MARK Simmonds the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Minister for Africa, resigned this week citing, ‘intolerable parliamentary allowances’.  
I wonder how Mr Tsvangirai is feeling about Mr Simmonds’ resignation because during his recent UK visit, which many have reported as a flop, Tsvangirai abused his short stint with the Africa Minister to gloat about a ‘successful’ UK trip to boost his bruised political ego.
Capitalising on the brief encounter and informal chat, his aide and pro-Tsvangirai media quickly wrote that Tsvangirai had met the British Minister, “to try to push forward an internationally-brokered initiative to resolve the deepening economic crisis in Zimbabwe” and that, “the 35-minute discussion centred on the crisis in Zimbabwe and the ways in which the debilitating situation could be averted in the interest of the ordinary citizens of Zimbabwe.”
Both his spokesperson and pro-MDC-T media used the meeting with Mark Simmonds as a barometer to measure the success of Tsvangirai’s trip.
Before the much publicised trip they had written that Tsvangirai’s UK trip had rattled ZANU PF, when all he did was probably to bulldoze his way to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and paid a courtesy call on a man pondering his resignation, who would resign barely two weeks after the gloated meeting. So should we read much into the alleged Tsvangirai and Mark Simmonds meeting?
I don’t think so.
Kumhoresana hakuna kuipa, toti mombe yatsika dope yanwa but it is nothing to write home about.
My effort to interview Mark Simmonds and find out more about his meeting with Tsvangirai was fruitless.
I wrote him an email asking for an interview because any engagement with a former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe would be of public interest to Zimbabweans, I stated, but a few days before his resignation I received an email from his Diary Manager, Gemma Chidgey, saying that he was very busy with pre-arranged commitments and overseas travel.
I wanted to ask Mr Simmonds if he had indeed met Morgan Tsvangirai to discuss Zimbabwe, because the former PM no longer has any mandate to represent Zimbabwean affairs abroad.
If Tsvangirai met Mark Simmonds to discuss the ‘deepening crisis’ in Zimbabwe, where does his resignation leave the MDC T leader?
I doubt if the new FCO Africa Minister, James Duddridge, will entertain Morgan Tsvangirai because according to the UK media, he is a no nonsense man, a Eurosceptic, who once said that, “Britain should tell the European Union to ‘sod off’ rather than pay welfare benefits to immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria,” (The Independent August 12 2014)
If Tsvangirai thinks that there is a crisis in Zimbabwe which the British should try and solve, then he does not live on planet earth.
He is either arrogant, naïve, ignorant, or all.
At the moment, the British government is experiencing some foreign and domestic problems.
For example, the Gaza-Israel conflict, which saw many thousands of ordinary Britons taking to the streets in London, Manchester and Edinburgh last week and calling for an end to Israel’s shelling of Gaza.
The Iraqi conflict is also another crisis confronting the British government, and it is sending humanitarian aid to people trapped on a mountain after fleeing ISIS. Then there is the issue of Russia and Ukraine, with both the EU and Russia imposing sanctions against each other!
Domestically we have the Scottish referendum next month (September 18) in which Scottish people will decide whether Scotland should be an independent country from the UK or not.
In addition, the Home Office is trying to clear a backlog of failed asylum seekers (some from Zimbabwe) and the rise of the UK Independent Party means that they have to do more on immigration to win the support of voters.
In recent weeks, too, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have had many changes.
For example, on July 14 William Hague stood down as the Foreign Secretary to become the leader of the House of Commons.
He too is contemplating to retire from Parliament after serving 26 years.
Last week (August 5) there was another high profile resignation in the FCO when Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, then  Senior Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, resigned citing the British Government’s policy over the recent Gaza-Israel conflict. Citing her unhappiness on British policy on the conflict, she told The Independent newspaper on August 10: “For me, this is all about policies and principles.
“Long after politics has come and gone, I want to be able to live with myself. “And at this point I said, after politics has come and gone, can I live with myself?
“And I thought, ‘no I can’t’.”
And this week, Mark Simmonds resigned although he cited financial issues.
Tsvangirai’s invented crisis is not one of the UK’s main worries at the moment. The EU (and the UK) is desperate to engage President Mugabe and ZANU PF. Many organisations that were funded by the West (media, pressure groups and so-called civic organisations) as part of the defiance campaign are now closing down because the West couldn’t be bothered any more to continue funding them.
On August 11 2014, Gerry Jackson, the manager of SW Radio Africa, told BBC Africa that the radio station was closing down citing lack of donor funding, the MDC disarray and EU re-engagement with Zimbabwe as some of the reasons why donors could no longer continue to fund the radio station.
Mombe yekuronzerwa ndeyekukama wakaringa nzira.
The closure of SW Radio Africa should be a lesson to all those organisations that thrive on donor funding.