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ago – May 26 to be exact – our Prime Minister told the world through his immediate interlocutors in Matabeleland South that his hands “are clean”, spotlessly clean like defrosted waters from the lofty Alps.
He went further. A priestly, open-palmed hand in righteous air, the Prime Minister challenged President Mugabe – a man who fought a 15-year war, governed this country for three decades, including during the tempestuous eighties when national unityfailed – to say the same.
Bloodied hand of a righteous man
Then a week later, hardly before we had recovered from this act of immodest piety, we woke up to a bloody headline proclaiming a murder most foul.
Thugs from our righteous Prime Minister’s MDC-T party had violently assaulted a senior policeman going about his lawful duties.
Using an assortment of weapons, including these thugs’s weapon of choice, boulders, these drugged MDC-T thugs had pounded the unarmed and therefore hapless police officer to death.
They were acting on orders from on high. They were acting well in character. They were acting in fulfillment of their party’s programme-of-action, ahead of elections the party so mortally fears.
From that Monday morning headline to this day, when our Prime Minister hears of rumours of righteous hands, he recoils his own hand – now bloodied.
Indeed, his hand scurries for cover into his pockets. His hands are no longer clean, will never be clean, after this murder so foul.
Did he see the weeping widow? Did he see the orphaned son spilling sob-tales on national television?
How about the teenage girl-child of the late departed, did he see her? What is more, against all these shades of grief, did he go back to his two palms of vaunted righteousness? How do they look today?
Not all the waters of Mtshabezi Dam can wipe them clean. Never!
More sinned against than sinning
Who is trying to undermine our righteous, God-fearing Prime Minister? Who? Soon after a spectacular performance at the Livingstone Troika Summit, our adroit Prime Minister came back home carrying a pity-deserving MDC-T, came back dragging a damnation-deserving bloody Zanu-PF.
The Prime Minister had convinced the world, again through his immediate Sadc interlocutors, that on violence, MDC-T was more sinned against than sinning. The real evil part of the piece was Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, a party he alleged was abusing national institutions, principally the military, to visit generous violence on his party and innocent Zimbabweans.
The South African President bought into this line, which he took to the Troika Summit. Today he regrets ever meeting our Prime Minister, let alone swallowing his convoluted yarns. Still there was no counter-argument from Zanu-PF, which for a while appeared so stunned, so numbed, to be roused to any action. For a while, the region went along with the MDC-T leader’s lies, and for that short while, the MDC-T leader ruled the propaganda roost.
Hacking, hacking, hacking
Who is trying to undermine our righteous, pity-deserving Prime Minister? Who? Hardly a week after that summit, the same MDC-T thugs, again acting on orders from on high, started hacking people, hacking, hacking, hacking in gratuitous violence.
The only difference this time around was that these murderous thugs were attacking their own, all in a vicious internecine conflict.
Pity, pity our righteous man: his most elaborately yarns – well-woofed, well-wefted – came back to hammer his bold forehead with a gong! Hacking, hacking, hacking, his violent men went about drawing brotherly blood. Not once, not twice, not thrice, but all the time up to his party’s congress and even beyond.
And, truth rang sonorously throughout the Sadc village and beyond, much to the embarrassment of his backers and all those wont to grant him undeserved benefit of the underdog. Thank God the South Africans now know their customer, and now understand why they need to make amends. They are set to do so shortly.
Following the path of the sword
MDC-T, the Prime Minister’s party, has chosen the path of the sword. It is a path with sharp, cutting edges, a path with pointed, piercing ends.
It is a path of deep grief, tears and even blood.
Ranged against a party of the peculiar history that Zanu-PF has, this is hardly a thoughtful path to take. MDC-T has good reason to cultivate peace.
More than any other party, it needs peace, perfect peace for its fortunes to begin to smile.
In politics, no party takes casualties after casualties. In policing, no Force expends its manpower to murderous hooligans. None in the world, civilised or uncivilised, whatever that means.
Sooner rather than later, measures commensurate with the threat level shall be instituted for the protection of serving officers. About that let no one speculate. And to say that, is not to incite violence. Rather, it is to mete it with justice.
I am not a policeman, may never be given my knocking knees and general indisposition to regimentation. But I know very well these guys can arm lawfully and use those arms within the strict confines of the law. Violence is not lawful. It is not a legitimate way of making a political point. MDC-T will be bruised, badly bruised.
The law – which it breaks so gratuitously – will not assist it, save it even. There are better ways of stopping elections which MDC-T sorely fear.
This is not one of them.
Topsy-turvy values
Except I am not exercised about the doom which awaits MDC-T unless it mends its ways. This is self-courted ruin. Let the borrower pay. What worries me stiff is the way sections of our society, incited by sections of the media, have reacted to this foul murder.
Let me restate the obvious: I am talking about the killing of a peace officer, not a Zanu-PF activist.
His duty is to enforce the law, often to interpose between agitated opposed sides, both threatening to shatter the peace, all for you and me. Then he gets killed, unarmed, in cold blood.
We do not devote headlines to such a dastard deed.
No. Rather, we wait meticulously to see what happens to those implicated in the bloody deed. Who are they? How are they going to be accounted for? Headlines are not on the dead man. Not even on his weeping widow. No. All that is not newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that 12 or so MDC-T activists have been arrested! They should not have been? No one should have been arrested?
Maybe Zanu-PF? Maybe the dead policeman himself for dying? And we have the editorial temerity to carry Mwonzora – himself a suspect in another orgy of violence – telling us the policeman got killed after disturbing patrons enjoying masese paMunyarari? Let’s grant that for a second, weird though that is. A policeman disturbing beer drinkers paMunyarari deserves to be killed? What bundle of values lead us to such a callous verdict?
Are these the values to guide my little son to adulthood? I shudder.
The violence set to eat us
For me, the fact of violence occurring somewhere is not the main issue, important though that is. For me, the real issue is how our collective humanity receives the act, indeed manifests itself in response to the act. It would appear from this incident that our humanity is partitioned around a given set of competing politics. It would appear, in other words that our humanity is now mortgaged to politics. Much like Achebe’s gluttonous Unoka who saw the folly of not eating, each time he saw a dead man’s mouth.
We search for the party card in the cold pockets and armpits of a dead man. We do not see a fatal morallapse in the cadaver; we see folly in a mouth that once shouted the other slogan, voted the other party. Compassion gets frozen, takes a backstage as the violent humours of party chauvinism find overflowing expression, all to utter self-destruction.
One day, this lack of actuating compassion shall return to bite us, eat us, consume us. You do not train a generation to deliver corpses to your doorstep, and then count that as political victory.
You do not make society insensate to death and still hope to humanise, democratise governance. If the problem was an allegedly violent Zanu-PF, is the answer a violent MDC-T?
A web of hypocrisy
Where is our humanity when newspapers, themselves our supposedcollective conscience, ask for party identity before accurately describing and appropriately decrying a violent deed, a violent death?
We have a problem. I hope we have an urgent solution to it. One despairs though when people like Tendai Biti, themselves officers of courts, spew out party politically correct drivel such as they have given us on this matter. They give us that on a Tuesday. On a Wednesday, they are chairing Jomic, itself the supposed peacemaker between parties, within our inclusive society. On Thursday, they aremeeting as negotiators of the GPA. On Friday, they participate in the National Security Council, even plucking the courage to mournfully complain that the death of the policeman is causing “our people” to be arrested! Surely stumbling once is bad enough?
Down to a world under
Talking about Tendai Biti – our award winning Finance Minister, dubbed Africa’s best in 2009 – what is going on in his restless head? Has an evil wind afflicted him? Picture this scenario. Some private bank, ironically named Renaissance, goes bust, thanks to three shady shareholders who break every rule in the book to get the better of public trust.
They have broken all relevant acts, all relevant regulations, all consequential ethics, these three. In the process, many depositors – individual and institutional alike – get enmeshed and sucked into this vortex. But, it is a bank which espouses a certain type of politics, to which it is also wedded consanguineously. The major shareholders are friends, brothers and comrades of certain politics, which they think are bankable. That bank comes to deserved grief. Now mark the response of our smart Finance Minister.
The workings of a super minister
Well before he advises the Council of Ministers – itself a halfway-house between an idea and its adoption by Cabinet – our Finance Minister is already pawning social security funds belonging to underpaid workers. He is engaging Strive Masiyiwa and his Econet, all on the strength of pledged resources belonging to workers organised statutorily as NASSA.
NASSA falls under another Minister. NSSA was launched by a Zanu-PF Government to stiff opposition from Biti’s MDC. He has already directed that shares of Renaissance- related institutions and investments be suspended from trading on the ZSE. All by himself, this our super minister!
He writes to the manager of NSSA, a manager of a body under another Ministry, this our most able Minister. By so doing, he dispenses with his counterpart both in Government and in his party – one Honourable Mpariwa. He dispenses with the NSSA Board, led by one Innocent Chagonda: fellow lawyer,fellow party comrade, MDC lawyer and adviser to GPA talks. And because he is already negotiating on the strength of NSSA money before the Council of Ministers has met, well before Cabinet has met, he has also dispensed with the Inclusive Government.
Much worse, we are talking about a failing bank, not a failing Ministry or parastatal. We are talking about a monetary issue, not a fiscal one. What is our most indefatigable Finance Minister doing in the banking sector? Where is Gideon Gono, himself constitutionally mandated to deal with monetary issues? Why is the dog-owner barking right in front of a massive Alsatian whose leash he holds, an Alsatian wallowing on the heath in abnegating idleness? So, the superman ploughs through and past all these layers of authority, all in the name of some stupid clause he then cites in his poor defense. But all that is to make a jurisdictional point. Let us look at the quality of his intervention.
A bank of loose bottom
What harkens the most able Minister to Renaissance’s banking atrocities is the RBZ which the Minister, supported by the IMF and Western embassies worked so hard to emasculate. The RBZ moved in speedily to investigate, all to emerge with a tome on how-not-to-do-banking.
By his own admission, the report on the goings-on at the offending bank reads like a work of fiction. You cannot put it down once you open the first page. The good Minister had the report on his desk, but still pressed on with his grand idea of pledging workers’ money in this one hell of a bank of loose bottom.
RBZ, in other words, had done due diligence for the Minister and NSSA. Renaissance was one place where even angels would flee from, in absolute terror of treading. But our good and boldest Minister still wanted to press on. What was at stake? Don’t give me this shit about protecting depositors! Are workers not the same depositors?
Why seek to protect them from the vagaries of a badly run bank by mortgaging their insurance cover to that same bank? What reasoning is that? Is not putting NSSA money in secure and assured instruments the first commandment of any social security authority? Was Renaissance one such secure financial instrument?
Votary of Adam Smith
And all this from a dilligent student of Adam Smith? Where was the invisible hand which works wonders in the market? What had happened to the rule of market forces, which Biti crudely reduced to feeding what we catch mantra? What had happened to this votary of market forces? Why was he stumbling on this one? Far from localising the aftershocks of Renaissance, the most able Minister was in fact virally extending the crash to new and more sensitive domains, including NSSA and Econet with it’s myriad of insured subscribers. This is why Strive told the Minister a hard thing or two over his unilateral decision to suspend trading of Afre and RTG on ZSE, in the process extending his reach into non-governmental concerns, against corporate sense. It was shabby.
Supporting a tuckshop
Then came the spectacle in Parliament. Thanks to Zimpapers, critical information on the whole saga had been placed in the public domain. The matter could no longer be dealt with through whispers. The Minister’s elected road was being challenged.
To beat a face-saving, roaring retreat, he goes to Parliament where he tells the House Renaissance was being run like “a tuckshop”. Really?
So, why was he about to commit workers’ pension into a tuckshop? He also tells the august House he would leave NSSA to decide on the prudence of channeling its surplus funds into Renaissance.
Really? At what point in his ministerial career did the clever minister realise NSSA was a living tissue capable of sound judgment? Why had he decided to take decisions for it? He also discloses iron-clad instructions he says he has given out to the Governor of the RBZ, not just in respect of Renaissance but also in respect of all all banks at risk.
Really? At what point did the Minister realise the Governor was part of the skills and institutions available to him?
Honeycomb of fat maggots
But there are more maggots. The RBZ report clearly lays bare the tapestry of false institutions which the shareholders of the bank had created to mug depositors.
Equally, the report boldly says who was who in the leadership of those smoke screening phony institutions. Among the persons in charge of a Trust with a dominant shareholding in the bank was some lawyer called Innocent Chagonda, the same man at the helm of NSSA.
Was Chagonda, a trustee of a leading shareholder in Renaissance going to ask a Chagonda who is chairman of NSSA whether or not it was right to bail out the distressed Renaissance? Was schizophrenia coming to the rescue? Had the Honourable Minister missed this part of the revelation in the report? Or, was he aware of it, which is probably why he chose to write to the General Manager of NSSA and not to the chairman of the Authority, as was marginally proper?
The proper thing of course was for the Minister to write his counterpart, Minister Mpariwa. Worse, could this matter have been discussed elsewhere, away from Government? Why was Minister Mpariwa so obsequious, much unlike Professor Mukonoweshuro who sharply told Biti off when he sought to trespass?
What is the role of interlocking directorships in the political economy of MDC-T? These are fundamental questions which throw light not just in the mighty mind of our superminister, but also in the workings of our Inclusive Government.
Hero of Euromoney, villain of Afro-vision
Thank God Gono has moved in to place the bank under curatorship, in which case the whole nonsense about NSSA funds falls away. Equally, the deft Strive has wasted no time in demanding his pound of flesh. But, a fundamental institutional question remains unanswered. Why was it possible for Renaissance to run the way it did?
Did it have an ignorant board? Did it have poor management? Or what? Documents from the inquiry clearly show that Renaissance had good managers who even resisted wayward whims of shareholders. The board was notified of shareholder excesses, even though no remedial actions were taken. Theboard faltered in its fiduciary role. Yet that needed not have beenfatal.
What was fatal to the bank was a sense of brazenness which could only come with a promise of impunity from some quarter. Or a sense that failure would be guaranteed somehow. Where did that sense come from? With the furious peddling of our able Minister, coupled with the risks, he was ready to take for the Bank, it is clear a lot was at stake, although not for him personally.
Could the story of Renaissance give clue on why it is MDC-T’s policy to attack and enervate the central bank, itself the supervisor of banks? Could the story of Renaissance tell us why Gideon Gono is an outstanding issue?
It is quite hard to separate this mayhem from the systematic weakeningof RBZ, both institutionally and by way of rules and scope. Renaissance is enough warning on what is wrong, who is wrong, and the motive for being gainfully wrong.
You do not get a sense of a blunder. You get a sense of a corporatised political programme that has gone badly wrong. Its goals are clear and straightforward, although its methods quite clumsy. All went wrong, but there was a plan. Which is why this hero of Euromoney could very well end up being a villain of Afro-concerns.
Icho!
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