There are rumours that the Chinese President Xi Jinping could visit Zimbabwe before year end.
Is the visit going to help Mnangagwa get the Zanu PF crown or is
the Zimbabwe’s situation so hopeless it does not matter who gets the crown?
No doubt China wants Mugabe to honour the promise to have their
man, Mnangagwa, as Mugabe's successor and stop playing his silly games of
declaring the succession race "wide open" and whilst promoting his
wife Grace's candidature at every opportunity.
China pledged to spend $4 billion in ZimAsset project in
Zimbabwe and a further $1 billion if Mnangagwa becomes president when Mugabe
visited China last August. They, however, refused to give Mugabe a dollar in
budgetary support because he is a “bad debtor” and told him so to his face. It
is the budgetary support Mugabe needed for the country to have any hope of
economic recovery. And that hope is all but gone because no one else gave
Mugabe a dollar in ZimAsset budgetary support and the plan is dead in the
water.
China has not spent a dollar of that project money yet and it is
reportedly seeking more assurance the money will not be wasted. China has been
demanding that Chinese personal be attached to the relevant ministry and
parastatal handling the projects to stop “excessive leaks” through corruption.
China’s $4 billion was not going to revive the Zimbabwe economy
on its own, but every little helps. Still given Zimbabwe’s serious economic
meltdown must have been forced to rethink whether the long-time, 3 to 4 years,
benefits of the projects was worth him abandoning his own Zanu PF succession
plans to please the Chinese. But reports of the Chinese having second thoughts
must have decided the matter for him after all when one is 91 years old and
sickly all one cares about is one or two years!
Mugabe and his wife’s portraits have featured side by side
together with the Zanu PF candidate’s face in recent election materials. Grace
has made no secret of her presidential ambitions and there is no doubt that
Mugabe is now openly promoting her candidature at every opportunity. The fly in
the Mugabes’ ointment is the economy.
The economic meltdown is taking a heavy toll it is now
impossible to ignore it; unemployment is a nauseating 90%, 16% of the
population or 2 million are already living in abject poverty, etc.
Even the government is now so desperate for cash that for the
first time ever since independence it is now publically talking of cutting the
“bloated” civil service. Mugabe has always viewed the civil service as if it
was the Canadian prairies or Argentina’s Pampas with sweet grass stretching
into the horizon 360 degrees where his party loyalists, their families and
“small houses” were sent to pasture and grow fat without ever having to worry
about overgrazing, etc.
The irony is the regime is now going of cut the bloated civil
service at a time when the private sector is all but dead, the economic
environment has been so hostile for years it has been impossible to do business
in Zimbabwe, they will have no hope of finding another job or making a living.
So whoever is going to be in power being it Mugabe or his wife
will have a difficult task of presiding over a government throwing out Zanu PF
party loyalists, their families, “small houses”, everyone into a certain life
of abject poverty. It would be particularly hard for Grace because the natural
thing for her to be doing would have been to extend the privileges to buy
political allies. Given the brutal fighting that is taking place in the party
she has so serious bribing to do.
What makes this situation so disappointing is that no matter how
savage the civil service cuts happened to be they will not end the economic
meltdown. As long as Zanu PF remains in power the economic meltdown will march
on relentlessly!
Zanu PF itself has become the byword for mismanagement,
corruption and lawlessness; the root causes of the country’s political and
economic problems. No one would invest in Zimbabwe whilst the party Zanu PF
associated with such obnoxious economic policies like its indigenisation laws
and the racist motivated looting spree of white owned farms remains in power.
The Chinese’s $4 billion last August may have help Mnangagwa get
the first Vice President post last December but it has clearly done nothing to
stop Mugabe scheming for who will be his successor. By the time the Chinese
President visit later in the year it will be probably settled that their
preferred man is out of the race.
As for now one thing has been settled; Zanu PF is a party is
serious political turmoil and under increasing economic and social pressure to
give up power as a result the worsening economic situation.
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