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Many people are currently servicing bank loans whose moneys they have long exhausted and, to say the truth, it is not a very pleasant situation.
It is common cause that borrowing is easy while repaying a debt is hard.
Sometimes you wish you should not and this is why most banks are currently under a huge bad debt burden, which is reportedly over half a billion dollars.
Defaults by individuals, especially on personal loans, are commonplace and you are lucky if you are not indebted to the Shylock kind of loan sharks that may demand a pound of flesh closest to your heart.
That is just how brutal loan sharks can be.
Yet most of the time, the borrowers themselves are to blame, often using borrowed money for other things than the stated ones.
Our hands are so quick to misappropriate and divert!
I am reminded of one woman and her family, back in our rural areas, who was so given to the finer things of life despite her poor financial status.
This woman would make it a point that when she got the little money that she laid her hands on, she would send her children to get a packet of sugar and some meat.
When she harvested the little maize — hers would be perennially a poor crop because she would have diverted money for fertilisers — she would readily exchange that for some meat or sugar.
A pig’s head was her favourite.
She was always in debt and her children and grandchildren in arrears at school.
It has been a long time since I last saw her but I am sure she is still the same Amai Tamare, for that was the woman’s name.
Old habits die hard.
Today some people, especially in small businesses, come up with good project proposals that win them funding but the moment they get the money they think of other things.
They buy cars and clothes.
They patronise expensive bars and restaurants.
They fly to exclusive holiday resorts.
Some people go on to marry more wives. The money gets depleted and they end up trying to use the small change for the original business purpose.
Expectedly, the business fails and the money from the loan is never recovered.
You do not recover money from a new wife, do you, even if you divorce her — as is many a time the case?
That is why it becomes some business to pay back.
Is it our inadequacy, myopia or simply an entrenched culture that forces us to divert and misappropriate funds?
The latest revelations that the Harare City Council clandestinely bought 50 cars worth US$2 million using the US$144,4 million loan facility secured from China is one case in a long list of indicting cases against us.
The loan was meant to rehabilitate Harare’s water and sewerage infrastructure.
If one does not stay in the high density suburbs of Mbare, Highfield, Mabvuku and Tafara, Mufakose, Kuwadzana, Rugare, Budiriro, Hatcliffe, Ruwa among others, you may not appreciate the magnitude of Harare’s water and sewerage woes.
Here is a small bit.
These suburbs are for the poor and they are old and overpopulated.
Because Harare was designed by the colonial authorities for a certain number of people, the boom in population in the towns has increased pressure on the installed capacity of every resource and facility.
It has not helped that the infrastructure has not been rehabilitated and/or replaced so it is crumbling and choking.
Imagine a house that is supposed to carry eight people ending up having to accommodate up to 20 people!
That is, the landlord and his wife and four children; and four tenants and their families of four.
These people will sap the old city water capacity dry and choke the sewage systems.
Mind you, these poor people’s choice of toilet paper is a newspaper although the cardboard box, sticks, rags and stones are easy resorts at times.
Given this situation, water is perennially a problem and some areas have gone for years without water while raw sewage flows freely from houses into the streets.
Four thousand people died of cholera not so many years ago.
There have also been typhoid and other diarrhoeal diseases.
They are poor people’s diseases.
The poor people of the high density suburbs.
They were supposed to benefit from improved infrastructure of water and sewage reticulation, only to have that money siphoned off.
Let us not mention that those who are benefiting from this diversion do not suffer want of water, no, they have their boreholes which water their Jacuzzis and toilets at their convenience.
They would be surprised if we were to tell them that in the high density suburbs you wake up at midnight to join queues for water some kilometre or so away or to wait on your tap where water comes in trickles.
Or that when you bath, not in a Jacuzzi or even shower, but in a bucket, you have to ration the amount of water you use and leave some to flush your toilet. It is such a wretched existence.
We wish somebody cared.
In Zimbabwe, many resources get looted from inputs that are supposed to benefit rural farmers, to proceeds of national resources.
Some daring ones have even reportedly diverted and stolen resources meant for President Mugabe’s birthday.
Is it not ironic that the news of the diversion of funds at Harare City Council comes at a time when the very same Chinese have promised to fund our Zim-Asset programme?
What is the message we are sending to our Chinese friends and would be lenders, especially when it is known that this is not without precedence?
It is being reported that some politicians have been busy helping themselves to donations made to thousands of Tokwe-Mukosi dam flood victims that are now camped at Chingwizi transit camp in Masvingo province.
Such shamelessness!
A few weeks ago it was reported that funds meant for midwives were diverted by some senior health officials at a time when primary health care is struggling and many mothers die while giving birth.
The looting and diversion of resources has gone on unchecked for long now even when some of the culprits are well known.
This must not go unpunished.
The Chinese, our all weather friends, are fastidious and hate corruption. They will no doubt be following matters closely.
They, like any other lender, will not be too amused to create a bad debt on their own account. Was it not Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa, who was telling us the other time that no one wants to lend bad debtor, Zimbabwe?
We could eliminate part of the risk profile by cutting our misappropriating hands, in the fashion of the Bible, if they cause us to sin!
Online Reporter