By Chris Kabwato
A decade ago, I happened to be on the same flight as the former Reserve Bank governor, Gideon Gono.
He was seated next to someone who did not even know who Gono was. I could see the gregarious former governor casting glances at the fellow passenger – probably mystified that there was someone in Zimbabwe who had no clue who he was.
Ego does not tolerate such.
Comrade Gono started talking about the economy and how “some of us bided the call by His Excellency and stepped in to rescue the economy.”
He went on, this amazing son of the soil. His critics, he pointed out, had not understood the danger the nation was under and how he had to employ unorthodox methods to ensure a functional economy.
I did not choke on my drink. This was not a character I respected, even from his days at the CBZ where he recycled over and over the story of his rise from “teaboy” to the corridors of corporate power.
In that short flight from Harare to Johannesburg, Gono simply confirmed the impression I have of those who push the ZANU PF government’s economic policies: malleable, self-serving and arrogant “technocrats”.
When the brains of a government fit on a pinhead
There was a time when we respected a Minister of Finance as they arrived at the House of Assembly holding that weighty black briefcase containing the national budget.
Even when he was dishing out the bitter pill called Structural Adjustment Programme, Bernard Thomas Gibson Chidzero carried the portfolio of the Ministry of Finance with dignity.
You could understand what he was saying using the terminology of economics and thus you could oppose his views using whatever ideological lens you wished.
But those days are gone. The current coterie of ZANU PF-linked civil servants and ministers are shameless.
You would have thought a Finance Minister with a resume that boasts senior positions in university business schools and a leading development bank, would carry himself with dignity and offer rational and cogent reasons for macroeconomic policies.
Instead, he sounds very much like the hysterical jackals sitting in Cabinet. Hired guns whose whole fate is tied to a looting project readily flush their conscience down the toilet drain.
Financial illiteracy and the Chitepo School of Ideology
The ideology of looting your country, pauperising your people and engaging in unproductive conspicuous consumption is not novel.
It is what settlers and colonialists did. It is what the first wave of African nationalist leaders did when they came to power.
Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth remains prophetic today as it was in 1961 when it was first published. Fanon describes the national middle class that comes to power after independence as intellectually lazy.
Neither financiers nor magnates, these are merely intermediaries – the Wicknells of solar panels and Starlink kits.
The briefcase dudes wielding import licences for this and that, who are always hanging in the offices of the powerful jostling for a tender.
When political leaders assume the highest office without a modicum of financial literacy, you get a Zimbabwe.
The basic understanding that you need to enable people and companies to build a thriving economy which in turn allows government to collect revenue for use in education, health, etc, is alien concept to our robbers.
Mystified as to where easy money could come from, they punish everyone with the most absurd and arbitrary policies and regulations.
No wonder they cannot even balance their personal books. Their farms and businesses collapse the moment they are removed from the ZANU PF feeding trough.
Mbinga – the birth of permanent hustlers
Once upon a time, when factories still belched smoke, many people would wake up early to catch a bus heading for the industrial area.
People worked and sent their children to school. From the mid-1990s when de-industrialisation began with the textiles industry heavily hit, we saw the beginning of something tragic.
Men who could no longer feed their families. They still woke up in the morning, buy a newspaper and sit with others outside the gates of any of the dwindling factories.
I distinctly remember a bizarre encounter – probably in 1998 – at the Jameson Hotel’s Beer Engine. A man walked into the pub and went around asking if anyone wanted to buy a car.
“Willowvale Motors is in trouble”, he said, “Please buy a car”. I think of this man often. His level of desperation and the faint hope that he could contribute to the survival of a once-protected industry.
We now aspire to be a mbinga – the family benefactor who has been plugged into the system. A few days ago, I was amused by the video interview of the members of the Mbare Chimurenga Choir.
They were lamenting that they have been neglected by you-know-who and were pleading for funds to record an album in support of our reluctant 2030 candidate.
“We used to sleep in hotels during galas and travelled all across the country,” they reminisced. They conveniently cannot connect their poverty to the regime in power. The regime is a source of largesse.
The Devil on the Cross
In the novel Devil on the Cross, Ngugi wa Thiong’o describes a macabre gathering of thieves who compete to outboast each other about their corruption, theft and exploitation of the people.
Land speculation, selling bottled air, smuggling, manufacturing human body parts, imprisoning workers in factories, political corruption, tiny portable houses for people – these are some of the exploits of the unproductive, crass and pea-brained middle-class thieves in Ngugi’s book.
If our Harare’s Sir of Sirs could have his way, he would sell to ordinary people everything he could.
Bottled oxygen? Toilet meters in your home bathroom where Sir could charge you per every visit? 50 US cents to cross Samora Machel Avenue via the skywalk? $1 per day levied against every WhatsApp administrator?
Zimbabwe is now a serious crime scene. Our country has now been sold to the highest bidders by a cabal of mercenaries.
Private lithium earnings are filtering back into the country and dressed up as proceeds of the numerous fuel stations sprouting across Harare.
Dipping into the Mutsvangwa dictionary
Way back in the late 1990s, my friend Double D and I used to enjoy doing a Chris Mutsvangwa on friends – throwing around jawbreakers just for the sake of it and then roll with laughter.
We were retarded. The Castle Pilsener at the Keg (Sam Levy’s Village) certainly aided the silly routines. One favourite line by Double D ran: “an unmitigated catalogue of cataclysmic catastrophes.” He could have been describing ZANU PF’s policies since 1980.
*Chris Kabwato is an economic analyst
