"Corruption is hurting us" admits Mugabe. It is time for decisive action and not grand standing posturing!

For 34 years Mugabe has denied there was any such thing as corruption in Zimbabwe. He had allowed corruption to grow and thrive because he needed to bribe members of his own Zanu PF to be sure of their continued blind loyalty to him. Corruption was the glue that held his party of odd balls together. These were men and women of no talent and with only one thing in common - their insatiable appetite for power and wealth.

Their promise to Mugabe was their resolve to ride rough shod of the ordinary people's basic rights and freedoms including the right to a meaningful vote and even the right to life itself. In return for their blind loyalty to the Zanu PF dictatorship; Mugabe allowed them to be corrupt and loot.

Mugabe got his de facto one party dictatorship that has allowed him and his misfits to enjoy absolute power and to pillage for 34 years.

"Corruption, corruption, corruption! It is hurting us,,” Mugabe has finally admitted.  

 

Corruption, looting and lawlessness are the sworn enemies of economic prosperity, justice and freedom. To say corruption, looting and lawlessness are "hurting" the nation is an understatement. They are killing the nation.

 

Life expectancy, the universally accepted qualitative and quantitative measure of the standard of living, has dropped from 68 years in 1980 when Mugabe took office to 34 years or less today. One out of every two deaths could have been avoided if the country had not had this corrupt and oppressive Mugabe dictatorship.

 

The regime has directly murdered over 30 000 innocent Zimbabweans to establish and retain the dictatorship.

 

The millions of Zimbabweans alive are hurting as the result of the plummeted standard of living but are lucky to have survived this far. The over 30 000 murdered and the hundreds of thousands who have died because the country's health service has collapse are not hurting; they are dead!

"We will send them (those who are corrupt) to prisons netai dzenyu idzodzo,” said Mugabe one breath. "But we do not want people to undergo such unnecessary suffering,” recanted the dictator in the next breath.

Of course he does not want, never did, his cronies and ultimately himself punished for the corruption, looting and lawlessness. The consequences of his failure to stop corruption is the economic melt-down that is killing hundreds of thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans but he would rather see the masses suffer and die in damn anguish and despair than the corrupt criminals send to jail.

It is not so much that Mugabe is not sincere about punishing the odd official or minister who is corrupt – he will have to do that given the seriousness of the problem. The truth is this will be no more than administering a painkiller to one suffering from cancer. The painkiller will give some relief to the patient so he can have a few hours of peaceful slumber. If nothing is done to remove the cancer the patient will die.

Mismanagement, corruption, looting, brutal political repression these are all the varying manifestation of the malignant and bankrupt ethos of one party dictatorship. The ethos that only Zanu PF has the monopoly of knowledge and wisdom and therefore it alone must rule Zimbabwe and be granted absolute political power.

The party has been allowed to rig elections and even to commit wholesale murders to establish and retain this political ethos. Anything to ensure there is no regime change, the antithesis of one-party autocracy.

So to end corruption we must uproot this cancerous disease and trace it back to its root cause – the dictatorship – and uproot that too! End the political system that has denied the people a meaningful say in the governance of the country and the distribution of its vast wealth and riches and corruption will die.

Zimbabwe’s economic situation demands the decisive action of ending the corrupt regime and not the token empty gesture of arresting the odd minister in the corrupt regime!