“ZIMBABWE
could receive €234 million (about US$318m) in development assistance from the
European Union (EU) if the bloc lifts its decade-old embargo on provision of direct
financial support to Harare at a meeting set for November,” reported the New Zimbabwe.
The EU is being totally irresponsible!
The
last thing the people of Zimbabwe want is for anyone to encourage Mugabe hope
that his regime can somehow fudge the economic recovery by getting a few million
dollars from the EU, the Arabs, AFDB; sell even more of the nation's treasures
to the Chinese and Indians for a fraction of their true value and so on. And
thus avoid having to tackle the two tough issues that this nation must deal
with decisive now or pay an even bigger price if we delay any further
The
two tough issues the regime has tried to avoid but cannot do so any more are:
1) the
cancerous problems of mismanagement and corruption. The national economy is in
this mess because no economy can thrive when it is subjected to so much
criminal waste of material and human resources as has been happening in Zimbabwe
these last 34 years.
For
example, two weeks ago Nehanda Radio reported of a “US$654 million dodgy deal involving
the Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC), a subsidiary of power utility Zesa Holdings”
in which new subcontractors had been surreptitiously added after the Solar
Panel Projected had been awarded and the agreed contract price was then doubled
in some areas. Ultimately it is the impoverished ordinary Zimbabweans who will
end up paying one way or the other the additional costs.
Over
the years mismanagement, corruption and looting have become got worse and worse
in Zimbabwe and today they are rampant. It is nonsense to talk of economic recovery
when there is so much waste!
Mugabe
has allowed the mismanagement and corruption to go on all these 34 years because
they constitute the very heart and soul of the Zanu PF patronage system that
has kept the party together and in power. Mugabe and the party popularity with
the electorate are rock bottom and the party’s iron grip on power is now totally
dependent on political patronage system. The party cannot afford to dismantle
it; not now!
2) the
need to attract direct foreign investment. Whilst the loans from donors like
the EU is supposed to be used in rebuild the country's economic infrastructure
like water and electricity supply, roads, etc. this alone is not enough to
produce the much hoped for sustainable economic recovery. The country needs direct
foreign investment too. (The regime is so cash strapped it will use
infrastructure loans to pay the boasted civil service wages too.)
The
regime has been told again and again, particularly in the last few months, that
to attract foreign investors back in the country Zimbabwe must restore investor
confidence that their investments will be safe. The Australian Ambassador to Zimbabwe
compared investing in Zimbabwe to swimming in the crocodile infested Zambezi River.
No investor would want to see 51% of his or her investment taken away and be
yoked to a partner from hell which is what Zanu PF’s indigenisation policies
have been calling for!
Since
the rigged July 2013 elections Mugabe and his Ministers have been forced to accept
that no investors will want to swim in Zimbabwe’s crocodile infested economic waters
and they have been have been toning the anti-white rhetoric, cutting back of
the shares investors will be obliged to sell and even scrapping this requirement
in some cases. Of course the would-be investors have remained decidedly unimpressed.
After
34 years of lawlessness, of disregarding trade agreements with other nations for
example; the Mugabe regime has opened a credibility gap as wide and as deep as
the Grand Canyon; bridging it now is proving to be impossible.
For
anyone to give the Mugabe regime money whilst these two core problems of mismanagement
and corruption on the one hand and failure to restore investor confidence on
the other remain unresolved in being totally irresponsible because the loans
will be wasted and added to the country’s mountain debt. But, worse still, the
loans will keep Mugabe in power for a few more months and thus post pone the
day of reckoning compounding the problems and making recovery even more costly.
The
only realistic solution for Zimbabwe is for the country to hold fresh free,
fair and credible elections, get a new government that will have the people's
mandate to rule and the respect and confidence of the international community
and investors. Fresh elections is the cure; EU loans are but painkillers to
someone with a broken leg. The patient would not have broken the leg if Mugabe
had not rigged the July 2013 elections; leg could be save if fresh elections
are held without further ado but gangrene will soon set in. Once gangrene has
set in then the leg must be amputated or the patient will die!
The
EU has forced its own member countries like Greece and Spain to take some
bitter medicine to address their fundamental economic weakness as a condition
for financial aid from the rest of the union. Yet the same EU is now telling
Mugabe that the Zimbabwe economic will recover regardless of the rampant
mismanagement and corruption and with no foreign investment! How dishonest is
that?
10 comments:
The EU has forced its follow members Greece and Spain, for example, to implement some tough reforms and the same group is telling Mugabe that he does not have to do anything about the mismanagement, corruption and the looting which are the root causes of the economic melt-down and driving would-be investors away. Countries like the US have stood firm on forcing Mugabe to change and the EU is undermining what these countries have achieved. This is really frustrating and intolerable!
The SA government has revised visa requirements for Zimbabweans wishing to live or work in that country. The bottom line is that many Zimbabweans will find it very difficult to get the visa and will be forced to return to Zimbabwe!
The way I see it Zimbabweans must redouble their efforts to sort out the mess back home so the Zimbabwe economy can be put back on track a.s.a.p. because as long as there are so many Zimbabweans in SA for whatever reasons the pressure for them to leave will remain. We had our best chances ever to do this during the GNU but MDC wasted these chances.
What is disappointing is that few Zimbabweans have yet to seat down and grasp what went wrong; in other words the nation is set to waste future chances too be-cause we have once again failed to learn from the past. How many Zimbabweans in SA and back in Zimbabwe will be adversely affected by these changes - hundreds of thousands! How many of them have been paying close attention to what has been happening back home, specifically to the MDC blunder of failing to implement the reforms - a tiny minority. As for the rest, they still do not know what these reforms were about! Tigere hengu! Well now they are going to pay the price for their cavalier attitude.
People get the government they deserve, there can be no question we deserve this Zanu PF dictatorship!
Minister of Finance Patrick Chinamasa admits that he is struggling to pay civil servants wages because 96% of government revenue is going straight to paying wages!
“When resources are not of the levels to meet our obligations we have to wait,” said the minister. What a way to run a country.
The Minister has been out with his mockingly empty ZimAsset begging bowl and some institutions and countries have said they will help. He is begging for capital expenditure projects but no doubt any money he gets will be all go into paying recurrent expenditure, most wages.
This Mugabe regime thought it could rig economic recovery and has since learnt that rigging elections was a piece of cake but rigging economic recovery in impossible. Instead of the regime admitting is now digging the nation into a deeper and deeper economic hole and therefore making future recovery that much harder!
If there was one issue over which the nation must unity and speak with one voice it is the call for Mugabe to stop digging. STOP DIGGING, for Pete's sake!
@ Tawanda Manjoni
This is wonderful stuff, keep it up!
"I, like millions of other Zimbabweans and citizens of the world, never understood why the party thought that locals, most of whom were disinterested to say the least, would all of a sudden successfully become shareholders in Unki, Zimplats, Barclays, etc." you said. Well you are wrong there. Mugabe floated the idea knowing that they are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Zimbabweans who would swallow the hook, line and sinker.
Zimbabweans have seen people like Philip Chiyangwa, Ignatius Chombo and Obert Mpofu become millionaires and people like Mai Mujuru and Mugabe himself become billionaires. Let us face it these individual were as poor as a church mouse not so long ago and they have no talent what so ever. So why not, the people reasoned, I can be a millionaire too. Indeed many of them had both talent and a superior brain than many of Zimbabwe's oligarchs!
What these millions failed to appreciate then, many still fail to this day, is that Zimbabwe's oligarchs are looters - anyone can loot of course, given the chance. The one universal truth about looting is that the looter takes what someone else created and therefore does not per se create any new wealth and, more significantly, almost always end up destroying the capacity to produce any more wealth in the future.
Looting kills the goose that lays the golden egg. The whole of Bindura belongs to the Mujurus but ever since the late Solomon Mujuru appropriated everything the whole area has been dying a low torturous death. The same has happened in Zimbabwe's parastatals; ZUPCO, ZESA, ZISCO, NRZ, etc. as soon as Mugabe’s political appointees took over the companies went into decline.
As a nation, we used to respect the importance of hard work but Mugabe has taught us that one can get filthy rich very quickly by reaping other people's hard work! Many Zimbabweans out there are grudgingly accepting all these revisions of the indigenisation and black empowerment policies only because they accept that there is no foreigner left with anything worth looting. The minute they see a white man with a bumper crop or a thriving business they will be demanding that the indigenisation policies must be reinstated so they can go and loot again.
Of course it was out of malice and political expedience that Mugabe sown the seed of greed and envy in our people but now that it has had years to grow, thrive and seed you will find it near impossible to contain. Greed is a very a hardy weed, especially when it is disguised in emotive racial overtones and dished out to an audience more responsive to rhetoric than reason.
@ Yamamoto
I know of a black businessman who was doing well and was expanding his business when the late Simon Muzenda muscled in. Muzenda said he wanted 50% of the business and told the poor man to double the size of everything. He did. Muzenda never paid a penny of the starting capital and so the poor man over reached himself and lost everything.
Ordinarily the Bank would have not given the man such a large loan but Muzenda leaned on them. It was the loan that bury the man and his dreams! It was ok for the likes of Muzenda; the Zanu PF ruling elite have borrowed billions and most of the money was never repaid. There is Zanu PF and its black empowerment for you!
A few years ago a regional anti-corruption trust found that the Zimbabwean traffic cops were the most corrupt in Southern Africa. Last year Africa Barometer, a research project which measures public attitudes on socio-economic issues, found that Zimbabwe was the third most corrupt African country after Nigeria and Egypt.
For years Mugabe has denied that there was corruption in Zimbabwe. Now the chickens have come home to roost. The tyrant has denied mismanagement and corruption were the root causes of the country's economic melt-down insisting that it was the sanctions. But ever since story after story has broken out of corruption the regime has stopped blaming the sanctions for the economic melt-down.
It is said you can convince a blind man that there was no maize meal added to his rice dish but not so with hot chills in the relish! The corruption has become so rampant it is impossible to see how the economy could do anything else other than suffer, wilt and die!
"So how do you then reconcile the need to liberalise (the airwaves) in circumstances where the economy itself is shrinking?” said George Charamba. “Before they have even been born, they will be dead. You see.”
Whilst it is true that the national economy is shrinking still what a feeble excuse for denying the people freedom of expression, free press and freeing the country's airwaves. Free the air waves and let the would-be players make the business decision whether to set shop or not.
People like George Chiramba have enjoyed absolute power for so long they really believe they are special, a cut above all others mortals and hence treat the rest of us as stupid idiots. No doubt he expected his audience to cheer and applaud him for being so considerate and keeping a tight lid on the country's air waves after all no one would want to be burying failed independent radio and TV stations!
Yes thank you, your royal highness George Charamba; where would Zimbabwe be without your infantile guidance and brainwashing!
@ Jera
I would not attribute the hearty cheering of Mugabe at President Jacob Zuma's inauguration by many South Africans to ignorance. There are at least three million Zimbabweans in SA and those South Africans have lived cheek by jowl with the Zimbabweans and therefore will have heard on the economic melt-down and the brutal political repression. The South Africans are cheering Mugabe out of stupidity not ignorance.
The South African have heard about how Mugabe's violent farm invasions have destroyed the country's agricultural sector and precipitating the economic melt-down throwing millions into abject poverty and despair. But they have also heard of how Mugabe and his cronies who took over the farms have become multi-millionaires! The South Africans want their government to implement similar land reforms and black empowerment policies in SA; they are confident SA will have millions of multi-millionaires and none of the poverty.
The South African can see the destruction and misery Mugabe's corruption and looting has caused in Zimbabwe but they want to believe the same corruption and looting will produce completely different results in their country! Why? Well, because SA is not Zimbabwe and they are a lot smarter than Zimbabweans – they think! How naive and stupid is that!
How ironic that President Joyce Banda should want to declare Malawi's elec-tions "null and void", because of "serious irregularities." And yet she was among the first SADC leaders to declare Zimbabwe's July 2013 elections free and fair although there were glaring serious irregularities including the failure to produce a voters roll, one million voters out of the three million cast votes failing to vote because their names were not in the voters roll where they expected, hundreds of thousands being bussed from one polling station to the next to vote, etc.
It is a crying shame that countries like Malawi and Zimbabwe are still failing to hold free and fair elections decades after independence. This is one area where someone must stand up and stop the rot once and once for all!
If Tsvangirai was as brilliant as you want the readers to believe then why has he failed to deliver the democratic changes he has promised all these year. He is the sun, you say, then he must be one of those red dwarfs, a spent force.
You, Mr Mwonzora, you are the one who insisted that the Copac constitution - which you carried around like Leonardo De Vinci carrying the Mona Lisa - would deliver free and fair elections. It did no such thing of course, because it is a weak and feeble document not even worth the paper it is written on. You are the one who is full of hot air.
MDC's popularity was based on one thing and one thing only - desperation. The people were desperate to end the Mugabe dictatorship and desperate people do desperate things in this case they did not pay due attention at what kind of leaders they were electing to carry out the important task of ending the Zanu PF dictatorship. After the breath-taking incompetence of the MDC throughout the GNU SADC and the donors, who are savvier on these matter abandoned MDC en masse. I agree the Zimbabwe electorate a lot slower but trust me they too are going to aban-don MDC.
You are right the MDC renewal's effort to form the grand coalition is doomed be-cause the same breathtakingly incompetent MDC leaders plus a generous sprinkling Zanu PF rejects are in it.
As for the Tsvangirai MDC faction, you lot are desperate to be included in the coali-tion regardless because on your own you will fade even faster. For all his shortcom-ings Tendai Biti did given MDC-T some semblance of direction and purpose; some-thing you, Douglas Togaraseyi Mwonzora, have failed to grasp and will never ever provide? You should stick to writing and singing song in praise of Tsvangirai from now on; your Copac composition was no good but keep trying you must be good at something other than producing copious amounts of hot air!
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