Mugabe has failed to honour his post rigged elections pledged to double Teachers' wages now offering free housing - not that he will honour that!

The Mugabe government has been forced to accept that it cannot honour Mugabe’s post July vote-rigging promise to double civil servants’ wages. So it is instead offering to plicate the civil servants with non-monetary benefits it will never delivery.

 

“The good thing is that the workers will participate in doing that by suggesting their ideas while we suggest what we can also do. I believe if we put our ideas together sincerely, then something positive would come up at the end of the day,” Minister Goche said.

 

No amount of spin by Minister Goche will change the fundamental problem here that the Zimbabwe economy has been shrinking at the same alarming rate as corruption and looting has been expanding and those forces will do nothing to improve the lives of the long suffering Zimbabwean people.

Mugabe told the civil servants that they will be paid wages above the $ 500 Poverty Datum Line (PDL) in August 2013, a few weeks after he declared himself winner of the rigged elections. He just wanted to pacify the civil servants in case they should go on strike. His plate was full, with all the evidence of the vote rigging flying around; the last thing he wanted was to have to deal with a civil servant strike too!

All the millions of Zimbabweans who had just been blatantly cheated of their vote would have teamed up with the civil servants turning the wage increase demand into a public demand for free, fair and credible elections. That scarred Mugabe!

Of course Mugabe was aware that government was broke; after all he was the one who suck up all the money to finance the vote rigging extravagancy. But true to his form as a dictator, he turned round to Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa and ordered him to "find the money" to pay the civil servants.

Mugabe himself then f***d to Singapore on one of his many overseas holidays cum business trips - in 2012 he had no few than 8 trips to Singapore alone. These trips cost anything from $3 million. He probably spend twice as much given the trip is two months before his daughter Bona's wedding; the whole family needed a new wardrobe, gifts, etc.

Finance Minister Chinamasa has said in his budget statement that there was no money to double the civil servants' wages. In other words he could not find the money as Mugabe had ordered. Of course Chinamasa has no problem finding the $6 million, or whatever, to pay for Mugabe's trip!

So now that the regime is coming round to accepting that one cannot fit a square peg one-metre across into a round hole one millimetre across Labour minister Nicholas Goche is offering civil servants "non- monetary benefits" like free housing. Where there are no government houses, the regime is promising to build houses. What is surprising is that the civil servants are even considering this as serious offer.

 

Where government was providing accommodation at nominal rent scrapping the rent will mean even less revenue going into government coffers. How will that help a cash strapped government.

 

If government has no money to pay wages where will it get the money to build houses for civil servants?

 

In fact free houses or heavily subsided housing is not a new policy at all. The practise, whether it had been public pronounced is irrelevant, has been going on for donkey years, at least for the ruling elite. How else did Morgan Tsvangirai get his $4 million Manson?

 

What Minister Goche is proposing is extending the benefits to the lucky few at the top of the civil servant ladder at the expense of those at the bottom who will never ever get those benefits!

 

The tragic reality is that Zimbabweans have for the last 33 years been bending over backwards to make the Mugabe corrupt and tyrannical rule work because they had accepted the regime's fundamental tenet that there will never be regime change. So it was not just the regime that has been pretending it can fit a one metre square peg in a one millimetre round hole; the people themselves have dutiful played along.

 

Zimbabwe will never get out of this hell-hole the nation now finds itself in until there is regime change! Mugabe rigged the July 2013 elections, he is per se illegitimate. Zimbabwe needs a legitimate government first and foremost before there can be talk of restoring the rule of law and economic recovery!