Posted on 02/15/2004 4:15:50 AM PST by Clive
THERE are no lengths to which the nutty misinformation minister in a troubled central African nation won't go. Not content with closing down newspapers, deporting journalists and banning radio and television stations, the junior minister now wants troubled central Africans to stop using the telephone.
Well, perhaps that's an exaggerationÉ but he does want to stop everyone using telephones that aren't under his direct control. This is because the wacky minister believes privately owned telephones are subversive. So do the spectacularly insane leaders of North Korea, Cuba and Burma, which tells you everything you need to know about the misinformation minister's perceptions of individual freedom.
The latest bout of Stalinist nonsense began when a local cell phone operator received a fax telling it to close down. The crazy communication would have effectively left tens of thousands of troubled central Africans cut off from essential dialogue with relatives in the Diaspora.
Still, you can understand the muddled misinformation minister's reasoning. Right under his nose he sees a privately owned cell phone company and it's making money. It may not work terribly well (and indeed it doesn't) but it works more often than the one owned by the Zany government. It also makes more money - and that has to be galling.
It's particularly galling because in the modern troubled central African basket case, making money is the prerogative of the Zany Party. In fact, it is the ruling party's intention to make money a Zany monopoly. This means that Zany money will be good and all other money will be subversive. But there is, of course, another reason.
The manic minister likes to listen to other people's telephone calls. This can be tiresome and bureaucratic if the telephone company doesn't belong to the Zany Party. If, though, the minister already owns the telephone company, listening in becomes simpler, cleaner and far easier. No one has to be told and no one needs to know.
The last and most important reason for closing down telephone companies is the oldest of them all property is theft, unless it is Zany property in which case it is enlightened and progressive and for everyone's benefit. That is why hospitals with nothing but aspirins, schools with no books, potholed roads and power cuts are so good for us.
We should all be very grateful the Zany Party is doing such a marvellous job and we should look forward to the day it nationalises all private business so that nothing works ever again.
Of course, it would be impolite and untrue to suggest, even for a second, that the loony minister wants to close telephone companies because he's jealous.
It has nothing to do with the fact that no one wants to use the government-owned services, or that private companies are more efficient and cash-rich.
Still less should troubled central Africans trouble themselves with the notion that the moronic minister will do anything but an efficient job when he takes over privately owned business empires.
Of course he will after all, his radio stations and newspapers are models of propriety and profit, or so he tells us. The fact that the people working for the minister might disagree just means they're unrepentant reactionary subversives.
As to the rumour that the Zany party wants to take over the telephone company because it needs the money; well, that's obviously untrue because the Zany Party is the people's party and it does nothing for itself. Well, yes, it does buy a few Kompressors and the occasional business class air ticket, but you don't really expect them to move around on bicycles like everyone else, do you?
5.56mm
Maybe it's jealosy, maybe it's money...no, the real issue is CONTROL.
There's already been concerted attacks on independent newspapers. If Zanu-PF can get control of the phone lines, what sources of communication are left? Hence the title of this article...
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