Corruption, vicarious fear

The most important thing for Zimbabwe’s revolution and for the generality of Zimbabweans is not what has gone wrong, but who has gone wrong — and how accountability catches up with the wrong doer. This is why retiring Cuthbert Dube with full benefits as punishment for his ferocious ruthlessness to the PSMAS membership is nothing short of a heartless slap in the face for the Zimbabwean public. Everyone feels cheated and short-changed.

IT is hard to imagine how a party laying claim to revolutionary credentials like Zanu-PF does, at the slightest of challenges, preside over an economy infested with so many iniquitous public office holders. And it is even harder to believe that at the exposure of such egregious malfeasance as has been hitting the headlines in the past six weeks Zanu-PF has not issued a single statement in relation to the hyper-looting that has been taking place in State-owned companies.

The party has an eloquent and vociferous spokesperson in Cde Rugare Gumbo.
MDC-T is supposed to be the official opposition to the Zanu-PF Government, and the reticence from the MDC-T leadership over the malevolent corruption in state owned companies is scandalously alarming.

It is as if at party level the two main parties have solidly found each other over how to react to the media busting of corrupt activities in state owned enterprises. One can be forgiven for concluding that the unspoken sense of unity is a product of fear — all emanating from the skeletal contents of private cupboards, especially those established during the praetorian era of the evidently treacherous inclusive government.

Someone very close to Tendai Biti has suggested the motivation behind the decision by Biti to be the defence counsel for the former RBZ governor could be vicarious fear of the same or similar allegations being raised against the defendant — himself an ex-archenemy of the firebrand MDC-T politician.

At the height of the Biti-Gono acrimony the former labelled the later “an economic terrorist” who deserved to “face the firing squad.” Suddenly Biti is Gono’s defence counsel over allegations not too different from his erstwhile disparaging remarks. Talk of stark irony.

Some in the MDC-T circles are suggesting that Tendai Biti could be in it all to defend not Gono, but the GPA inclusive Government — itself an institution with too many dirty secrets not befitting of opposition politics, especially against Zanu-PF. Zimbabwe’s political alternative is in the hands of people who have squandered their integrity and credibility no less than those they pretend to oppose, and that state of affairs is sad for the country’s political landscape.

Reading that Happison Muchechetere is on paid leave is equally disgusting, regardless of the legal merits of that decision. Zimbabweans in general cannot stand a cent more in the direction of Dube or Muchechetere, not from the coffers of PSMAS or the ZBC. The mere imagination of the act is infuriating.

The land reform programme developed in our people a transformed dimension of attitude. With this transformation we have prided ourselves among Africans as a people with a consciousness that says wielding power is our business. We have insolently bragged that the destiny of Zimbabwe is our collective business, and these thieving captains of industry have in some cases fronted our cause, blasting the imperialist West and its ruinous sanctions with firebrand zeal, yet committing against crimes far greater than colonialism and imperialism put together ever did to us.

Little did it occur to us that we had in our midst the Muchecheteres and Dubes of this world — the indisputable definition of heartlessness. One was feeding at the expense of people’s health while the other hoodwinked the nation by pretending to be defending the national interest through radio and TV — smiling with payroll loot from the bank every single month.

By redistributing our land and introducing the indigenisation policy we had all told ourselves that the wealth of our country would no longer belong to a minority.

But the looting brigade at Air Zimbabwe did not think so, and the executives at the Harare City Council clearly mocked the national resolve, and they simply plundered ratepayers’ coffers with politicised impunity.

At Air Zimbabwe, they blatantly went the criminal way, stealing and stealing in million dollar terms as a well oiled looting outfit star marshalled by one Grace Pfumbidzayi, a miscreant who for many years masqueraded as the airline’s legal manager and company secretary — doing next to nothing in regards to those two roles.

And it is hard to believe that Minister Chombo believes the Town Clerk of Harare is too holy to be suspended, even after declining to explain his failure to answer straightforward questions, or failing to provide lawfully requested documents. Not many Zimbabweans would want to see partisan decisions over the payroll malfeasance at the Harare City Council, and frankly speaking Minister Chombo is coming across as egregiously distasteful, whatever his administrative reasoning is.

We are faced with an elitist looting cartel that will not accept even a minimum of social justice, and it all thrives on a patronage system that now cuts across the political divide, with the MDC formations as the willing newbies that just managed to taint themselves badly between 2009 and 2013.

Let them dare deny it, and the floodgates will open.
There is a very good reason for the reticence and the deafening silence from the MDC formations. The leadership feels vicariously on trial alongside Dube, Pfumbidzayi, Muchechetere and all the others so far exposed. The same goes for many in Zanu-PF’s top leadership, many of who have never in their political lives publicly denounced corruption, and most certainly will never do until death.

In his ‘state of the pocket address’ disguised as the ‘state of the nation address’, Morgan Tsvangirai was suspiciously very measured in his utterances on the ongoing exposures of corruption. He had to say something.

These were his words: “We note that the biggest threat to this economy is corruption as recently exposed in the nauseating benefits and perks of senior staff at quasi-State institutions such as the ZBC and the PSMAS. Unchecked corruption has been the result of the incapacitation of the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission.

In the case of the PSMAS, over a million people will go without health care as a result of graft and unmitigated corruption. As long as we don’t give the Anti-Corruption Commission teeth to enable it to execute its constitutional mandate, corruption, especially by the powerful and politically-connected, will remain a cancer to this economy.”

We all know that the inclusive Government never seized itself with matters of corruption, and that Morgan Tsvangirai’s own priorities at the time had nothing to do with fighting for the independence of ZACC.

Some lady by the name Lillian Timvios has echoed Tsvangirai’s words on the need for an independent anti-corruption body, and she says she is Tsvangirai’s shadow minister for home affairs.

We do not know Timvios at all. We want to hear the complex lexicon of Nelson Chamisa lambasting the exposed corrupt elites. We want to hear real war cries from the frothing mouth of the rabble-rousing Tendai Biti. This is time for real opposition politics. Why the reticence boys?

We hear Biti has finally called for a commission of inquiry into the apparent impropriety at Parastatals. Belated but welcome call all the same, and hopefully Biti himself is ready to assist the commission with what he knows as former Finance Minister.

Minister David Parirenyatwa said, “If we compare the salaries (for PSMAS) it means you can all be paid by one person here.” He was addressing a Senate of over 90 members, and he was referring to one salary, that of Cuthbert Dube, a whopping US$230 000 per month.

One hopes the Minister has the teeth to do more than this breathtaking comparison, and the stomach to deal decisively with the rot under his portfolio.

We are heartened that the man who started the ball rolling, Minister Jonathan Moyo, still leads the pack in fighting the egregious iniquities bedevilling our Parastatals. So far the professor has been a champion, and evidently he has many admirers among Zimbabweans.

He is the man who discovered the unprintable sins of Cuthbert Dube at ZBC, sending the nefarious character and his whole board packing, together with the conniving CEO and the facilitating finance director. That bold and decisive move has led us to the exposures at PSMAS, Air Zimbabwe and Harare City Council.

Prof Jonathan Moyo has hailed the media for exposing “the scourge of corruption highlighted by some obscenely corrupt salaries,” and that is the frank language lacking from some of our leaders, many of who are just vacillating in meaningless bureaucratic language.

He has urged the country “to allow facts to speak for themselves,” and has warned against “witch hunt or cover up,” adding that such an approach would not be “in the public interest.”

The minister’s advice is that “due process of the law and principles of good governance” be allowed to run their course.
He added that this is the only way to deal with the “obscene salaries, crooked allowances, fraudulent procurement procedures, and distorted prices.”

We can add nepotism, bribery, protection money, patronage and many other forms of corruption rampant in our system.
Essentially what many of the CEOs of Parastatals have been doing is nothing but a callous betrayal of the whole cause of the founding idea of Parastatals. State owned companies are premised on the idea of ensuring that essential services are delivered to the people in a guaranteed manner, and that is why the ZBC is owned by the State — presumably to ensure that information dissemination is guaranteed for the public, and also to safeguard the national interest.

Under Muchechetere, the ZBC was at its woeful worst, and even him had to resort to an outrageous allowance to enable him to subscribe to the alternative DSTv. He did not feel bad. He enjoyed it and he was happier with the fact that he had the MDC to blame if anyone ever raised any concerns.

ZESA is mandated to ensure that the nation does not languish in perpetual darkness, and the power utility ensured perpetual darkness in the last ten years, blaming it all on the West’s illegal sanctions. ZESA made darkness so common in Zimbabwe that very few people care about light any more, and one hopes the CEO and management at this parastatal are not in the same salary league with Cuthbert Dube and Happison Muchechetere.

PSMAS ensured that the sick went without health care by neglecting their plight as unpaid dues escalated to nearly US$40 million, prejudicing 600 000 members in the process.

It appears our fundamental fight is not exactly against the imperial West, evil as that breed of people stands. We face a more malignant enemy in our bourgeoisie and our petit bourgeoisie.

Ordinarily our Parastatal CEOs must count among the petit bourgeoisie in our political economy, but with these monster salaries it appears some of them unilaterally elevated themselves to the highest throne.

We need to find how we are going to deal with elites inclined towards self-enrichment while at the same time admiring the prestige of the revolution. Numerically these bourgeoisie elites count for nothing, but Cuthbert Dube has just shown us how much power these ruthless people can wield.

In business the petit bourgeoisie steals and corrupts the system, in politics it screams, poisons minds, and slanders the well intended.
We have allowed these unpatriotic elites to occupy a preponderant place in our decision-making processes, and they have returned the favour by stealing unabated from our national coffers, or promising what they will never deliver in the political sphere.

Now it is time for national consciousness to win over blind loyalty to political parties. It is time for accountability, and let only the voice of social justice prevail.

My colleague Nathaniel Manheru explained in his Saturday column how the dollarisation factor contributed to the egregious greed of the GPA era, and how the politics of the day allowed the offending miscreants free reign, telling us of the protectionism culture that prevailed that time.

That kind of analysis is better left to unconcerned non-Zimbabweans studying corruption and its causes at foreign universities. We Zimbabweans are baying for the blood of whoever robbed us, and we frankly do not care about the factors that may have caused them to do so. We just want their heads on the platter, and we are in no mood for leniency of whatever form.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.