Chinamasa lies Zim has "suspended" diamond tax to hide he failed to collect tax because of the rampant corruption!

Our Finance Minister, Patrick “Kiya-kiya” Chinamasa, is still grappling with how to deny the wholesale looting and plunder going on in Marange.  Every month the Minister has had to struggle to find the money to pay the civil servants let alone to pay for all the other things like consumables and food for the soldiers. There is billions of dollars in potential revenue from the diamond mining going on in Marange but so far he has not received a cent because all the money it being looted. He has been forced to go elsewhere to find the money. And here is where it has become really tricky; none of the other possible sources are willing to give him a cent, not when they know Zimbabwe is wasting billions in mismanagement and corruption.

Millions of Zimbabweans are unemployed today but they are eking out a living by becoming vendors, kiya-kiya. Zimbabwe must now have the biggest vendors to formal employment ratio in the whole world because it seems everybody is a vendor. The way Minister Chinamasa has run the country’s finance shuffling the dates each group of civil servants are paid, living from hand to mouth and always paying each bill or overdraft when one has absolutely have to; just as a vendor has to live from hand to mouth on negative cash flow, etc.; has earned Chinamasa the nickname “Kiya-kiya”.

The issue of the unaccounted Marange diamond revenue has once again been taxing our Kiya-kiya Minister’s other hidden skill of being economical with the truth.

“The government owns half the shares in all the mines in Marange, which produces alluvial diamonds that are of a lower quality than the gems mined at Rio Tinto's Murowa mine in south central Zimbabwe,” reported New Zimbabwe in its story, “Chinamasa suspends tax of diamond sales”.

“Murowa produced 344,000 carats in 2014 but production figures from mining companies operating in Marange area, which produced 14 million carats in 2013, are not yet available.”

A few months ago Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, Zimbabwe’s answer to notorious Nazi Germany propagandist Joseph Goebbels but with a ferret’s nose for juicy gossip to boot, twittered that “there will be a significant drop” in tax revenue from Marange diamonds.

A week later, Kiya-kiya Minister announced there were “no more alluvial diamonds” in Marange and Chiadzwa. None!

Of course Kiya-kiya was just being very economical with the truth. How is it possible that in 2013 Marange produced a staggering 14 million carats, it must have produced even more in 2014 because there was a hive of activity down there and now 2015 zero !

 

When Tendai Biti was Minister of Finance, he complained money that should be coming to government disappearing to fund a shadowy “parallel government”. He was talking of the Joint Operations Command (JOC), a Junta, comprising of a select elite from security chiefs, from Zanu PF including Patrick Chinamasa, former RBZ governor Gideon Gono, “Goebbels” Moyo who were invited to the strategic planning committee meetings only, Emmerson Mnangangwa and Robert Mugabe himself. This Junta had its own source of funding – Marange diamonds being the primary source.

The nation will never know how many millions carat diamonds were mined in Marange in 2014 because Finance Minister will have to explain why the public fiscus did not get a single cent in revenue! So just as Zanu PF refused to make public the voters roll for the July 2013 Zimbabwe elections because it is the smoking gun to the rigged vote; the regime is once again withholding information on the diamond mining activities in Marange in 2014 because that is the smoking gun that would prove the very existence of the JOC Junta.

Minister Patrick Chinamasa’s announcement that all alluvial diamonds in Marange had been exhausted was the Junta’s rather pathetic attempt to forestall further public demands for an explanation why he is still failing to collect any tax from diamond sales! Of course Chinamasa could not tell IMF and WB, from whom he was begging for financial assistance, the same cock-and-bull story of no diamonds left in Marange. They have their own sources of information to counter Goebbels Moyo’s propaganda lies, they know there still a hive of diamond mining activity in Marange.

"We have temporarily suspended the collection of the special dividend on diamond sales on the back of the drop in production and adverse price developments," Minister Chinamana said in his letter. The IMF has gone on to publish the letter on its website, for the whole world to read for themselves some of the nonsense they receive.

Needless to say Kiya-kiya Chinamasa returned from Washington DC empty handed. IMF and WB cannot continue to fund this Zanu PF regime and ignore all the looting and plunder that is going on in the country.  

The irony is Zimbabwe would not be need IMF and WB funding if the country managed its vast resources and great potential well and stopped all this criminal waste through gross mismanagement and rampant corruption.  For example, Zimbabwe is believed to hold 25 percent of the world's reserves of opencast extractable diamonds valued at $800 billion, with the eastern Marange fields its major diamond source.

We have to end the corruption and criminal waste of these resources and thus end the heart-breaking human suffering the wastefulness has brought. We must end the Zanu PF dictatorship that created this wasteful system; Mugabe and his cronies have grown fat and filthy rich from the system and will not want to see it end.

The suffering people of Zimbabwe must demand the full implementation of all the democratic reforms Zanu PF and MDC agreed to in the 2008 GPA followed by the holding of free, fair and credible elections. This is the only way the nation is going to end this Zanu PF dictatorship and its kiya-kiya economy that has brought nothing but suffering and poverty to millions of Zimbabweans!