Mugabe to pay $ 54 million unpaid Mugabe Scholarship fees in SA - splash will cost him povo's vote!

Mugabe pledges to pay the $54 million unpaid fees demanding by SA Universities for the 4 000 Zimbabwean students studying there or they would be kicked out of the institutions of 28 July 2013. The students are there on a Mugabe scholarship scheme, like most things in this dictatorship it bears his name but paid for by the taxpayers and for the exclusive benefit of mid-ranking Zanu PF party loyalists.

Finance Minister, Tendai Biti stopped funding the scheme in 2011 reportedly because “it is a private trust”. That was only half the story; the other important half was that government did not have the money. The Minister had savagely slashed the budge of other soft targets ministries like education whilst spending even more on overseas trips for the President and other senior government officials.

Year of underfunding and demonstrations by the students and strike by the teachers demanding better funding have seen Zimbabwe’s education standard drop. Sending one’s children to study in SA, UK, USA and other overseas institution was a matter of prestige soon became an absolute necessity. Mugabe’s own daughter has only returned after what must be over a decade studying the Far East. Like her father, she must have several University degrees; he has seven.

The President Mugabe’s Scholarship Fund was established to placate the mid-ranking Zanu PF loyalists who saw those above them sending their children out of the country whilst their children were condemned to near collapse institutions. The scholarship would then pay the fees the parents could not otherwise afford to pay.

The timing of the demands for the unpaid fees, 28 July 2013, could not have been better! The people of Zimbabwea are going to vote three day later. The last thing Mugabe and Zanu PF would want to see is just before the people went out to vote is headline of “President Mugabe Trust Fund Student in SA send booted out of Universities for failing to pay their fees!”

The parents of these students form the core of Zanu PF loyalists who have done so much to keep the dictatorship in power but so far have had precious little in loot to show for it. Schemes like the scholarship have kept these loyalists slaving away in the hope that the dictatorship will reward them one of these fine days. The last thing Mugabe would want is to lose the confidence of this band of blind loyalists; later yes but just before the elections that is simply unthinkable!

Of course Mugabe had no choice but cough up the fees.

“We will ensure that we get the money soon and kana zvichireva chikwereti tinotora chikwereti ichocho. Tingabva tashaya chikwereti?” Mugabe said reassuringly.

Well he has the $5 billion at least he has been pocketing these last four years from the sale of Marange diamonds. Given that his Lebanese and Chinese friends, his partners in the looting in Marange, have themselves probably ferretted $50 to $500 billion in the same period they will happily advance Mugabe the $54 million.

“I will be the guarantor of it, so we do not wreck our relationship with Fort Hare, our relationship elsewhere with other universities,” said Mugabe.

But most important of all wreck your relationship with these middle-ranking Zanu PF loyalists whose assistance you will need to pull off the dirty tricks you need to “win” these elections! They constitute the foot soldiers; the shrinking circle of the filthy rich ruling elite does not have enough numbers left to pull off this election fit.

Of course paying the Scholarship fees, was a high risk tight-rope walking act; given Zimbabwe’s multitude of financial problems the act is being performed in the Grand Canyon with Gale force winds blowing. The splashing of any money was bound to be notice and to upset some constituencies. Let us stay with the same issue, education.  

The $54 million is a fortune compared to the US$ 5 million allocated to the Ministry of Education in 2012 to spend on the country's 300 000 schools, not students. Worse still, Education Minister Senator David Coltart said the ministry only got a misery 6% of that in the end.

 

“We are financially crippled and cannot implement any projects because of failure by Treasury to disburse funds,” said Senator Coltart in September 2012. “Rural schools are mostly affected because most of our projects were supposed to be implemented there.”

 

The years of poor funding were now showing in pathetic the school results; last year 82% of the students failed to pass five "O" level subjects or more.

 

The same year an estimated 50,000 students on the government’s cadetship programme were barred from registering for classes with local universities and colleges because they were demanding that government must paid them millions of dollars in unpaid fees first.

 

Mugabe did not raise a finger to make sure Ministry of education got the $ 6 million or to pay the fees so the 50 000 could do their cadetship. The parents of all these children whose very lives have been irrevocably damaged by being denying a decent education have a vote too.

 

Mugabe will be holding his mass rally campaigns in the next three weeks where he will, no doubt, be splashing some of his diamonds fortune given everyone a Zanu PF T-shirt and buying beer for everybody.

 

It is almost certain that this payment is going to be the last one for these Mugabe scholarship; even if Mugabe wins he will be too busy replenishing his fortune to be bothered about the 4 000 students. If Mugabe lose, no new government can ever justify spending such vast sums of money on the education of a tiny few whilst the majority of the children’s education suffer.

 

What Mugabe is hoping is that this $54 million payment will convince the middle-ranking Zanu PF blind loyalists into believing there is plenty more money wherever that came from enough to help him win this elections. He is hoping the beer will make the Zimbabwe masses forget all their economic hardship, the brutal repression and the yawning economic chasm between them and the filthy rich ruling elite long enough to vote for him. He will certainly forget them immediately after the voting; he is buying the beer grudging, he would have wanted to beat, rape and murder them into submission as he did in 2008 if he had his way.

 

The middle-ranking Zanu PF loyalists are clearly impressed with the fees donation. I do not think the beer will do the trick with the masses though; they have been cheated and taken for fools by the tyrant for 33 years so much so that even if Mugabe can get them drunk for the whole three weeks it can induce them to forget what a tyrant he is. No, buying povo beer will not bag them for Mugabe! Not this time!