Goodbye beetroot, hello cold showers

The removal of the inept South African president Thabo Mbeki was surprisingly painless. Would that it were as easy to get rid of other African leaders. Of course, it was his party rather than the people who deposed him (the people would not have counted for much).

The reaction may be a sigh of relief, but there is a darker side.

His 'quiet diplomacy' (amounting some might think to total silence), allowing Robert Mugabe to continue in power, with a sham agreement which will swallow up Mr Tshangurai just as surely as Mr. Joshua Nkomo was swallowed, when he could really have made a difference; has cost and will untold human misery and many human lives in Zimbabwe. If presidents of smaller countires such as Botswana and Zambia were not afraid to make their feelings known about Mr. Mugabe, why not the South African President?

But the more serious issue is the crackpot theory of AIDS he and his dumb-loyal cabinet followed for years (notably his bizarre 'health minister', recommending beetroot and garlic as treatment), which is largely resonsible for the 1500 a day death rate of the virus in South Africa. As the writer of the First Post e-paper noted, any politician causing a tenth of this death rate would be speedily hauled up before the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. No doubt Mr. Mbeki will enjoy a peaceful and respected retirement.

In his place, for a few months, we have a 'caretaker' whose name nobody can remember and nobody can pronounce. No matter, after that we have Mr. Zuma, who is a Zulu, related to the Matebele in Zimbabwe whom Mr. Mugabe tried to exterminate in the 1980's. So we might see a little less patience with the senile dictator north of the border. And although Mr. Zuma believes that taking a shower helps to prevent HIV infection, at least he is not on record as being opposed to more conventional anti-retroviral treatment.