The story of how Morgan Tsvangirai got to own and keep the
Highlands Mansion is an issue that Tsvangirai himself has failed to explain
fully to the nation.
There are two issues here for him to explain: one can the
nation afford such extravagant spending and two was this not a bribe?
Since 2008 Zimbabwe has rely on donors buying 98% of the
nation’s medical needs and the health delivery service is in such a poor state
that as many as 100 children are dying a day of presentable diseases, for
example. And yet the same regime is squandering $4.5 million on a mansion for
its Prime Minister and a $20 million on a mansion for the President (many
people believe the Blue Roof mansion is worth as much as $5 billion)? There is
no doubt the rest, Deputy PMs, VPs, Ministers, etc., each got their cut of loot
in accordance with their position on the feeding trough!
There can be no doubt too that getting the mansion and all
the other trappings of power played a part in Tsvangirai and MDC colleagues not
implementing any of the necessary democratic reforms. “Vana Tsvangirai vadzika
kudya vanyerere!” (Tsvangirai and his friends have learnt enjoy the benefit of
power without making a fuss!) commented one Zanu PF crony at the time as to why
MDC was not implementing the democratic reforms.
"Do you want me to go and live in the bush so that you
see that I am suffering just like the people out there," Tsvangirai told
the Daily News on Sunday at his Highlands home last week in reply to the public
outcry why he was still in the mansion since he lost the July 2013 elections.
"If at all, Zanu-PF should know that they have created conditions which have made us all poor. So comparing who is poorer than the other I think it is unfair. Yes I am living in this property. It is still an outstanding issue and will be resolved when the time comes but I never chose myself to come and live here. Remember I was prime minister, so it is under those circumstances that I then came to live here?"
"If at all, Zanu-PF should know that they have created conditions which have made us all poor. So comparing who is poorer than the other I think it is unfair. Yes I am living in this property. It is still an outstanding issue and will be resolved when the time comes but I never chose myself to come and live here. Remember I was prime minister, so it is under those circumstances that I then came to live here?"
Tsvangirai is right his Highlands mansion together with all
the other loot MDC (and Zanu PF) leaders have accrued are outstanding issues
that must be resolved. There is no doubt that Zimbabwe cannot afford to buy its
leaders such expensive luxuries when millions are dying for the lack of the
most basic necessities of life.
Mugabe has encouraged a very dangerous political culture
where people go into public life not to serve but to enrich themselves first
and foremost. It is little wonder that politics is now overcrowded with the
riff-raff and villains. We need to do some serious spring cleaning if the
nation is ever to get some public spirited leaders back into politics.
What is at issue here Mr Tsvangirai is not that anyone wants
you to live in the bush but that you traded the whole nation’s best chance
since independence to end the corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship
peaceful for the tyrant giving you the highlands mansion! You had a decent
house in Stratehaven but your greed got the better of you. Your selfishness has
condemned millions of our people to abject poverty and despair and hundreds of
thousands of them will die unnecessarily. You have served the nation poorly as
Prime Minister and it is only right that the nation should not reward you for
your callous and cruel betrayal by allowing you to keep the bribe Mugabe paid
you not to implement even one reform!
Tsvangirai’s excuse for selling out the nation for the Highlands
mansion or else live in the bush is no different those blacks who hunted down
and sold their kith and kin to white slave traders for a piece of calico cloth claiming
he needed the cloth to cover his nakedness! It was infinitely better that those
blacks went naked if they could not find other ways to clothe themselves than
for millions of slave to suffer and die instead. There is little we can do to
reverse the rig elections and the consequences that have followed that tragic
reality; still we can make sure that Tsvangirai never keeps the mansions. Why
should he be rewarded for betraying millions of our people!
12 comments:
The president Obama argued that the deadly toll of Ebola was being exacerbated because of the rudimentary public health infrastructure in Africa. He is right!
Many cities and towns in Zimbabwe have had problems of providing something as basic as clean running water for decades. Old Tafara has had no clean running water for the last 15 years already! Even Parerenyatwa Hospital, the biggest hospital in the country, has had problems of clean running water. We have sat on this problem all these years. If there should be an outbreak of something like Cholera the death toll will be a lot worse than it would have been if there was no clean running water problem! If there was Ebola then we too would be looking to the US Marines to help contain it!
Zimbabwe has sat on its political and economic problems for decades allowing social and health problems to grow into the time-bombs there are today. We will only have our-selves to blame is one of these bombs explode in our face!
@ Rudechick
You stupidity is getting out of hand. You are still angry with President Obama for having singled out Mu-gabe and not invite him to the US-Africa summit and so you now have declared war on the US.
The countries with the Ebola outbreak welcome the help from the US and your attack against the Ameri-cans is nonsense.
Thank God the Zanu PF regime is on its last legs, the people of Zimbabwe are sick and tired of Mugabe and you, his dogs, anti-western rhetoric to hide his pathetic failure. The economic meltdown is getting at you lot, Mugabe came back from China with nothing to stop the economic meltdown. The tyrant's days in power are numbered!
You support Mugabe because you do not want the truth of what the regime has been up to known. Well, you will have to find a hole to hide because you will be called upon to account for the blood on your hands!
@ Luke Tamborenyoka
“President Tsvangirai uncontrollably sheds a tear as he listens to the surviving orphans of how the very hut in which he sits was razed to the ground,” wrote Luke.
“In hushed tones and tearful voices, the two boys explained how they lost their mother, Georgina Gogoda, who was callously murdered in that violence that destroyed the entire homestead.”
After shedding the crocodile tears did Tsvangirai tell the boys that he could and should have stopped this ever happening again if he had implemented the reforms during the five years in the GNU? He did not implement any reform because he was too busy galli-vanting all over the world and chasing women of ill repute.
He is back in Uzumba and shedding the crocodile tears because he misses the gravy train life of the GNU days and will shed a bucketful of tears to get back on the gravy train.
Luke, Tsvangirai is a corrupt and incompetent village idiot; he will never again hold public office in Zimbabwe. He can shed a river of tears that will make no difference. As for you, find yourself another job or go back to growing tomatoes in Domboshava rather than be a party to this political deceit!
Mugabe's attention seeking antics are now real embarrassment to the nation!
The reality of the economic meltdown is sinking in; he brought back nothing from his recent Chinese trip to save the national economy from collapse. The tyrant is now getting delirious but instead of seeing the pathetic figure he is cutting as the national economy collapses and his tyrannical regime with it, he sees himself as a great statesman feared all including other world leaders like US President Barak Obama.
“What makes people like Obama to fear me with this small stature of mine, imagine all leaders can meet but I will not be included,” Mugabe boosted.
Mugabe is not stupid, at least not stupid enough not to know when he has lost. What he is doing now is grandstanding for the single purpose of being defiant to the bitter end! “Nhamo inenharo!!” as the Shona would say!
The GMD fails to raise $8 million to unlock $51 million from China to service grain solos.
“The committee recommends that maintenance and repair of silos be prioritised as a matter of urgency, as such the committee recommends that Ministry of Finance avail funds to the tune of $7.6 million to allow the AVIC facility to kick start,” the parliamentary committee said in its report.
We have a serious problem but these parliamentary committee members who have their heads buried in the sand are not helping one bit. For the last year the regime has strug-gled to raise enough money to pay civil servant wages let alone anything else so what is the point of telling the Minister of Finance to pay for this, that and the other. Where do they expect him to get the money from?
These Zanu PF MPs know last year’s elections were rigged and this illegitimate regime will never solve the country’s worsening economic crisis. The only way out is for the regime to resign so the democratic reforms can be implemented and fresh free, fair and credible elections held. All this charade of parliamentary committees coming up with meaningless reports has gone on long enough. Zimbabwe is in serious trouble and there is no time to waste.
@ Fidhe
If it was your family or even your own life that was at risk would you refuse help? Would you question the nationality of whoever is offering you that help?
Would you be amused to hear that someone from the safety of their home thousands of miles away in a distant country are maligning those offering to help for them purely for their own selfish, stupid and petty political causes? I would not be amused or would the people in those nation where the Americans are out there helping. You need to wash your foul mouth with bleach for speaking nonsense in matters that you neither understand nor concern you.
Chinese official says China is interested in helping revive Zimbabwe’s collapsed agricultural sector. He said this when he donated 40 water pumps, 120 chairs, 60 desks and 20 sport-ing balls to a secondary school.
Zimbabwe's agricultural sector will only take off again after the mess Mugabe created has been sorted out. When you have a leaking bucket you fix the leak first instead of wasting energy, time and water.
China's efforts to prop up this Mugabe regime is only creating the false sense that the system can be fixed; we know that it cannot be fixed. Only China starts to benefit from the wasted time to maximize it dodge activities in places like Marange diamond mining. Zimbabwe will pay dearly for every day this economic meltdown is allowed to continue because it will make it that much harder to get out of this hell-hole the deeper we sink!
When the country finally descend into chaos as it will have to because this is where the economic melt-down is taking us; the Chinese will quietly slip out of the country leaving us to face the music alone!
MDC-T is struggling to raise the money to pay for its October congress.
After the pathetic failure by MDC to get even one democratic reform implemented and the leadership's refusal to listen to warning not to take part in the elections without the reforms SADC and donors finally accepted that MDC leaders are village idiots and washed their hands, as MP Samuel Sipape Nkomo has admitted. No one in his or her right mind can ever take any of the MDC leaders seriously ever again, certainly not the donors.
If MDC scrap the bottom of the barrel as Zanu PF regime has been doing for the last year to pay civil servant wages, etc., the party will hold its congress. But what the party has to know is that the barrel will be empty to pay for little else.
It took the Zimbabwean electorate 15 years for them to see Mugabe for the corrupt and murderous tyrant he is. After the GNU blunder by Tsvangirai and his MDC friends, one hoped that the Zimbabwean electorate will have seen the MDC lot for the incompetent idiots they are. Sadly the penny has not dropped; that is worrying because this country will never get out of this mess as long as we have a naive and gullible electorate incapable of learning from their past mistakes!
Soon after the rigged July 2013 elections Mugabe was angry that the white had not wholeheartedly em-braced him as the winner but he has had to bite his tongue whilst he tried to get the West to contribute towards his $27 billion ZimAsset economic recovery plan. He has begged for over a year now and got not even a dollar from the West.
His trip to China, his last throw of the dice, brought nothing too.
Mugabe knows that with no money to finance his ZimAsset plan the country's economic meltdown is set to get worse. As long as he remains in power the economy will get worse; there is a limit to the suffering the nation can endure and he knows it. He knows too that he will have to go - step down now or be kicked out!
Mugabe is angry with the West for not bailing him out with the $27 billion for ZimAsset, so angry he is no longer content with just dispossessing the white of the land but now want them to leave the country too.
Zimbabwe's economic meltdown which is forcing him out of power is of his own making by Mugabe, being the tyrant he is, not trying to rope in as many other people as he can to suffer with him. He has pick on his usual scapegoat the whites but there will be hundreds of thousands innocent Zimbabweans caught in his net too!
@Whichfool
Mugabe and Zanu PF would not be in power if Tsvangirai had implemented the reforms; you are pleased, very pleased that the village idiot did not implement the reforms I am angry, very angry that he did not.
Well Mugabe has met his match in the economic meltdown; if the tyrant cannot rig economic recovery then his days in power are numbered. Forget the reforms and the great favour the village idiot did for Mugabe by failing to implement ever one reform that is now irrelevant; the economic meltdown is the python with its body rapped round the tyrant and it is slowly squeezing the life out of Mugabe.
Mugabe's trip to China was the last throw of the dice for him to get ZimAsset funding. He came back empty handed. Now all we are waiting for is for the economic meltdown, the python, to start squeezing; each time Mugabe breath out the python squeeze, each time he farts it squeezes.
Mugabe has cheated his fellow Zanu PF leaders to stay in power. He bamboozled Tsvangirai into not implementing the reforms. He has rigged elections denying the people the vote. Let us see if Mugabe can cheat, bamboozle or rig his way out of this economic meltdown.
@ Andrew Vuma
Mugabe has always outwitted his Zanu PF members, treated them as idiots and crapping all over them. He has bamboozled the village idiots Tsvangirai and his MDC friends into doing nothing about implementing the reforms. He has rigged elections denying the people a say in the governance of the country. But the tyrant has now met his match in the economic meltdown.
Mugabe cannot cheat, bamboozle or rig the economy recovery. Mugabe’s recent trip to China was his last chance to get funding for his ZimAsset recovery plan; he came back empty handed. Now the economic meltdown has Mugabe in its grip and has started to squeeze the tyrant like a python squeezing its prey. Every time Mugabe breath out the python tightens it squeezes, every time he farts the python tightens the squeeze! There is no way out for Mugabe other than step down now or be kicked out the Gaddafi way.
@ Jera
The main reason Mugabe has extended the retirement age of these security chiefs and the reason why all those who were due to retire have heaved a sigh of relief is the economic reality. With the country's econ-omy in total meltdown any of those security chiefs who retire today will be living in abject poverty within a year at the most!
All these chiefs have big farms, for example, but most of the farms are producing nothing. They have kept the farms to get the free farming loans but since the loans were cancelled last year they have earned nothing from the farm!
What these security chiefs have failed to recognise all these years is that Zimbabwe's economic model be-ing pushed by Mugabe was unsustainable. They helped Mugabe rig last year's elections and now they are paying the price with the rest of the nation of Mugabe failing to rig economic recovery! Even if they hang on to their jobs another five years they will not be spare the economic hardship of no running water, no electricity, collapsed health service, etc. affecting the rest of us. Soldiers are being asked to take two weeks holiday every month to save of food bill; generals will be forced to do the same too!
Those generals who sworn that Zimbabwe would never be ruled by no one else but Zanu PF got what they wished for plus a lot more beside.
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