Let’s make Orwell fiction again

Even in these far reaches of the globe it is impossible to escape from the noise of those damned elections just around the corner.

How will the outcome influence dictatorships that the prescient novelist George Orwell foresaw in Animal Farm and 1984?

* Which one of these presidents defended free speech, saying people could demonstrate outside the White House but not outside the Kremlin? Mr Gorbachev replied that Russians were also free to demonstrate outside the White House.

Jimmy Carter was a decent bloke but we all know that  doesn’t work in politics.

Before Hilary Clinton lost against Trump in 2016 she said: ‘It’s about time we had a woman in the Oval Office.’  ‘Been there. Done that,’ said Bill.

* More seriously though, whatever happens on Tuesday, Zimbabwe’s all-invasive ZANU PF party rulers will surely chirp on about Western sanctions. The grass roots are suffering terribly, they say.

Not so, Washington insists. Economic sanctions remain only against nine prominent individuals and three companies still deemed responsible for misrule and theft here.

The companies and the nine can’t visit the U.S. or do business there unless they go under the cover of authorised U.N. meetings.

* Once again demands for reparations for colonialism and slavery have come up at the latest Commonwealth summit in Samoa. They’re whistling into the wind, say the Brits.

The late Queen Elizabeth II came to Harare a few years ago for the Commonwealth meeting of heads of government (CHOGM) and she went shopping for baskets and trinkets at Mbare Musika, the largest and oldest informal market. It completely burnt down the other day.

Theories abound: arson, gang rivalry, anger that it had become a nest of money changers, cheats and thieves

Who torched that historic market? Who is to blame? Was it simply caused by its inevitable decline into chaos and  disorder?

It’s easy to blame everybody else for trouble and strife and for perpetuating elitism. To borrow from St Matthew’s gospel:

”Thou hypocrite. First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy  brother’s eye.”‘