is wrenched from his ailing grasp

Forgive me for returning so soon to the subject of Zimbabwe but the vacuous piety of your editorial ("Prolonging SA's shame over Zimbabwe" April 8) should not go unchallenged. Your conclusion is identical to that of President George W Bush on Iraq: we should support genuine democratic efforts to restore prosperity and decency to Zimbabwe, implicitly by overthrowing a tyrant. O noble purpose! But how? The only hint you give is to demand that we support mass action if and when it occurs. Again, but how? By standing at the walls of Jericho and blowing trumpets? By smuggling arms to the Movement for Democratic Change? By cutting off electricity supplies and blocking food convoys? Or by the military methods of Bush, which at least have the merit of murderous honesty? Come now, do not be coy. Tell us how to go about our noble task. From my point of view it seems clear that our aged and sickly soldiers are incapable of military intervention; cutting off electric supplies would hugely increase the unemployment and misery of the people, and the last light-bulb left burning would be in Mugabe's study. Stopping food supplies would be a crime against humanity, and shipping arms would negate everything this country stands for, and make us complicit in atrocity. And we do not, like Bush, have the resources to reconstruct what we have destroyed in pursuit of regime change. So what's left? Only the trumpets, one of which is blown assiduously by the FM. That is brave, since it puts you in the company of vengeful Rhodesian when-wes and racist white South Africans. But can you not persuade yourself to face reality: that the psychopath Mugabe will misgovern until power is wrenched from his ailing grasp, not by Morgan Tsvangirai but most likely by some element of the Shona elite, probably a warlord? Meanwhile, the already marginalised economy (producing less than US$4bn/year) will continue its irreversible decay. Blow, trumpet, blow!