There is no demonizing campaign against Mugabe, not by me anyway. It is sheer intent in order to malign on your part for you to assert this.

The reason no food is being grown is that the price of inputs, infrastructure etc is now beyond the reach of the average farmer. It is still tied down to the fact that the biggest single forex earner was affected. All other potential forex earners have also been hit. There is no money in the country, there is hardly any left to import the special paper needed to print new bank notes, which are worthless anyway as they are backed by a non-existent economy.

Perhaps you would like to elaborate anti-peasant. If you mean that I am opposed to the socio-economic order that is emerging in my country, consisting of a small rich ruling elite, and millions of suffering peasants at the mercy of this elite, then yes I am anti-peasants.

For your information, the Zimbabwe government still hasn't solved the problem of the street people it drove out when Queen Elizabeth visited in 1991. Indeed, none of the squatter problems have ever been solved. Ever heard of Chirambahuyo? Porta Farm? Casa Banana? These are all habitat issues from way before the farm invasions, at which point people like you suddenly became experts on Zimbabwe's political and socio-economic history.

For someone who claims to love Black people, you are going out of your way to make excuses for the Zimbabwe Republic Police's trademark brutality. If you think that the security agencies in Zim do things without Bob's sanction, then you just haven't got a clue how the country is run.

I notice that you declined to comment on these matters I raised, while accusing me of "conveniently" forgetting to mention that white farmers grew tobacco. Let me bring them to your attention again.

"What really riles me is that anyone could actually find and "alternative" perspective on the matter as it were and display it on a message board called "Rastafari Speaks". Rastafarians, victims of institutional segregation in Zimbabwe- Mr Mugabe himself once said, "Let them go to the Courts and say it is their right, we don't care about the Courts!"- have been in the "informal sector" for years now. University graduates have been doing their own thing, from stalls, to small premises, towards expansion. And Rastafarians, a favourite target for police brutality in Zimbabwe, bore the brunt of this attack on people trying to survive under very trying conditions. I am one of those who has put a lot of money in to the informal sector, with a view to empowering my fellow Rastafarians in areas such as Chitungwiza.

Now, everybody knows the real reason this is happening, it is because the urban dwellers voted for the MDC and are now being shown, " Yeah, you voted for the MDC, but we are still in charge!" I know this even from my own relatives in the army, they were told to beat the hell out of the urban dwellers because they have a lot of nerve.

This thing did not start with the articles that have been appearing in the papers this past week. Before that a few weeks , ZANU activist Chinotimba - who once compared his relationship to Mugabe as that of the Father and the Son in the Christian Trinity- went around with his goons beating up people who were using private public transport, forcing them to use the new ZUPCO ( state-owned bus company) buses recently acquired from China.

Even earlier, there was a housing fund to help people get homes. It was looted, the names of the present police commissioner and the first lady were named as beneficiaries- the mansion she built was dubbed Gracelands by the people. Years later, the average Zimbabwean has no hope of ever getting their own place. Only those of us who have been lucky to work abroad can, all my siblings are still living at home, although I still think us lucky because my folks have more than one property. But all the older generation, those that seized the opportunity got property, it is my generation that has had yet another basic human right stolen from them by the Mugabe regime.

So, that is why all those people are living in backyard shacks. They have no where else to go. Now the soldiers just come in and burn down their property and beat them up. How many Herald journaists have also been victims of this but cannot say this in their own paper?

A woman I spoke to yesterday in Chitungwiza told me that the people had resolved to do nothing, some sort of passive resistance. "They came in to provoke us because we still won't vote for them, we will not give them the satisfaction of a reaction, so we are just going about our business".

At real value, the Zimbabwe dollar is $42000 to the UK£ ( it used to be ZW$1=UK£2) at Independence. Now when a President who claims to be a man of the people spends UK£250000 on a wedding anniversary, what does that say? Not only that, but he has created a burgeoning bureaucracy, with bizarre names like Ministry of Publicity and Interactive Affairs mid-way through the financial year, and has done all he can to drive the economy to a halt till there is nothing more for them to plunder, what kind of a revolution is there? And all that noise about Western imperialists machinations, I mean, they got their work cut out then, haven't they?"