Basil, Thanks to you and all the other brothers who have sent us ladies Valentine's greetings. It shows that our men do have very soft spots in their hearts for us, and we all appreciate that very much. On the land issue in Zimbabwe, you are quite right. Mugabe had many years in which he could have taken care of that , and it was just a tool for him to use this time around. However, the people of Zimbabwe saw through that farce very quickly. He thought he could use it as a smoke screen to blind the people to what he was actually up to, which is as you rightly pointed out, to consolidate himself in power.It is a good sign that our people are becoming politically savvy, and will no longer tolerate these kinds of tactics, and i say long live this trend of thinking on our continent. Jabou In a message dated 2/17/00 7:28:28 AM Central Standard Time, [log in to unmask] writes: Hi Jabou, By the way belated happy valentine's day to you and all the sisters on the L. I totally agree with you that land in Zimbabwe should be redistributed to the majority of black farmers in the name of fairness. After all their land was forcibly taken from them during UDI. My contention is why has it taken Mugabe almost 20 years to do something about it and now he is accusing the opposition of citing with the white farmers, which is a lot of nonsense. My observation is that he is trying to use the land issue (which is very noble and playing on peoples sentiments) to consolidate himself in power. It would have given him the authority to rule with an iron fist allowing him to dissolve parliament and the cabinet and rule by decree. Now i don't think that's what Zimbabwe needs at this point in time. Frankly the land issue should have been the first thing settled after independence and did he really need a draft constitution to do so. Thanks for sharing the radio commentry. basil >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------