Belfast Blogs.com

This is Robert Mugabe's new house:It cost around $26 million dollars and took five years to build, five years during which Zimbabwe's economy completely fell apart, inflation spiralled up to hundreds of thousands of per cent per year, and thousands of the poorest lost their shanty shack homes in slum clearances ordered by Mugabe.But Robert sleeps well at night:He dines well too. Even though 80% of the population are without work in Zimbabwe, Mugabe's kitchen and chefs ensure that he and his Zanu cronies are well fed:And they can always relax later for cocktails by the pool, and discuss perhaps the pressing matters of the day.Like the election they lost then stole back. Like the tens of thousands of citizens who've fled the country. Like the fact that they'll get away with it because the...

Everyone over a certain age (let's say 30) can recall the harrowing impact of Michael Buerk's first reports of a famine in Ethiopia in 1984.The sheer biblical images of starving black children - their hollow eyes pleading for food to placate their empty, distended bellies, their ribs stretching their thin skins, their limbs shrivelled to mere bones and skin - shocked the West in our relative affluence.What followed was Band Aid, Live Aid, and the growth of global consciousness in relation to the appalling poverty suffered on the African continent.Since then, charities have reported 'donation fatigue' and the diminishing returns of shock footage of African carnage or disaster. Mass rape and child slavery in Darfur barely stirs us now. Burma is flooded, and we can barely bother to put a...