MUCKRAKER saw it coming, and it is now here. After using different party members to test the term-extension waters and realising that it might not be very safe (for now), our Owner — who until now has been feigning lack of interest in the whole lucrative project — this week moved to make a show of dissociating himself from the illegality.
And this show came in the form of the suspension of the reeling party’s Harare provincial chairperson, Cde Godwills Masimirembwa.
His crime is trying to continually enslave our Owner, by trying to keep him on the yoke of leadership beyond the party and country’s constitutional limits. Suddenly, the reeling party — which even recently passed a resolution at its conference to that effect — has remembered how criminal it is to violate the supreme law of the land.
Poor Cde Masimirembwa has since been charged with, among other things, “gross abrogation of the party constitution and national constitution”.
“Firstly, by personally and actively moving the ‘2030’ initiative and sloganeering against not only the will of His Excellency, the First Secretary and President of Zanu PF, Cde ED Mnangagwa, but also against the party and national constitution, you have led and preferred an agenda that has the deliberate effect of causing divisions and factions in the party,” reads the suspension letter.
“We believe that the unconstitutional actions being pursued by you are meant to deliberately undermine and impair the standing, the legacy of our revered leader, His Excellency, the President, in obvious pursuit of a hidden, selfish and nefarious agenda.”
The more things appear to change in the reeling party, the more they appear to remain the same. For those who follow events therein closely, this is how things have always been done.
When Ndabaningi Sithole was toppled in that 1974 prison coup, the beneficiary of that coup, Robert Mugabe, appeared uninterested throughout the whole exercise.
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He even made a show of being opposed, even going on to pretend to be a reluctant leader. It had to be so, just in case the coup was unsuccessful.
Ask Rugare & Co
During the same war days, some people approached others with suggestions for a coup against Mugabe & Co. Ask Rugare Gumbo & Co, those that warmed up to this idea of leadership change were only surprised when those that had sold the idea to them turned up at the subsequent court-martials as prosecutors.
After the 2017 coup, many ended up on the wrong side of history because they did not know whether to agree or not to the illegality. Had the coup been unsuccessful, Muck can only shudder to imagine what would have happened.
Sadly, these are some of the occupational hazards of politics: ask people like Cde Godfrey Tsenengamu who were used to test the waters for our Owner when it was still a very dangerous thing to even imagine — what became of them. The same fate might befall Cde Masimirembwa.
Benefits of drought
The good news is that the drought conditions that have ravaged the country and the whole southern African region appear to, thankfully, continue.
This makes it really good news to the reeling party and the many politically exposed individuals to whom hopelessness among the masses delivers limitless lucrative opportunities.
For a start, a hungry person is very, very easy to control. When crops fail, it means villagers would spend more time at rural business centres taking turns to chant party slogans to ensure that their names are not expunged from the Eucharistic list of food hand-out beneficiaries.
Everyone will toe to party line, more so with amendments to the Private Voluntary Organisation Act increasingly criminalising most charities, while simultaneously promoting the politicisation of food aid.
Wherever possible, the food donations from Rwanda, Russia and other donor countries and institutions, are “EDwashed” and passed down to the starving villagers as handouts from a very caring leader — and therefore a cause for him to go on and on.
A drought situation is more or less like a war situation. A lot of things go unquestioned: lucrative deals are the low-hanging fruit available for the picking by the politically appropriate persons (PAPs) whom we are so proud to have an over-supply of.
Starting with the grain imports, for a country like this, where locally-produced grain is strangely more expensive than imports, it’s like that with almost everything. This provides abundant opportunities for those who belong to the correct side of politics.
Instead of toiling on the farms for months at the risk of incurring poor harvests and/ or sub-par producer prices, grain imports in a drought year is as good as a money printing machine. And the tenders are the exclusive preserve of these PAPs whose names are now just too familiar to recite.
As we talk, a lot of these PAPs are already feasting. There are tenders for school feeding programmes, tenders to move the food aid, and tenders for everything and anything.
Cash hand-outs
Then there are the supposed cash hand-outs to the poor in rural and peri-urban areas. On paper, taxpayers’ money is being given to deserving individuals every month, but those who have been Zimbo for long enough know the proper meaning of “deserving” in our own vernacular context.
All the money that cannot be accounted for is just written off as having gone towards drought mitigation efforts, even when not even a cotton-picking cent of it would have strayed in that direction.
When Muck tells you that a drought is good, it is better to believe him. Here is one example: after March, when most food crops in the region had been certified as write-offs due to drought, individual countries started preparing their own drought assistance requirements.
The first round of this drought appeal was like this: Malawi was seeking US$447 million to feed nine million of its citizens. Zambia US$940 million to feed 10 million of its citizens.
Yet Zimbabwe was seeking US$2 billion to feed a mere 2,7 million of its citizens! This left many wondering at which five-star hotel Zimbos were going to queue for their drought-relief meals. This is how lucrative drought situations can be.
Forgetting sanctions?
A recent letter by Finance ministry perm-sec Cde George Guvamatanga made it clear that we were a broke as a country.
One thing that disappointed Muck is that in both their efforts to explain away the shortage of resources, both Cde Guvamatanga and the state media neglected to highlight the prominent role played by “the illegal sanctions imposed on the country by the West” in this crisis, only a few weeks after the annual anti-sanction noises.
This serves to give the dangerous impression that they also no longer believe the official narrative that all the country’s problems start and end with “the illegal sanctions imposed on the country by the West”.
Well, it looks like deep down in the private forum of our consciences, we know the truth about our sorry situation even though we would rather choose to believe a lie.
We know that the money is lost through various “resourceful” schemes and sheer extravagance. Only last week, we sent a bumper delegation to the climate talk show in Azerbaijan.
That was shortly after our Sadc extravaganza of August, a lite version of which we repeated this week. Then there is that costly bribe to chiefs and other some such profligate expenses. Sanctions have always been a handy fig-leaf to hide.
