It was a matter of time
before this Zanu PF regime finally acknowledged that the economic meltdown
affecting Zimbabwe is real, is getting worse and, most significantly, that the
regime does not know what to do to stop this runaway train. The regime went
China hoping to get some hard cash for budgetary support and the Chinese told
President Mugabe to his face that he was “a bad debtor”, according to Minister
Chinamasa who was there with him.
Mugabe needed the
budgetary to civil servant wages let alone pay for everything else.
"I am embarrassed
that our wage bill is some 76 percent of whatever revenue we receive. It's not
good, it's not sustainable," Patrick Chinamasa told business leaders in Harare
on Tuesday.
The very next week
following his return from China empty-handed, Finance Minister Chinamasa
announced to the impoverished and over taxed nation that taxes on fuel, mobile
phones and everything else he could. Companies are closing and unemployment is
a soaring 85% plus; the revenue base is shrinking fast increasing taxes
therefore will not increase collected revenue.
Every rural boy knows
that milking the cow three times a day will not increase the quantity of milk.
The Zimbabwe cow is now being milked every hour on the hour!
After rigging the July
2013 elections President Mugabe was warned that unless he can rig the economic
recovery too his hold on power will be tenuous! It is now over a year and the
ZimAsset begging bowl has remained mockingly empty; a testimonial of his
failure to rig the economic recovery.
The party has tried to
pretend the mega-deals it signed with China and Russia will somehow make up for
the empty ZimAsset begging bowl. The economic meltdown was not so easily
fooled.
The solution to ending
the economic meltdown is simple and straight forward: end the rampant
corruption and restore the lost confidence of donors and investors alike in the
country’s commitment to the rule of law. Since Zanu PF rigged last year’s
elections this Zanu PF regime will never convince anyone it can be trusted to
uphold and guarantee property rights, which is what the donors and investors
want.
How can a regime that
will contemptuously disregard the constitutional rights of millions of its own
citizens to a meaningful free and fair vote be trusted to uphold the property
rights of a foreigner? It should be noted here that the said regime has
committed the treasonous act of rigging elections a number of times in the past
just as it has violently seized the properties from foreigners and locals alike
in the past.
The solution here is
therefore first and foremost a political one; President Mugabe and Zanu PF must
step down to allow the full implementation of the democratic reforms, that
should have been implemented during the GNU, followed by the holding of fresh
free, fair and credible elections. The government emerging from these elections
will have the political mandate to do what is necessary to end corruptions and
the confidence of donors and investors alike.
“As to the solution...
we have to create the necessary political climate, build consensus in order to
tackle the issues. I can assure you that we are working on this issue," Chinamasa
said without elaborating.
Just remember two things
Minister; one, another political fudge like the last GNU is a waste of time.
Two, the economic meltdown is affecting real people; 2 million Zimbabweans are
living in abject poverty already and that number is increasing every day. Get
on with it!
8 comments:
Yes ZSD have a whole raft of economic policies many of which we have already stated in the various discussion papers we have published in the various forums including the fol-lowing zimbabwelight.blogspot.co.uk. We have not collated these into one document one might call an election manifesto because we believe this will be a distraction from the three main tasks in hand right now:
1) Getting Mugabe and Zanu PF to step down
2) Getting all the democratic reforms implemented
3) holding free, fair and credible elections.
Deliver the first two tasks and coming up with economic policies for the election manifesto will be a walk in the park.
@ Djoser
In case it has not sunk in yet, the Chinese told Mugabe he is a bad debtor and they would not give him a dollar of the budgetary support he was begging and nagging them for. The tyrant got nothing.
The Russians got the platinum mining rights for a song, they knew Mugabe was desperate. Rus-sia has the second biggest platinum reserves in the world but why mine your reserves if you can mine someone else and corner the market. Mugabe thought the Russians will offer him some hard cash in return; he was wrong. The Russians too offered Mugabe no budgetary support!
This week the IMF told Mugabe he has to pay his outstanding debts for the country to get any budgetary support. "You are not special," he was told. There is the most unambiguous middle finger salute you will ever get from a diplomat.
Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown is getting worse, let us see how long Mugabe think he can pretend to ignore it!
@Amir
Tsvangirai and MDC's breath-taking incompetence in failing to get even one reform implemented is a his-toric fact.
The Zimbabwean electorate's failure to see MDC leaders for the incompetent village idiots they are even with the benefit of hindsight is a real tragedy. There is no chance of the nation ever getting out of this hell-hole as long as we have an electorate hard wired to follow even proven village idiots like Tsvangirai blindly like sheep to the slaughter.
Granted the MDC is incompetent and the electorate does not have a clue what is in its own interest still that is no excuse for Mugabe to rig the elections and deny the people a meaningful vote.
I agree that Zimbabwe needs a political party since there is not even one party of substance on the ground. There were over 28 parties in the last elections but none of them are worth the candle. The challenge is how to form this new party and avoid it becoming just another one of the 28 rubbish parties.
I believe the Zimbabwe Social Democrats is one such party that meets the two challenges above. You can get more details on ZSD at the following site zimbabwelight.blogspot.co.uk.
It is not enough however to have a good and focused party if the electorate is easily swayed by every village idiot who comes along. Breaking into that hermetically sealed tin-can head of the Zimbabwean vote remains the greatest challenge for the nation. Democracy demands a thinking electorate, one that will ask the hard questions; how else otherwise will they hold the leaders to account!
“One significant structural problem we now have in this economy is the size of the infor-mal sector - That is the biggest structural problem.
“The 2012 Census said 5.8 million people are now employed in the informal sector; three million entities are operating in the informal sector; that is a structural problem.”
He added: “The burden of this economy is now being carried by the informal sector. The census also showed that from a peak of some two million workers in the formal sector some years back, that figure is now half a million.”
When the nation has the curse of having incompetent individuals running its affairs, it is to be expected that they will expend a lot of time arguing over trivial matter and waste money on a wild goose chase. The size of Zimbabwe’s informal sector is a reflection of how much the formal sector has shrunk.
Only an incompetent Minister Chinamasa would consider the informal sector the country’s “biggest structural problem” and, worse still, would come up with this raft of taxes to increase the “burden … being carried by the informal sector”.
The people in the informal sector have no assets in the form of buildings, savings, stock, plant, vehicles, etc. Whatever they are carrying in their boxes constitute their stock and whatever little they make has to cover their cost to buy new stock, transport costs, prof-it, everything. Most of these kiya kiya people have no more than $50 of stock and barely make $2 a day. And Minister Chinamasa is envious of the $2 and wants to take even more?
Minister, should you not be concerned about how to stop the formal sector shrinking even more and not how to push those already living in abject poverty even deeper into poverty!
@Jmoyo
Well this time Mugabe is going. What Mugabe cannot ignore is that out of the 2 million Zimbabweans living in abject poverty many of them are Zanu PF grandees like the late Nathan Shamuyarira. He died a pauper. Mugabe, with the usual Animal Farm cynicism, painted his house the day he died to hide the years of neglect, decay and rot.
There are are as many Zanu PF grandees still alive who are as poor as a church mouse already but will get even poorer still. Let see how long they will accept the reality of Mugabe holding $1 million birthday parties and $5 million wedding parties whilst they are dying of starvation!
Unlike the last economic collapse where the ruling elite were spare the hardships; this time we are all in it. This is the big starvation, the tsunami that will sweep everyone before it!
UNDER pressure Finance and Economic Development minister Patrick Chinamasa yesterday continued his pursuits to attract funding for the country's comatose economy as he pleaded with the PTA Bank to pump money for infrastructure which is the country's major development priori-ties.
Chinamasa please stop begging all the time, this is getting to be really embarrassing. I tell you if Chinamasa was to hear there was a stray dog with a dollar to its name Chinamasa will beg from it!
“Why, I ask, should Zimbabweans continue to suffer under the yoke of unjustified and unwarranted illegal sanctions,” said Mugabe at the UN.
“These evil sanctions violate the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter and should be condemned by the international community. We once again call for their immediate and unconditional removal.”
This is sad really; Zimbabwe’s economy was already on its knees before the sanctions were imposed in 2002. If Mugabe cared about the UN Charter and the values it stands for then why has he systematically denied the people of Zimbabwe their basic freedoms and rights including the right to a free vote and the right to life itself.
It is heartening that the regime change Mugabe has resisted to the point of murdering over 30 000 innocent Zimbabweans is finally going to happen and the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth of his years of corrupt and murderous tyrannical rule will be known and more, significantly, the people of Zimbabwe can finally start rebuilding a normal life denied them for all these years.
Mugabe’s daughter is believed to be behind the latest white farm seizure in Goromonzi.
Mugabe has now realised that he cannot revive the Zimbabwe economy, he cannot rig economic recovery, and he will do anything to make the nation ungovernable.
Yava nyaya yeshaisano!
Post a Comment