“It is a disheartening
situation and nobody wants to work with a demoralised force. Our officers at
times have to use waste paper to prepare crime records or even going beyond
their limit to purchase bond paper,” Home Affairs
permanent secretary Melusi Matshiya told parliament.
“They have at times also
been forced to wear tattered uniforms and shoes as well as sharing police hats
but they have remained disciplined.”
Well Police Commission
Augustine Chihuri gave enough public testimonial of just how bad the situation
is in the Police Service. He was could not afford a decent pair of shoes and
squeezed his foot into the only pair he had. They were so tight fitting they
cut all blood circulation. Instead of witness the pass out parade of new
recruits they witnessed him passing out.
The Army too is having
the financial squeeze; all soldiers are now being forced to go on leave for two
weeks in a very month, just to save on the food bill!
34 years of Mugabe’s
scientific socialism – read gross mismanagement, rampant corruption and all out
looting spree – has not delivery mass prosperity, “Gutsa ruzhinji!” as he never
tired of tell the nation. It has delivered mass poverty at a grand scale.
Zimbabwe’s economy was
doomed to fail because no economic can survive much less thrive when there is
so much criminal waste of human and material resources. Impossible!
Last week Zanu PF
spokesman Rugare Gumbo announce that Mugabe was ready to hold talks on what
should be done to rescue the national economy and end the tragic human
suffering it has brought. The story of Police officers using waste paper to
write legal documents should help focus the Zanu PF minds on the urgency and
seriousness of the economic meltdown.
In a few weeks 250 000 Zimbabweans returnees
whose work permits SA cannot extend will start arriving. There are at least
four Zimbabweans who depended, directly or indirectly, on the remittance they
have been sending back home. Time is fast running out for Zimbabwe to get the
national economy on a firm recovery path and give our people hope in a
tomorrow!
Conclusion
Mugabe and Zanu PF thought they could rig
economic recovery just as they had rigged the 2013 elections; they have failed
to do so. The economic meltdown is real and must now be addressed as a matter
of urgency. This country is sitting on a ticking health time bond because there
is no clean water and the health services has collapsed. We are sitting on a
social time bomb because millions of our people are out of work and are living
in abject poverty. These bombs can go off any day; Mugabe and his Zanu PF cronies
must know that will be held to account for the consequences!
Signed. Wilbert Mukori
Secretary General
Zimbabwe Social Democrats
9 comments:
@ Mseyama
The basic reality is that Mugabe would not have rigged the 2013 elections if Tsvangirai and his follow MDC leaders had implemented the reforms.
Even now with the benefit of hindsight there are people like you who have yet to understand that basic reality. They even have the audacity of calling those of us who have grasped this basic fact of having "shallow analytical skills".
Zimbabwe is in this political mess because it has too many shallow minded people, so shallow they will not even see what is there before them. They are hard-wired to follow blindly and will follow an idiot even when there is the evidence to prove it!
@ Zimdawg
It would like to get my vocabulary correct but what I care about most is substance. If all you can see is the spelling mistakes but completely missed the substantive points then you are like someone who goes to the library
and all they ever read is playboy magazines - beautiful pictures but will never get any intellectual enlightenment from them!
@ tabonga
No we do not have to wait for God's intervention. Mugabe has accepted to have these talks be-cause he knows the economic meltdown will continue if he does not have the talks. What we must make sure of this time is that the reforms are implemented fully and then hold free and fair elections. Mugabe will never win free and fair elections you know it, I know it and Mugabe knows it!
we would have got rid of Mugabe last year if MDC had implemented the reforms! Let me assure you; it will be done this time. There will be no more cock up - Tsvangirai will be kept well off this time!
@ Opinion
Zimbabwe is in a real mess and millions are living in abject poverty; that says to me that some-thing has gone terribly wrong because I also know that the country has vast resources. You can call those who have led the nation into this mess geniuses, I chose to call them idiots. You can call those who voted the leaders great minds, I chose to call them simpletons, myself included.
Some people are simpletons others are idiots; the former have the redeeming feature of learning for their past mistakes the later never do! What would I call you then - have a guess?!
After a year of staring at that mockingly empty ZimAsset begging bowl Mugabe has finally come to his senses and accepted that he cannot rig economic recovery. And it is the economic melt-down that has allowed poverty, that rogue, to declare himself a Zimbabwean citizen by birth.
Poverty has no respect for anyone, if you have no money he will walk into your home without even knocking. He derives a great deal of sadistic pleasure in you poor meal, will remind you of the mountain of unpaid bills and will not allow the children to sleep and make them cry for hours because they are hungry.
Poverty the rogue has no respect for rank and status. Even Zanu PF grandees like the late Na-than Shamuyarira could not keep him out. The rogue laughed in his face when Nathan told him of impressive ministerial past. "Who cares, you do not have a penny in your pocket and that means you are mine!" Poverty told him.
Many of those Zanu PF loyalists who got the big farms are as poor as a church mouse. Many would have abandoned those farms if they could have a paying job!
Cheating Tsvangirai was ease, child's play but Mugabe has since learnt that cheating poverty by rigging economic recovery was a totally different ball game. In poverty, Mugabe has finally got his match. Unless Mugabe can turn rhetoric into bread, he is working on it; poverty will over-whelm the nation and Zanu PF too!
At a faction to mark Bastille Day the French Ambassador to Zimbabwe said Zimbabwe should work to restore business confidence if the economy is to recover.
“Zimbabwe needs to regain the confidence of its international partners and of the global business community,” said the Ambassador.
Last time the Ambassador said the exact opposite, that there was business confidence in Zimbabwe. Of course there is no business confidence as the ambassador explained himself.
The renewed confidence was necessary for local companies and farmers to invest, banks to lend money, citizens to start businesses and for the informal sector to contribute to the formal economy. “It is that confidence that will unleash the full potential of Zimbabwe’s many assets”, he said.
Whatever he had eaten or smoked when he gave his Mutare speech - I will not speculate - it did not agree with him and he must never try it again. Never!
We want a health relationship with France where we treat each other with respect and not one where the French flatter our failed leaders and in doing so insult our intelligence!
Joyeux Jour de la Bastille Monsieur l'Ambassadeur!
@ Donhodzo
You are right about the Zimbabwe electorate being ill informed they are. People believed MDC when they were told the 2013 elections will be free and fair. They would have never approved the Copac constitution if they had known the truth. Get the people know the truth about Tsvangirai's blundering incompetence, end the wildebeest mentality and Tsvangirai will have no supporters! None!
I am going there! I am of the school that Zimbabweans are ignorant but not stupid. Give them information and they will prove it; unlike some of the so called educated people (many on this site) who have all the information but have failed to make sense of it. They still follow Tsvangirai just as sheepishly as ever, Of course they are stupid!
@ VaMutuki
You should not confuse getting the majority vote with being right particularly when you have an electorate that is ill informed, to say nothing of being down right stupid.
Zimbabweans voted by 95% to approve the Copac constitution in the 16 March 2013 referen-dum; they believed Tsvangirai when he said it was a "brain child of the MDC" and would delivery free, fair and credible elections. Even Tsvangirai himself has had to admit that the elections were rigged. You being hard-wired to follow the leader has no doubt accepted the rigging as a matter of course and it will never occur to you that Tsvangirai had indeed lied that the elections would be free and fair.
Of course Tsvangirai is free to contest the next elections but you can be sure of one thing I will do my best to remind the people of what a liar and incompetent individual he is! Only a stupid idiot would vote for someone they KNOW to be a village idiot. We both you he will have your vote, of course, but I can assure you it there not millions like you out there!
You should not make the mistake of assuming that everyone who voted for Tsvangirai last time is stupid; many of them did out of ignorance, which is not the same thing. I will do my best to make sure those with ears to hear and the mental intellect to perceive all get to hear the truth about Tsvangirai's blundering incompetence!
The primary concern of the people is to get out of this mess, they voted for Tsvangirai because they believed he would get them out of the mess. Explain to them how Tsvangirai forgot about getting them out because Mugabe bribed him with the Highlands mansion and gave him a blank cheque for him to gallivant round the world and chase women of ill repute. Tsvangirai himself admit of his "playboy" days.
Yes, he admits that his playboy days are over, but only because as soon as Mugabe secured his election victory he stopped all bribe payments.
Tsvangirai failed to get the people out of this mess because he and his MDC friends were breathtakingly corrupt and incompetent; not just corrupt and incompetent but BREATHTAKINGLY so. When you are that corrupt and that incompetent and one KNOWS that then only a first class idiot would ever trust you with their vote again!
My job, and I do take my jobs very seriously, is to make sure the Zimbabwe electorate KNOW about tyrants like Mugabe and blundering idiots like Tsvangirai!
@ Eddie Cross
I will say this much, Eddie Cross is probably one of the few MDC leaders who has shown some sparkle of originality and common sense. But even he has been overcome by the fumes of confusion coming the thousands of MDC deadwood. Here is one example when Mr Cross is just as confused as his MDC friends; “They (Zanu PF) have to contend with a new Constitution – the one element in the GPA that they could not circumvent - but clearly they have a strategy to deal with that problem by simply fudging its implementation and delaying the required changes to our laws,” wrote Eddie.
He is saying in the same sentence – not one thing in one sentence and then something else in the next, but all in one – that Zanu PF could not circumvent the new constitution but they found a way to do just that!
In other words Mr Cross is admitting, in the typical MDC roundabout way, that none of the GPA goals were ever delivered; not even one democratic reform was implemented and the Copac constitution Tsvangirai claimed was the “brainchild of MDC” and would deliver free and fair elections is a weak and feeble constitution not even worth the paper it is written on. It is so weak that Zanu PF is cherry picking the bits they like and “fudging its implementation”!
If the Zimbabwean electorate had been wide awake, which is what an electorate in a healthy and functioning democracy should be, then all the democratic reforms would have been implemented, a new democratic constitution produced and the nation would have been rewarded with free, fair and credible elections. We would not be in this mess!
We say we want a free, just, democratic and prosperous Zimbabwe but have done little to earn it. We have to understand what takes to have a free society; freedom of expression and a free media, for example, and then make sure these are secured. It is not rocket science but is does require a little effort on our part.
The moral of the story is that ultimately; people always get the government and opposition they deserve; after 34 years since independence we cannot say we do not deserve Zanu PF and MDC! And until we rouse ourselves out of this sloth-like slumber, a competent government and opposition will remain a pipe dream!
Post a Comment