Te Radar: Happiness in Zimbabwe is a nice piece of old cardboard

I am sure many of Zimbabwe's disenfranchised poor were only too happy to have their homes demolished. It would have provided a welcome distraction from their squalid, disease-riddled lives by providing them with the necessity of finding a piece of cardboard to shelter their family under.

This cardboard would keep them shaded from the hot African sun when they were not busy searching for twigs to combine with slurry to form a colourful if insubstantial gruel for their swollen-bellied children.

And it isn't as if it will bother them for too long anyway. The average life expectancy in Zimbabwe is only 34. People die of Aids, hunger and generally being African.

In many ways this alone is a good reason for our national cricket team to tour. Many Zimbabweans won't be alive the next time we are scheduled to tour there. They, too, should have the opportunity to not be able to afford a ticket to see the games.

And those who have had their shacks demolished have only themselves to blame. After all, they continued to mooch in squatter camps near cities when their misunderstood leader, Robert Mugabe, had gone to all the trouble of having the former white land-owning settlers evicted and turning their once productive farms to fallow fields of faux potential.

This was only one of many good ideas Mugabe has had. Another came last November when he approved the obesity tourism strategy, which aimed to attract obese foreign tourists to Zimbabwe to work for free on land seized from the white farmers.

This was a rather innovative idea. There is little doubt that there are many wealthy chubbies who would leap at the offer to shed pounds and guilt in a philanthropic manner.

Seemingly not so bothered by guilt, our cricketers claim, through their appointed spokesman, that they are contractually obliged to travel to Zimbabwe and play or they will be fined by the wallahs at ICC.

I say show a bit of testicular fortitude and tell the ICC to shove the fine into their rather empty boxes.

But I can say that because I don't have to pay the fine, nor are my wages derived from cricket, and my chances of it being so become less by the day (and word).

Still, team sponsor the National Bank is not short of cash, given the amount of interest I pay on my credit card. Perhaps they could offer to shame the ICC by paying the equivalent of the fine not to the ICC, but to an agency that helps disease-riddled Zimbabwean kids.

Or they could sign a contract with the New Zealand team that compels the players to wear a natty range of new team outfits, embroidered with slogans such as Africa This is Your Shame, or the simple but effective Mugabe is a Doofus.

Mugabe would then ban them from travelling: ergo, no tour.

I am sure the ICC couldn't object then. After all, cricket is the sport of gentlemen.