Better late than never

Perspective Stephen Mpofu
There should be no two ways about it. It has to be a riches-back-to-rags for those who have damaged – thank God not destroyed – the integrity of quasi-state enterprises through their involvement in the Salarygate scandal which has grabbed headlines in both print and on people’s lips for many weeks running. These are the men and women in designer suits who skimmed the cream and ensconced in air-conditioned offices, while their subordinates in work suits settled for the whey tending the cows under the searing heat and frigid conditions, so the cows would not starve to death.

Of course, some or all of those indicted over reaping hefty salaries with inflated allowances might try blithely to exonerate themselves from any blame by saying there never was a salary and allowances benchmark in parastatals and other State enterprises to go by and so the whopping packages they took smiling to their banks were justified. But benchmark salary scale or no, obscenity is obscenity and there has never been a benchmark for obscene salaries anywhere on this earth.

Officialdom says the bosses of the enterprises in question gave themselves abnormally high allowances to evade paying tax that is levied on salaries. What all this suggests is pre-meditated tax evasion which is in itself a crime – and the law must descend on all who are guilty of dodging tax with thunder and lightning.

The government says all the money earned using unorthodox means will be recovered and forfeited to the State as the shareholder in its enterprises including municipalities.

This pen suggests that every ill-gotten cent should be recovered even if this means that in its blitzkrieg the State will strip those involved to the last chick if they kept poultry, and to the last duckling to the last kid to the last heifer to a bicycle and to a tangwena-to a single square meal a day for their families, as the case might be.

Critics of the government might jump on the bandwagon, saying the State should have acted before things came to a head, with thousands upon thousands of hard-earned cash ending up in the pockets, some porous, of chief executives who built their little empires out of the earnings, some verging on the measly earnings of their enterprises while the generality of the workers went without pay for months or received the little that was left over to feed their families.

The truth is that the smoke that served as a signifier of the fire appears to have risen too late to the skyline for the powers-that-be to scramble action to try to quell the fire in time.

As such this pen will not be seen as apologising for the crackdown, belated though it might be, by riding on the back of the altruism: “better late than never.”
In fact had the government not weighed in thunderously as it did, there is no doubt Zimbabwe might have seen a rat race for wealth in various other economic structures in the country.

This would no doubt have resulted in an explosion of corruption that men of the cloth would add to a population explosion around the world which hovers around five billion, an explosion in travel that sees anyone with money going to the farthest reaches of the world, a postmodern explosion in communication technologies which has reduced the world to a global village; and an explosion or outpouring of the Holy Spirit as the last marker for this age coming to a close.

But come to think of it, Zimbabwe is not alone in the sphere of State enterprises elsewhere in Africa being brought down to earth.
The Kenyan government has also grabbed the errant parastatal bulls in that country by their horns, trimming scandalous salaries to levels that the economy there can accommodate.

But not only that, the government there has said those who feel anguished by the action taken should pack their bags and go and that young men prepared to earn the downsized salaries were ready and raring to move into any vacancy created by those who might see it fit to quit their jobs.

The Zimbabwean government has not issued a blatant statement giving short-shrift to those who might feel gravely wronged by the drastic reduction of their pay.
That is however not to say a silent message saying those who are fed up with the salaries paradigm shift can go is not embedded in remarks by government leaders who have censured State enterprise gurus for fattening themselves on the sweat of poorly remunerated workers. If these executives stay on their jobs – who knows – the more frustrated among them might work to rule and run down what is left of those institutions.

To be sure, the crackdown on obscene salary-earners should send a message with booming clarity to potential exploiters of their companies by giving themselves salaries that the enterprises must pay out groaning for inadequate resources.

The anti-corruption measures by governments in Zimbabwe and elsewhere clearly demonstrate what Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah contends not just about his own country but about Africa as a whole when he writes: The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born.