Editor,

RE: "Burundi's breach of EAC free trade regime will hurt own economy, says trade minister” (The New Times, August 3).

Talk about shooting themselves in both feet, with bazookas! Do the gangsters in power in Bujumbura realize that they are punishing their own people by depriving them of an essential market for the few items they can trade, in the thoroughly mistaken belief that they are somehow going to hurt Rwanda? Really?

By the self-inflicted loss of a market that will soon be filled by local Rwandan producers, who would never have dreamt the Burundi authorities would help them by eliminating competition from them?

I knew the characters now running (more aptly 'ruining') Burundi into the ground were not the brightest bulb on the tree, but I could never have thought they would be so loopy as to impose an embargo on their own farmers.

God help our brothers and sisters across the Akanyaru; the last visible part of their beautiful land has just disappeared down a rabbit hole deep into Alice's Wonderland!

Mwene Kalinda