Posts by Angus Shaw

  Smoking very bad. War very bad. The Great Plague very bad. Most things very bad in the olden days. It’s different now! In Afghanistan, starving children are sold to traffickers or given tranquilisers to dull their hunger pangs. Very bad. There is medication for hunger, it’s called food. For a plethora of reasons, food…

So it’s just two years since our playboy ‘Ginimbi’ Kadungure died in his Rolls Royce on the way home from all night revelling and drinking at his now closed Harare nightclub. Quite where his ostentatious lifestyle came from is mired in mystery. Squabbles persist over who gets his mansion, his undamaged mega cars and any…

Former British envoy to Zimbabwe Deborah Bronnert, now ambassador in Moscow, is summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry over British involvement in Ukraine. Maria Zhakarova, one of Putin’s main spokespeople, alleges that the Royal Navy masterminded, and its special forces assisted in, “terrorist” drone and missile attacks by Ukraine on the Russian fleet in the…

Zimbabwe has draconian public order laws and enforcers often exceed them in breach of protection in the constitution HERE: Ahead of elections early next year, opposition gatherings are banned or disrupted willy-nilly, ordinary remarks are interpreted as incitement to violence and unguarded jokes overheard in the bar or anywhere else in public lead to arrests for insulting…

  Government ministers in Zimbabwe admit that underpaid rank and file soldiers and military personnel on duty – and the police as well – are getting worse food rations than inmates in our already bankrupt prisons. The unformed forces have a gruel of sadza (maize meal) and beans but don’t have any cooking oil. Sometimes…

  Don’t get sick in Zimbabwe unless there’s hard currency at hand for private care. Public health is a death trap, Go in standing up and come out in a box. The diagnositics here: big cars and hospitalisation abroad for the bosses worth zillions more than the value of new cancer, dialysis and radiography machines.…

What have you been up to? Where have you been? I’ve been working, old guys say. For some reason that annoys me. I’ve been retired for seven years now from 50 years of journalism and I never wore it on my sleeve. The new media has changed everything and has no place for old timers.…

An apt United Nations graphic on why wetlands should not be built upon – something some of us have been saying for years, but no-one took any notice in drier seasons in the recent past.      Much rain this season and housing and other developments on the wetlands have been flooded out and property…

IN ANOTHER LIFE? An Argentine correspondent researching the matter tells me that one Angus Shaw was shot dead with 40 of his fellow anarchists on December 8, 1921 in a peasant rebellion in Santa Cruz in Patagonia, crushed by Colonel Hector Benigno Varela’s government cavalry. As many as 1,500 protesters were killed, many later by…