Germany offers way out of Zim crisis - offer Mugabe will be mad to refuse!

Ambassador Georg Schmidt, Germany’s Regional Director for Sub-Saharan Africa offers Zimbabwe the way out of the country’s economic meltdown and debt trap by offering to assist in repayment of our debt in return for Zimbabwe implementing the economic and political reforms.

“Should the positive signals in the process of constitutional alignment and economic reform prove to be sustainable Germany is prepared to enter into an open dialogue with the Zimbabwean Government on ways out of the economic crisis, including the burdensome debt problem.”

“I came to Harare in this spirit,” Ambassador Schmidt gave the assurance.

Mugabe and his cronies do not deserve this help and thus the more reason they must grab it and be thankful. It is not every day that someone will offer to help pay another person’s bad debts particularly when the said debt is a self-inflicted wound from decades of criminal waste of resources through gross mismanagement, rampant corruption to all out looting and plunder.

Zimbabwe is a very rich country and would not need any helping hand if the country’s vast resources and wealth were managed properly and for the good of all and not wasted to gratify the insatiable greed of the few. In 2005/2006 Zimbabwe’s Marange and Chiadzwa diamonds were valued at a staggering $800 billion, for example. The exploitation of this bounty is now in full swing and yet the country has only collected mere pittance in tax revenue. A few weeks ago the nation learnt that will not receive even the pittance!

The Minister of Information, Professor Jonathan Moyo, twittered two months ago that there was going to be a “dramatic reduction in tax” from sale of Marange diamonds. His colleague, the Minister of Finance, Patrick Chinamasa, confirmed the bad news a few weeks later when he told parliament that “alluvial diamonds are finished”.

Government has been struggling to pay the wages of the bloated civil servants let alone pay for anything else. What Minister Chinamasa was failing to explain was why the government was not getting anything from in tax revenue from Marange diamond mining. By telling the nations there were no more diamonds the Minister was saving himself from having to give any more feeble excuses by giving one blatant lie.

Of course Chinamasa was lying that the diamonds were finished because the regime had just signed a deal with the Russians to mine for diamonds in Marange in September 2014.  When Mugabe signed the $4.8 billion deal with the Russian to mine Platinum in Darwendale; he also signed a hush-hush deal with them to mine diamonds in Marange with the Zimbabwe Military as their local partner. The two shared the proceeds without having to pay any tax; that is why it was hush-hush.

 Apparently this is in fact the norm; the foreign company provide the mining expertise and then share the proceeds from the sale of the diamond with their local partner without having to pay a penny in tax. The late Zanu PF MP Chindori Chininga confirmed this was indeed the practice in his parliamentary report in 2013. The report said the mining was a hectic 24 hours  a day and 7 days a week operation and yet no one on the Zimbabwean side had any record of the quantity, quality and value of the diamonds the foreign partners were extracting and shipped out of the country.

The rich and powerful in the Zanu PF ruling elite are all in on the looting and plunder of Marange, including the Army, the Police and Zanu PF leaders including Mugabe himself. According to Partnership Africa Canada’s report, Mugabe made a mouth-watering $2 billion in 2012 alone from his share of the Marange diamonds.

In calling for “economic reforms” Ambassador Schmidt must have meant an end to Zimbabwe’s rampant corrupt but he could not have realized the extent and depth of the rot. How can Mugabe tell his cronies the tax free windfall concessions have all been terminated, especially when he has been so heavily involved himself and took the lion’s share all these years and has amassed unbelievable wealth for himself and his family. The cronies feel they are only playing catch-up!

The firing of former Vice President Joice Mujuru and 16 senior party and government leaders has made everyone in Zanu PF very jumpy. All these years Mugabe has kept the peace in the party by dishing out jobs in the bloated civil service, lucrative contracts, seized former white owned, tax-free diamond mining concessions, etc., etc. to his ever demanding but wasteful party loyalists just to keep them sweet. In the face of the country’s economic meltdown these patronage perks are all that is stopping many of these party loyalists sinking into abject poverty as has already happen to 16% of the country’s population.

If Mugabe was to end the system of political patronage now Zanu PF loyalists affected will never see it as a necessity for economic recovery but rather as the on-going political purge in the party. Purging Mujuru and those close to her is one thing but to purge the whole Zanu PF body-politic is political suicide.

Mugabe will never ever address the problem of mismanagement and corruption at the heart of Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown because he would have to end his political patronage system of rewarding corrupt and wasteful party loyalists. He needs their blind loyalty to stay in power now more than ever because the regime’s failed economic policies and political repression has made Zanu PF unelectable without vote rigging.

The European Union has already promised Harare $1.28 million to fund the process of aligning Zimbabwe’s existing laws to the 2013 Copac constitution.  Ambassador, this is a waste of time and money because the Copac constitution alone will never delivered free and fair elections, restore law and order, restore property rights, etc. as the 2013 elections have already shown.

What Zimbabwe need to have ALL the democratic reforms agreed in the 2008 Global Political Agreement necessary for free and fair election and the restoration of all the freedoms and basic humans implemented. Since Zanu PF and MDC were the parties in the GNU who failed to get even one of the reform implemented it would be naïve not believe that with Zanu PF on its own can ever be trusted to implement any of these reforms.

Mugabe and Zanu PF must step down so that a body can be appointed to implement ALL the democratic reforms.

What Mugabe and his cronies have to realize is that the current economic system that has pushed unemployment rate to nauseating height of 90%, has forced 16% of the people into a life of abject poverty, etc. is socially, morally and politically unsustainable. Zimbabwe is sitting on a social time-bomb because no people can be expected to endure economic hardships that have denying them their humanity and hope forever without protesting. The limit of what Zimbabweans will endured has now been reached as can be seen by the growing public unrest.

Germany is offering Mugabe and his Zanu PF cronies a way out of the economic nightmare of the economic meltdown by helping organise and fund economic recovery and Zimbabwe ballooning national debt. Germany has the technical know-how and experience given that it was in total economic ruins after the Second World War but soon emerged as Europe’s economic power house it is today. This is an offer only a madman would refuse; all Mugabe has to do now is step down. But by refusing to step down, Mugabe will per se have elected that he will be forced out power the Muammar Gaddafi way!