Thanks, but we’re out of here …

We the extra terrestrials came down to see for ourselves. But soon we put our flying saucers into reverse gear and departed, disappointed once again.

We had hovered over the climate summit in Brazil beside your precious Amazon rain forests scarred by chain saws and bulldozers. Where were the big guys, the big polluters from America, China, Russia and India?

Hey, and see those alleged Venezuelan drug runner boats being blown to smithereens in the dirty seas.  And what about those drones and ballistic missiles, killing machines, zooming around everywhere these days?

What is it with you people? We could have destroyed the entire universe in Star Wars but we didn’t, we got past that phase.

Oh Earth, you can self-destruct all on your own.

We saw the beauty of Zimbabwe. A pity it’s on the potholed road to ruin. The lights went out in the parliament building when the leader was making his annual State of the Nation speech. He proceeded in torch light.

The House speaker said it was sabotage, and no stone would be left unturned to find the culprits. Petrol bombs went off to deter a meeting of regime opponents but no stone turning went on to find those perpetrators.

We saw police and government officials taking bribes. Electricity going on and off.. Acute water shortages.

At night, from from our height, the whole country disappeared down a big dark hole when the power went off. (Left: Election hoardings in 2023 promising constant electricity across the whole nation.)

We saw the squalor of mounting piles of uncollected rubbish buzzing with mosquitoes, poisonous slugs and bugs and rats. We saw poor streets vendors being chased away and their goods being grabbed by the officers for themselves.

We saw military vehicles patrolling towns. That wasn’t the precursor to a coup d’etat, apparently. The head of state went abroad for a pointless summit of talking heads at this time and nothing happened.

How many African leaders have been overthrown when out of their own country? (***see one below)

We heard the military chiefs saying the tanks and armoured cars needed a good run from time to time in case the engine oil coagulated in the barracks. Nice one! But why such sudden concern for the oil, twice in one week? Muscle flexing perhaps.

Clear to us, though, were the power struggles going on in Zimbabwe, the rape of the environment by illegal mining and a stark rise in hunger and begging. The beggars went to the windows of small cars driven by ethnic minorities and not the windows of the black fat cats’ luxury cars. “We don’t bother with them. They never give us anything,” a skinny street kid told us..

We saw a top executive driving to a business meeting stop to release rumbling diarrhoea from a curry the night before which he couldn’t hold in. The struggling street hookers where he pulled over charged him for ‘short time’ to use their loo.

And Tanzania, once a haven of equality, has gone to hell in a hand basket. After banning her opposition rivals from the recent elections dictatress Samia Suluha Hassan got 96 percent of the vote, exactly what Putin got last time he went to the polls. It still isn’t clear even to us how many died in protests against the madam’s crimes, but plenty did. Will Tanzania go the way of Sudan? We hope not.

Social media claimed Suluha fled the bloody riots and went to Zimbabwe. She is actually a native of the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar and went there instead to wait for things to cool down. Can’t you get the geography of Zs right, your social media and artificial intelligence right? We have often warned you about fake news in this day and age.

We saw galleries of rogues and all manner of mayhem the world over.

In Europe we saw a fashion magazine with models on the front cover who were once men. We saw rubber boats carrying illegal migrants causing a huge groundswell of prejudice, racism and social paranoia. We warned you often about global mismanagement, greed, conflict of interests and failed food harvests laid at the feet of land grabbing politicians..

You can keep your world. Adios! Adieu! Tschuss!

*** Independent Ghana’s first black prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, a leading light in the pan-African movement against colonial rule, was overthrown whilst visiting Chairman Mao in China. His aides heard it on BBC World Service short wave radio news. “It can’t be true. My people love me,” he was reported as saying. (Right; Nkrumah after receiving the news in 1966.)