ZIMBABWE CIVIL SERVANTS ON STRIKE: TENTATIVE STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION!

The Civil Servants, like the rest of Zimbabweans, have been very patient; I am surprised it has taken them this long before saying enough is enough. It is nonsense for this government to say it does not have the money to pay Civil Servants a living wage when the politicians are squandering millions of dollars on questionable activities.

Tsvangirai MDC promised to government expenditure by reducing the size of government; before the 2008 elections he promised there would be 15 ministers, for example. How quickly he forgot. There are now five times as many ministers; counting the governors, ministers, Prime Minister, Deputy PMs, President and Deputy Presidents. What exactly is the Minister of National Healing supposed to doing and we have three Ministers sharing this portfolio for good measure! And, of course, each minister has an army of civil servants, drives ministerial car and is paid all manner of allowances!

Mugabe has fostered a new class and culture system on Zimbabwe; we have the ruling elite who are pampered and spoilt, they are to be denied nothing money can buy and they are, as a rule, a-law-unto-themselves. They constitute 10 to 20%. The rest, the ruled, are not entitled to any basic rights including the right to life itself and they are expected to make any sacrifice demanded of them in a fight for resources to meet their basic needs as contrast to buying luxuries for the ruling elite. So schools and hospitals for the ruled have closed for lack of funding and meanwhile the state has spent millions buying plasma TV for Judges, Mercedes Benz for Ministers, financing countless overseas trips for ministers, etc. The ruling elite have not been affected by the school closures since the send their children outside Zimbabwe for their education.

In Mugabe's Zimbabwe it is those who have political power and have pledged their loyalty to Mugabe who have been granted unfettered access to the nation's resources. In the last five years Mugabe has expanded his loyalty base by giving seized farms to more and more people and thus expand the "ruling elite" class. For most of the new "ruling elite" the farm is the only asset they have, take that away they, like the overwhelming majority in Zimbabwe today, will have absolutely nothing. It this fear of joining the dispossessed masses that Mugabe is hoping will spur the new farm owners to defend status quo and thus help him and his cronies who have commandeer and now own the lion's share of Zimbabwe wealth and resources keep their loot.

Mugabe and his cronies have seized the nation's wealth and resource but have failed to put it to good use through mismanagement and corruption. They took over the farms, factories, etc. not because they were the best farmers, etc. They took over the farms because of greed and because they had the political muscle to do as they pleased.

If Zimbabwe is ever to become a just and prosperous country then we must break this culture of greed and lawlessness. The nation's resources must be used for the good and benefit of all and not just a select few. All citizens must have an equal opportunity to keep resources like land and those who are going to use a given resource productively must considered first before those who will seat on it.

After years of unmitigated looting of the nation's wealth and resources there will be those who want the political system that allowed them to be favoured at the expense of all other to stay. Or at the very least, that they should be allowed to keep their loot. This can not and must not be allowed. First in the interest of common justice, the looters must be punished not rewarded for bring the whole nation into this sorry state of affairs. Allow these crooks to keep their ill got wealth and there will be no end to the mischieve they will fund! Secondly, more practically, the only chance the nation has for future prosperity is by making sure that the looted wealth is in the hands of those best able to use it to create even more wealth for the good of all.

A concerted Civil Servants strike will not by itself dismantle Mugabe’s dictatorship and bring sanity to the nation. Still, it is a tentative step in the right direction!

BITI SAYS MDC IS READY FOR ELECTIONS - TRUTH IS MDC HAS NO CHOICE NOW!

“The MDC is ready for this election” says Minister Biti. After all the humiliation and contemptuous treatment by Mugabe; what other option does MDC have but to accept elections at the dictator’s terms!

It took Tendai Biti a very long time to finally, finally realise that Mugabe and Zanu PF could not be trusted. Here is the man who has been dealing with Zanu PF up front and personal ever since his party entered into negotiations long before the 2008 elections.

Only a few months ago Tendai Biti himself was full of praise of the dictator calling the brute “a Victorian gentleman” who should be “knighted”. A ruthless dictator who has brought our great nation to knees and has the blood of hundreds of thousands of our people on his hands, some of the blood still fresh after the 2008 presidential run-off; knighted?

Minister Biti, you may choose to call what you and your fellow leaders in MDC have done “sincere” and do acknowledge even being “naïve”. What you did is a lot worse than that. You betrayed the people of Zimbabwe who had risked so much over the years and many lives lost to end the reign of terror and bring about real democratic change. The people paid dearly for the electoral mandate they gave you in March 2008. And you gave it away for a place at Mugabe’s high table.

Minister Biti it was not after the Zanu PF Congress in December 2009 that the unlawful farm invasions, disobedience of lawful court orders, etc. started. These things have been going one all along. MDC has said little and done nothing about these criminal activities by Mugabe and his thugs because people like Biti and Tsvangirai had been appointed Minister and Prime Minister by Mugabe and did not want to rock the boat.

You are complaining now because Mugabe did not share the spoils of power fairly with you.

Only a week ago Prime Minister Tsvangirai was quick off the mark to slam down President Zuma’s call for fresh elections. Now Minister Biti is calling for elections and asking SADC to supervise. It is the contemptuous way, “vitriolic” to you, Mugabe continues to treat Tsvangirai that has forced you to change you mind?
Minister Biti; MDC is NOT ready for elections. MDC lost faith with the people when it cosy up to Mugabe. Mugabe used the time to rebuild his own party, get the Army and the Police to reaffirm their allegiance to himself and Zanu PF. What people saw in December 2009 is as strong and united Zanu PF as Mugabe can ever get it to be; given the chaotic state of the national affairs. So Mugabe has now decided to ditch Tsvangirai and MDC; he has too if only to stop Zanu PF falling apart again!

Minister Tendai Biti’s belated bravado is fooling no one. Mugabe is the one calling the shots here. With MDC discredited and his party as united as he can get it to be; Mugabe is now looking for the opportune moment to call for fresh elections. There will be no fresh elections until Mugabe is good and ready; his say is the only one that really matters – absolute power for you.

Ironically, it was MDC’s blundering that ensured Mugabe would still have absolute power after signing the GPA! Poor Biti, he of all people, has egg all over his face but has now to pretend he and MDC still have a say in all this.

ZIMBABWE'S CATCH 22: HAVE A DICTATOR WHOM THE OPPOSITION IS SCARED STIFF OF AND THE PEOPLE ARE SCARED OF GETTING RID OF THE BLUNDERING OPPOSITION.

This would be really funny if it was not that the consequences are unbearable! MDC President and Prime Minister of Zimbabwe is in Davos, Switzerland calling on the West to lift sanctions “to reward the progress made by the inclusive government”. Back in Zimbabwe his key party leaders, Minister Nelson Chamisa and Minister Tendai Biti are saying there is NO PROGRESS.

The parties to the inclusive government have been negotiating on the trivial issues of who occupies what office and a year later, they still can not agree. The really important issues affecting the ordinary people like restoring law and order and getting the national economy back on track remain untouched. The people continue to suffer and die!

What is the way forward? The people of Zimbabwe have to realise that this circus will continue until they finally learn that they have to look to themselves to force change. We have been conditioned to look “to our political leaders” for the answers to all our problems. When they leaders themselves are the problem, as is the case here; it is a totally different kettle of fish!

Tsvangirai is now the problem, just as Mugabe became a problem soon after independence. People realised Mugabe was incompetent, corrupt and repressive as far back as 1985 and yet for years they really believed Mugabe face up to all his serious short comings.

After years of breath taking blundering, flip-flopping and down right betrayal of the people by MDC, particularly its leadership; many Zimbabweans have finally reached the point were they are “angry” with MDC. The people are angry but not enough to reject MDC and search for a way out themselves; that is a bridge-too-far for them.

Just as Tsvangirai and MDC have the political muscle to force Mugabe out of power but are too scared to stand up to him; the ordinary Zimbabweans themselves have the political power to force Tsvangirai and Mugabe out of office but they too are scared to use this people’s power. Mugabe has of course taken full advantage of this to give Tsvangirai the run around. Similarly Tsvangirai too learnt to do as he please and completely ignore the wishes of the people and their tragic on going suffering.

We are is a catch 22 situation in Zimbabwe: we want to get rid of a dictator using an opposition party too scared to use the people’s mandate we gave them and we are too scared to use our people’s power to remove the ineffective opposition!

THE WEST SET TO APPEASE MUGABE REGARDLESS OF WHAT HE HAS DONE AND WHAT ZIMBABWEANS SAY!

From what the Germany Ambassador to Zimbabwe said on Hot seat, the EU will at best leave the targeted sanctions unchanged – the 200 or so individuals and 40 or so companies will remain and the many loop holes in the sanctions will remain. For those who see the sanctions as the only small thing causing minor irritation to Mugabe and his cronies worse could happen, the EU will start lifting the sanctions.

The Ambassador is right; Dr Madhuku’s insistence on a “people driven” process which means the exclusion of politicians is tenuous. MPs are elected representative of the people and they should rightly lead the process. What the Ambassador failed to acknowledge is the commitment and will of the GNU to carryout this important and critical task. If there had been any doubt on this twelve months ago then the shambolic performance of the GNU so far says it all.

The West should support calls for fresh elections instead of bankrolling a constitution making process which is only meant to extend the life of self-serving administration. The new constitution the GNU will produce will not be worth the paper it is written on!

Zimbabweans are trying to build a democratic country and we not only have to fight the dictator Mugabe and his cabal of thugs and murders; we must also fight fellow Zimbabweans like Tsvangirai who have now taken it upon themselves to gloss over what the dictator is doing and present him as a great statesman. As if that was not tough enough, we must also fight the Westerners, the very people who are supposedly the champions of justice, rule of law, human rights, etc.

Of course the ordinary person has no chance against the rich West, they have the money. He who pays the piper calls the tune! And so we, the ordinary Zimbabweans who are at the cutting edge of this economic melt down and know what it means to be beaten up and terrorised for no other reason than that we dared to exercise our basic right to vote have no say. We have no voice!

The West is set to lift targeted sanctions to appease Mugabe although the latter has been even more repressive than ever before and, more significantly, they could careless what we the people think. This is really, really frustrating!

APPEAL TO ZIMBABWE'S FARM INVADERS: IS YOUR OWN LIFE THAT WORTHLESS!

Has it ever occurred to you jambanjas who have been used by Mugabe and the ruling elite to invade farms and cause all the lawlessness that have now become the norm in Zimbabwe that this IS the root cause of Zimbabwe's economic melt down? I know the need to be revenged on the whites for all the colonial injustices is simply too irresistible to you. It is this Mugabe is exploiting and keeps stirring up. I appeal to you all to stop for one minute and think this through.

The farm invasions have been going on in Zimbabwe for more than ten years now. You, jambanjas, know better than anyone else the number of farms invaded and the white owners evicted. You know better than most of us how productive the farms were before the invasion. You also know what has happened to those farms after the invasion. Whatever the farms were producing, the yield has dropped significantly since the invasion. This is an established fact and no amount of propaganda can change this simple fact!

Zimbabwe’s total economic melt down happened at the same time and pace as the collapse of our agricultural sector. Zimbabwe’s economy well being was dependent of it agricultural sector just as the branches of a tree are dependent on the roots. Cut the roots and the branches will soon wither and die.


Hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean lives were lost in our fight for freedom, peace, human dignity and economic prosperity. In the last tens years particularly all these been forgotten or denied in pursuit of this single object: to humiliate the whites and be revenged for all the years of colonial oppression and exploitation. Jambanjas and all those who have supported farm invasion have had their fill of revenge but at what price?

Today the millions of our people live in abject poverty, thousands of them are sick and can not get even the most basic medical help and hundreds are dying unnecessarily.

Please stop and ask yourself: is your life, the lives of your own family and children and the future of the whole nation really that cheap to be trading in for sadistic pleasure of humiliating and harassing a handful of white farmers!?

Zimbabwe’s future is truly gloomy; how can we build a prosperous nation out of such people like jambanjas who hold themselves is such low regard, they consider the loss of their own life in return for humiliating a white man a very good bargain!

MUTSVANGWA - MUGABE'S MAN ON ZMC - FLEXING THE DICTATOR'S DISRUPTIVE MUSCLES

Christopher Mutsvangwa lashes out at Journalists for failing to condemn the sanctions imposed by the West. “Sanctions are real and journalists must focus on how foreign powers have sapped the country’s capacity to fend for itself through colonialism and sanctions,” he said.

Mutsvangwa is a Mugabe and Zanu PF support so there is nothing new in that. What makes his remarks notable is that he is one of the commissioners of the Zimbabwe Media Commission – the body, that nation hoped, that would bring freedom of expression to all Zimbabweans.

With a hot head like Mutsvangwa, the ZMC will be rendered useless ineffective; particularly when he will doing this at the instigation of none other than Mugabe himself.

What I find laughable is that there great cheer following the appointment of ZMC commissioners. It is not only Tsvangirai and his MDC friends who have refused to accept that this GNU is not working and never will. The evidence was there from the word go and has continued to pile up over the months and still MDC has continued to pretend the GNU is working. MDC leaders and their supporters are no alone in this many Zimbabweans too refuse to face the cold reality.

The GNU is not working and we should consider other ways out of this mess! Having refresh elections now is one way out!

Mugabe rightly guessed that Tsvangirai would never consider leaving the GNU once locked in. MDC neither have the mental finesse to have a plan B nor the political will to see it through. So Mugabe, not one to miss a trick, has taken full advantage of that and abrogated for himself even more sweeping powers than the GPA had given him much to the annoyance of all the SADC leaders who have now have egg on their faces. Still it is the Zimbabwean people who have more than egg on their faces; we are paying the price for the continued political chaos and economic melt down with our very lives!

No self respecting nation would allow itself to be treated with such contempt and arrogance as Mugabe is showing. Why we let him; is the biggest mystery of our time!

"Chaunonzi rasha ndechawakabata; chawadya unofa nacho!"

DEMOCRATIC CHANGE IN CHINA IS COMING REGARDLESS OF THE ECONOMIC BOOM: IN ZIMBABWE IT IS THE OPPOSITE!

“There is an expression in China: "Kill the chicken before the monkey." Target the weak and vulnerable, it means, to frighten the strong and many,” wrote Peter Beaumont (Mail and Guardian 17 January 2010.
It was an excellent article except for one thing, the Chinese dissents may be few but the one thing they are not is “weak and vulnerable”.

No one should under estimate the importance of economic feel-good factor on the people. The standard of living for the ordinary people in China has improved in giant leaps and bounds in the last fifteen years. On the political front, nothing has changed; the Communist Party is as repressive as ever. And as long as the people feel their lives are getting better they will go along. Any Zimbabwean would testify to that!

The dollarization of Zimbabwe’s monetary systems ended the country’s supersonic hyper inflation and almost overnight the shops filled with food and other commodities. This has been brandished as “proof” that the GNU was working. Even those numbering among the 90% unemployed would not question why the economic recovery has been sluggish let alone the continued lawlessness and political repression by Mugabe and his thugs.

The fact that the Chinese dissents have managed to keep alive the demand for political reform regardless of the economic success is itself a measure of how focused they are on the cause and their iron determination to see it through.

The dissents have their eyes firmly on the ball: the basic human rights of the individual are a basic and fundamental right not to be denied or traded-off for economic privileges or anything! Man and woman like that can never be “bought” to give up their cause by the promise of premiership, a Mercedes Benz, etc. That is what is worrying China’s ruling elite and forcing them to respond is the only way they know – continued and increased repression as shown by increased arrests of dissents and disruptions of human rights websites.

It was the growing demand for political reforms that forced China’s Communist leaders, fifteen years ago, to embrace the economic reforms that have pulled China’s economy from the dark ages into the space age. That only delayed the inevitable political change.

China’s economic boom has had a seismic shift on the country’s demographics. Before, China was a nation of peasants, preoccupied by the daily challenge of eking a living, with a sprinkling of academics and the rich ruling elite. Now, China has a significant affluent and well educated middle class and billions of the peasants are snapping at their heels demanding a share of the national wealth denied them all these years.

The Communist Party is under great pressure to continue to deliver on the economic front; it is doubtful it will. Tyrannical one-party states are inherently corrupt and inefficient. Even if Communist party manage to deliver the high economic growths of the last decade and a half; the party’s monopoly on political power is not assured. The growing middle class, with their economic needs met, will be demanded greater political power and freedoms next!

The stage is set for real democratic change in China; continued and increased repression will only delay the day of reckoning but not stop it coming!

Mugabe may have Tsvangirai in his pocket and economic feel-good of having food in the shops will quickly wear off – Zimbabwe’s economic improvements of the last year is a far cry from the economic boom of China. He will still have to face regime; in Zimbabwe it is coming because Mugabe failed to embrace economic reforms necessary for economic recovery!