Once upon a time, 40 years ago but it might as well be 400 years ago for we have regressed so quickly we are now back in the dark ages, Zimbabwe used to produce enough food to not only feed all her people but had plenty left over to be the breadbasket of the region. Today the nation is starving.
The World Food Programme (WFP) is frantically trying to raise US$ 200 million to feed 8 million Zimbabweans who are facing starvation. To blame the food shortage on drought alone is to miss the point.
Ever since 2000 when Mugabe undertook his chaotic and violent seizure of white owned farms to give to his Zanu PF cronies mostly, the country has lost its breadbasket laurel as agricultural production collapsed and with it the nation’s economy. So when the recent drought and Cyclone Idai struck the region, not only Zimbabwe, it hit us the hardest because we had no grain in the solo and were so impoverished we had to rely on food aid!
Unemployment has soared to 90% as the country’s economic meltdown has got worse and worse. 90% of our people are classified as poor with 34% of them living in extreme poverty, according to a recent World Bank report.
Who is to blame for Zimbabwe’s economic rapid descend into this economic hell-on-earth? Have to blame the corrupt, incompetent and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship, the regime that has ruled the country with an iron fist for all the last 40 years. But when all is said, it is us the people of Zimbabwe who are ultimately to blame for letting the corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF destroyed the country’s once upon a time prosperous economy and, with it, our hopes and dreams!
For the last 40 years we, Zimbabweans, have buried our heads in the sand so we pretended not to see or hear the corruption and tyranny of the Zanu PF dictatorship and so we said and did nothing to stop it. It is shocking that even today with the nation dragged to the very edge of the precipitous abyss some people still continue to bury their heads in the sand!
“A few days ago I was talking to my neighbour - who is a teacher - on the collective job action proposed by the two main teachers' unions in the country - who have called upon their members not to turn up for work when schools open for the first term of the year, as long as the government (their employer) persists with its arrogant and stubborn refusal to honour its contractual obligation to pay its employees their United States Dollar-pegged salaries in local currency at the prevailing interbank exchange rate.” wrote Tendai Ruben Mbofana.
How is it possible that there can still be one single Zimbabwean out there who is not aware that Zimbabwe is a pariah state ruled by corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and murderous tyrants. And that as long as the country remains a pariah state, there will be no hope of any meaningful economic recovery. None!
So all these teachers, nurses, doctors, etc. who are demanding a living wage are the ones who are being arrogant, stubborn and, most important of all, down right stupid. The Zimbabwe economic has all but totally collapsed; where do they expect government to get the money to pay them? You do not harvest mangoes from a thorn tree!
Mbofana accepted the economic reality that the teachers, etc. were not going to get a living wage from the government and proffered a solution!
“It is, therefore, without any doubt that the only way teachers, and other civil servants, can successfully break themselves from these shackles of enslavement by their employer, would be for genuine economic empowerment - such that, not only would they have other ready alternatives for sustaining a livelihood, but prove an indispensable asset, which the government would not be able to kick in the teeth whenever it felt like,” he suggested.
“Teachers, and all other civil servants, now need to sharpen their skills in so many other trades that they may have a passion for, or are gifted at.
“Such magnificent and essential skills need to be further meticulously sharpened in the teacher - coupled by business management training - so that they go beyond the boundaries of the classroom, but translate into meaningful, productive, and income-generating ventures that would catapult him or her out of the dungeons of poverty, and vile enslavement by their employer.
“Armed with these skills, there would be nothing to hold them back. There would be nothing standing in their way to a dignified livelihood that is worthy of a creation wonderfully and fearfully made, just below the angels of the heavens, by our loving God - as no human being was ever meant to be a slave of another.”
This is sentimental nonsense at its worst!
Mbofana failed to name even one profession which the teachers can retrain in and afterward find a job that will pay them a living wage. He did not name one such profession because there is not one profession in Zimbabwe where there are no hundreds of thousands qualified and experiences professionals on the Mount Everest unemployment mountain already!
Zimbabwe is not going to get out of the economic and political mess the country is stuck in without addressing the problem of bad governance.
Zimbabwe is not a healthy and functioning democratic nation in which normal market forces such as collective bargaining, economic laws of supply and demand, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. count. Zimbabwe is a pariah state ruled by corrupt and murderous thugs in which chaos, voodoo economic and the criminal waste of human and material resources to feed the insatiable appetites for power and wealth are the norm.
It is therefore shocking that even after 40 years of the Zanu PF dictatorship, with the national economy in the gutter, millions living in abject poverty and despair, etc.; that anyone would still fail to see Zimbabwe for what she is - a dysfunctional banana republic. When you live in a banana republic you do not expect to be paid a living wage!
When Mnangagwa rigged the July 2018 elections, there was a deafening silence from many Zimbabweans; they did not see or hear what happened and, as usual, they said and did nothing to stop him getting into power. He rigged the elections and has since discovered he cannot rig the economy to pay Zimbabweans a living wage.
It is not for a living wage Zimbabweans should be demanding but an end to the curse of rigged elections and of pariah state!
“Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall be added unto you,” said Ghana's first President Kwame Nkrumah. We, in Zimbabwe, have ignored the advice these last 40 years and have paid dearly for it!
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Government has frozen tuition fee increases in public schools and warned that it will de-register private schools that charge fees in foreign currency "directly or indirectly."
In a statement yesterday, Acting Minister for Primary and Secondary Education Professor Amon Murwira said boarding schools will be allowed to increase boarding fees and levies, provided 20 percent of parents agree and the proposal is approved by the ministry.
The bottom line is that government is back to the bad old days of price control! The bad old days of hyperinflation are here too, back with vengeance!
Charging school fees, for medicine or anything in a stable foreign currency or at least ask to be paid the equivalent in local currency at the going exchange rate makes a lot of sense. Inflation has soared to 800% plus it is nonsense to fix the price of one service or commodity even for one month when the prices of everything else is doubling every week or two.
If the tuition fees are frozen then so too are the teachers’ salaries. If the salary barely covers the teacher’s basic needs at the beginning of the term then it will not do so by the end of the term. If the teacher’s wage cannot cover his/her transport cost then he/she will not go to work!
Government should concentrate on bringing down hyperinflation and leave the schools to decide how best to manage the economic chaos fostered on them by the government!
Wellington Chikombo, Harare province chairman for the MDC led by Nelson Chamisa, has said that it was a huge mistake for Zimbabweans to partake in the 2017 military assisted transition which resulted in the demise of former president Robert Mugabe.
He said that the country might have been bad but is now worse off compared to what it was then.
I wish I could say that MDC has learned the lesson but clearly it has not. The biggest blunder MDC leaders have made was to fail to implemented the democratic reforms during the GNU when they are the best chance. The party has never learned from that mistake hence the reason they blundered in participating in the 2013 elections, in supporting the November 2017 coup and more recently in participating in the flawed and illegal 2018 elections.
Chikombo and his fellow MDC leaders including the senior leaders like Tendai Biti, Nelson Chamisa, David Coltart, etc. have all shown how little they understand their blundering incompetence. First of all they have condemning the party’s decision to back the November 2017 elections and have failed to acknowledge all the other serious party blunders.
Second, they are only condemning they support of the November 2017 coup because it did not result in the power sharing they were promised. Of course, the power sharing would have been a repeat of the 2008 GNU and a total waste of time.
MDC has failed to implement even one meaningful reform in 20 years of the party’s existence. Zimbabweans must now wake up to the reality that MDC will never bring about the democratic changes the nation has been dying for.
Indeed, before the 2008 GNU, MDC was hunting with the Zanu PF hounds and running with the polo hare. During the GNU and beyond, MDC leaders have been openly cavorting and sleeping with the Zanu PF thugs in return for a share of the absolute power.
Many parents have already withdrawn their children from school because education is now a luxury many Zimbabweans can ill afford.
The quality of education in Zimbabwe has gone down because of the decades of poor funding and economic instability. Many of the nation's teachers have left the country a long time ago in search for economic survival.
It is no exaggeration to say Zimbabwe's education and health care services have all but collapsed. Zanu PF is more concerned with the funding of Police, Army, CIO and Prison Services. But given the country's worsening economic situation, even these will in turn collapse. After all even the security personnel will need health care and education for his/her children!
Zimbabwe is a failed state, the only big question is how deep down the abyss are the people are going to allow Zanu PF to drag the nation before they finally say enough is enough?
CIVIL servants are set to meet Public Service Minister Paul Mavima for a crunch meeting over salaries as government employees say they are no longer able to report for work due to incapacitation.
Unions affiliated to the APEX Council, the main negotiating arm for civil servants, met Tuesday in Harare ahead of the Friday meeting.
APEX Council vice secretary Gibson Mushangu said after the meeting that they noted government had not shifted its position concerning civil servants’ salaries and Friday’s meeting will be a “make-or-break” one on whether they will continue reporting for work or not.
“This is a make-or-break; what the government is going to offer on Friday is going to decide the fate for the rest of the civil servants as we approach schools opening,” said Mushangu.
“Government has invited us to a meeting on Friday. That is where we are going to get the feedback from the government on the issues we have raised.”
The tragedy here is that; even now with the country facing total economic meltdown; there are still people like Gibson Mushangu who continue to bury their heads in the sand and refuse to see the bigger picture beyond the tip of their big noses.
What is the point of civil servants demanding a living wage from a government whose revenue base has all but completely disappeared.
ZANU PF leader Emmerson Mnangagwa has twice announced that created a new corruption.
While addressing a Transparency International meeting in December, he literally repeated saying that he created a new corruption while referring to the new Zimbabwe Anti-corruption commission.
The head of ZACC is the wife of Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sibusiso Moyo. Of course, she is corrupt! She knows that the top brass in the Army have been involved in the wholesale looting of Marange diamonds for decades now and her husband as an ex-Army himself before the November 2017 coup was one of the beneficiaries of the looted wealth. She was not going to arrest her husband and surprise, surprise she has not done so! If that does not prove she is corrupt then what will!
“In 2017, VP Mphoko showed Cabinet gruesome images of victims of machete gold-gangs in Kwekwe. Cabinet tasked Chombo to get the Police to investigate. Mnangagwa, July Moyo and Owen Mudha Ncube were implicated!” Moyo wrote.
“The November 2017 military coup and reversed the wheels of justice,” says Moyo, a fierce Mnangagwa rival who skipped the country when the now state leader seized state authority with military assistance.
Horror tales of machete killers have dominated local media in the recent past with the callous murder of a Kadoma police officer last month while an 80-year-old woman and her 16-year-old granddaughter were this week raped and murdered by suspected members of the gangs.
Professor Jonathan Moyo, VP Mphoko and Robert Mugabe himself are hypocrites of the worst kind! They want the nation to believe they were shocked and outraged by “the gruesome images of victims of machete gold-gangs in Kwekwe”! The nation knows that they were all too familiar with imagines of gruesome murders. Over 500 innocent Zimbabweans were murdered in the three months run-off in 2008 and over 20 000 murdered during the Gukurahundi massacre!
Zanu PF is a party of blood! The only reason Professor Moyo is revealing the 2017 gold-gang murders in Kwekwe is because he has a score to settle with Mnangagwa. Whilst we want to hear the truth about the Kwekwe murders we must be careful not to be sucked into the Zanu PF factional war and lose sight of the bigger picture. Zimbabwe will only restore peace, justice and good governance by dismantling the Zanu PF dictatorship in its totality and not just one faction.
ZIMBABWE’S ongoing power shortages contributed to at least 20% output losses to the country’s mining sector, the 2019 third quarter treasury bulletin published by the Finance Ministry has reported.
The bulletin acknowledged that the majority of players in the extractive sector experienced severe power outages.
“Power shortages was the major challenge for the mining sector and it is estimated that about 80% of the miners suffered regular and prolonged power outages resulting in output losses of around 20%,” the document says.
The details come at a time when Zimbabwe has been experiencing increased power outages running between 12 to 18 hours a day, something that has forced prolonged production cut downs across industrial sectors.
So if the mining sector output dropped 20% how come the country still managed to reduce its trade deficit by 70%? Where did Nick Mangwana getting his figures from?
FINANCE Minister Mthuli Ncube says government will offer civil servants a reasonable salary increase, but warned the public workers’ demands will not be fully met to avoid an inflationary environment.
Zimbabwe is in the midst of hyperinflation what is the minister talking about he wants to avoid an inflationary environment!
Civil servants here have rejected government’s latest salary offer of a 97 percent increment which would have seen the lowest paid civil servant earning $2 000 per month.
The development comes as the workers threaten a crippling strike over their employer’s “dishonesty” a few days before school open.
The civil servants today met government where it was proposed that the highest-paid civil servant, would receive an increment of 56 percent.
However, the $2000 in RTGs translates less than US$100 on the parallel market where the greenback is trading in excess of $22 for US$1.
FINANCE Minister Mthuli Ncube said government was going to “offer civil servants a reasonable salary increase” how can 97% be reasonable when he is the one who has awarding 300% to 600% price increases of fuel, power and other things? The minister knows that inflation is now 800% plus!
It has emerged that the lower rank and file in the Police, Army, CIO and Prison Service have received 300% plus wage increases. The top brass in these security arms have received a warping 600% plus! The message is loud and clear: In the Banana Republic of Zimbabwe security of the ruling elite from the impoverished majority is more important than education and health of the masses!
The only question to be asked is how long are the impoverish masses themselves going to allow to be treated as fourth class citizens?
@ Mechavio
“Wilbert Mukori, as the wise man, why don't you advise the teachers to resign since their employer is not able to pay them.Why force to be paid when one can easily withdraw his/her labour?Is there anyone holding their writing hands so they cannot pen their resignation letters? Wise Wilbert please help!”
Many teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses, etc., etc. have resigned an left the country in search of a living wage and future for themselves and their children. Most professionals in the civil service today would happily resign if there was any hope of finding employment somewhere else; they have stayed put because they have nowhere to go.
Our education and health care services have all but collapsed because they are poorly funded and resourced. Ordinary people like me are concerned because the consequences of a nation with no education and health care are just too ghastly to contemplate. The ruling elite and their apologists like you Mechavio do not give a damn because you have stop using the local services and are indifferent to the suffering and deaths of povo.
I would never consider myself a wise man, not for seeing the madness of destroying a whole nation’s future to feed the insatiable greed for power and wealth of a few village idiots; that is common sense!
Do not believe half of the things Minister Mthuli Ncube says, he is known for saying a lot of rubbish. The Chinese and Americans took him to task for under reporting the financial assistance the regime received from them!
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