I have read Zimbabwe Economist, Eric Bloch's columns many, many times in Zimbabwe's independent press. I have to say, often I was no wiser after reading them than before. His theories / explanations / comments / etc went way over my head. This time however, HE is way out of his depth; to call Gideon Gono a genius is tantamount to calling Adolf Hitler or Robert Mugabe a great statesman!
Gono, Hitler and Mugabe have done a lot of things and their words and actions have affected millions of people. Their names will be remember in history for a millennium and beyond together with those of other historic figures like US President Abraham Lincoln, Sir Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi of India and Mother Teresa. The later group are famous whilst Gono and co. are notorious. Sir Isaac Newton is a genius because he was able to explain things that had puzzled mankind for generations. What exactly has Gono done to deserve to be called genius? I am not an economist, but this time, Mr Bloch; you will have my undivided attention.
Mr Bloch must explain how Gono’s “nefarious” activities like printing Z$ and thus fuelling Zimbabwe’s hyper inflation, taking the country’s resources from critical areas like health, education and food relief and channelling them into buying Mercedes Benz for the ruling elite and funding Zanu PF’s thugs who terrorising and murdered innocent people fit in with being a genius. It is not enough to say Gono was forced to do these things.
“Gono is being condemned for the wrong reasons because whatever he did under the Zanu-PF government, he was being forced to do,” said Mr Bloch. One will have to be very naïve to believe that nonsense.
What ever Gideon Gono has done, he was well rewarded for it. As Governor of RBZ, Gono was a de facto member of the Joint Operation Command (JOC) – the supreme decision-making body of the Mugabe dictatorship. JOC members wielded a lot of power and influence and everything and everyone they touched turned into gold!
Gono, like all the other members of JOC, earned his JOC badge because he showed initiative – the regime would have never cleaned clients’ RBZ foreign currency bank accounts with such efficiency without Gono’s active help, for example - and showed the willingness to go the extra mile in serving the dictatorship.
When Gono was asked to explain his past his defence was he was following parliament and Mugabe's orders. Right, we are back to the Nazi killers' infamous "we were following orders!” People should not be surprised to find that Gideon Gono played an active roll in the writing of the RBZ Act, just to cover his own backside!
It is one thing for Mr Eric Bloch to call the disgraced RBZ Governor a “genius” because he was “impressed” by all the dirty economic tricks the Governor devised and how he tried to cleverly covered his tracks. Mr Bloch did not feel the adverse effects of the economic melt down and the political repression Gono’s dirty tricks caused. Millions of Zimbabweans did and find it insulting that someone would call the person clearly with no professional principles, who sold his own mother for a price and was proud he had a mother to sell and who caused them so much grief a genius. It is no exaggeration to say, it will take at least two generations and a lot of hard work and sacrifice for the Zimbabwe economy to recover to what it was in 2003 when Gono was appointed Governor. Zimbabwe is in this political and economic mess, not because the country was being run by idiots; Mugabe’s successive governments have some on the well educated men and women, expects in their own field of expertise! The country is in a mess because these men and women did not have the professional principles, the moral compass and the common sense to say no to Mugabe’s corrupting influences. Gideon Gono, like many others in JOC and Mugabe’s ruling elite, is accused of abusing his power and corruption and will be rightly condemned! Mr Bloch, Gono is not being assessed for his knowledge of Keynesian Economics, etc. just as the Nuremberg Nazi criminals were not on trial for their shooting skills!
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