Financial Gazette (Harare)
22 November 2007
Harare — ZIMBABWEANS have become increasingly restive due to an economic crisis now in its eighth year. There is growing despondency, and people are increasingly appealing for the intervention of the divine hand of the Almighty God for a solution to the crisis.
There is an acute shortage of fuel: diesel, petrol, coal, etc -- basically a shortage of every essential commodity. And the economy is in free fall, with gross domestic product (GDP) expected to contract a further six or seven percent this year, which would bring the cumulative GDP decline since 2000 to about 40 percent.
National days of prayer have been held, with tacit support from a paranoid government. The powers-that-be have reached a breaking point, although, publicly, they will not admit it, and will also not acknowledge that the crisis Zimbabwe is facing is now out of hand.
That admission, obviously, would require of them to humbly give up power or pass on the baton to others, more able or better placed to deal with the situation confronting the country.
Indeed for many, the country has reached a point where, like the Israelites in Rephidim, faced with thirst, grumbled against God and their leader Moses, resulting in God asking Moses to "take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink".
You get that sense of dejection among Zimbabweans today; they have lost faith in all state institutions, and are grumbling against their leadership and appealing to God for that water to quench their thirst.
But just how desperate can the government get to splurge billions of dollars of taxpayers' money on a hopeless "spirit medium" to get diesel gushing from a rock because of the people's "grumbling"? And how desperate can the government get to parcel out land to a bunch with no history or clue of farming. Those who lost lives in the struggle for land must be turning in their graves!
There is no denying that Zimbabwe's economic crisis presents the biggest headache -- nay heartache -- to government, battling to extend its incumbency by hook or crook, but even a kindergarten kid would laugh at the gullibility of a whole politburo and Cabinet agreeing to claims that a Chinhoyi-based "spirit medium" had power to cause a rock to pour out huge quantities of diesel to sufficiently supply the country with the scarce commodity.
Yet this is exactly what our country's leadership did. The Financial Gazette reported last month that the government had squandered $5 billion worth of taxpayers' money and given away a farm to a pseudo spirit medium, Rotina Mavhunga, after she had claimed she could extract diesel from a rock by just pointing her magical stick at it.
Should it be surprising therefore, that some of the senior politicians holding government posts today claimed disability levels as high as 80 percent, as they ransacked the War Victims' Fund in the mid 1990s?
A provincial governor, Nelson Samkange, later told the nation that the government and its numerous state agencies had accepted Rotina's lie because "the government and the President believe in African culture and in spirit mediums". "She said the diesel was coming from our ancestors so we had to pursue it," Samkange said.
President Robert Mugabe later reaffirmed Samkange's claim, but angrily demanded that Rotina, who has been arrested on charges of being a criminal nuisance, and her accomplices should be punished for fooling him and his entire Cabinet and the party politburo.
The President has highly learned individuals in his Cabinet, some of them scientists who should know better that diesel is extracted from crude oil through a purification process; there was no way this fuel could have gushed from a rock, even under the alleged mystical powers of a grade three school drop-out.
Samkange would have the nation believe that if Rotina's claims had not been pursued, she would have blamed the government for the fuel shortages. Now he wants to be a key state witness because she "took the government for a ride". Indeed extra state resources are being marshalled to punish Rotina through the court prosecution system.
But who will hold the powers-that-be to account for their naivety? Who will hold them to account for spending so much money on a wild goose chase, so to speak, on a non-existent bargain from a fake spirit medium? For how long will Zimbabwean taxpayers pay for the foolishness of a government desperately battling to defend itself from collapse?
We had the case of Ari Ben Menashe a few years ago, who was paid huge sums of money to pin down opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in an alleged plot to topple President Mugabe from power through the barrel of the gun. Despite spending hugely on a court case against the opposition leader, the case collapsed like a deck of cards, but Menashe went all the way to the bank smiling.
What rank madness!
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