Old Africa, Same Old Politics

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe is not getting with the program.

This week he insulted Johnnie Carson, US assistant secretary of state for African affairs with the terms "an idiot".

Mr Mugabe told the state-owned Herald newspaper in Zimbabwe that his first meeting with a US government official for many years had angered him. "You would not speak to an idiot of that nature," he said. "I was very angry with him, and he thinks he could dictate to us what to do and what not to do."

"We have the whole of SADC working with us, and you have the likes of little fellows like Carson, you see, wanting to say: 'You do this, you do that. Who is he? I hope he was not speaking for Obama. I told him he was a shame, a great shame, being an African American."

Mr Mugabe apparently also took exception to Mr Carson's predecessor, Jendayi Frazer. In May last year he described her as "a little American girl trotting around the globe like a prostitute" after she suggested that the then-opposition Movement for Democratic Change had won the disputed presidential election.

President Obama has got his work cut out in Africa ..... colour only goes so far with the African "Big Man".