Maybe. Paying the security forces in real money rather than Mugabe’s toilet paper is an inspired idea as a way to pry them away from loyalty to the ZANU-PF, and I hope that the donor nations will agree to fund the entire civil service that way.
It has always seemed strange to me that the Washington Consensus ignored the importance of securing the services of honest, competent, and diligent public-sector workers, which can’t be done if public-sector pay isn’t enough to live on.
The MDC minister in the story is wondering what to do with the official portrait of Robert Mugabe that hangs on the walll of his office. Perhaps he could put it on the floor at the entrance, so visitors can step on Mugabe’s face on the way in and out.
The notion of a world of equal and independent sovereign states embodied in the Treaty of Westphalia was probably an impovement over the Thirty Years’ War. But that’s about the most that can be said for it. Three and a half centuries later, it needs to be replaced. There needs to be a way to deny a morally and politically bankrupt regime — Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe — of the internationally recognized legal right to ruin its country.