Min Biti, practise what you preach

With words couched in well selected superlatives, the minister tried to misleadingly describe himself as a principled and no nonsense bureaucrat who is purely guided by the need to safeguard the best interests of the country. For instance, during the interview, Minister Biti was quoted saying, “In 2009, I came up with the philosophy that we must eat what we kill. If all Zimbabweans, including civil servants, are killing a rat then you cannot expect to eat an elephant when you are killing a rat.”

This was an erudite but completely hollow statement from the learned minister. His utterances widely run counter to what is apparently obtaining on the ground. For recent media reports have indicated that the minister had recklessly allowed some legislators and ministers to eat what they did not kill.
The minister awfully deviated from his supposed principled stance when he showered some ineligible legislators and ministers with sitting allowances they have not sweated for. If Minister Biti is really pursuing austerity measures, how come he allowed Government to lose over US$1 million after he thoughtlessly paid US$15 000 sitting allowances to Members of Parliament and ministers who were not even distantly entitled to such a windfall of allowances.

Why give Parliamentary sitting allowances to ministers when the Ministerial and Parliamentary Salaries Act unmistakably states that members of the executive are not entitled to any parliamentary sitting allowances? Despite the restraints of the law and his supposed austerity guidelines, the supposedly principled Biti found it wise to blatantly pamper himself and his fellow executive members with some unaccounted monetary advances.

Surely why should Biti allow himself and other lucky ministers and legislators to eat what they did not kill?
In the same vein, questions arise as to how the “kill” is distributed among civil servants. It is puzzling that minister Biti recently doubled salaries of senior civil servants but chose to “freeze” those of their underpaid subordinates. In addition to other newly awarded work related paraphernalia, the senior civil servants were also given brand new vehicles while their subordinates dutifully toil daily in run down pool vehicles.

In the matrix of Biti’s “kill”, does it mean that senior civil servants are entitled to eat more because they have ‘killed’ more? Such a selective application of austerity measures is harmful to the operations of government. This skewed distribution of remuneration does not reflect Biti’s tired mantra of “eating what we kill” because some are apparently eating more than they have killed. During the same interview, minister Biti also mumbled something about compromising and selling the country.

In his words, he said; “There are many ways in which we are compromising our country. My experience in Government is that incompetence, lack of advice and technology; the bad deals that we are negotiating are part of compromising our country. Also not recognising what is in the best interest of our country also constitutes the bundle of what I call selling the country.”

With such a crude definition of selling out, I think the minister is actually one of the undisputed sellouts. It is on record that the minister has frantically been at the forefront of pushing for bad deals with IMF and the World Bank that are potentially detrimental to the country. His unrelenting lobbying for the country to enlist for the IMF’s Highly Indebted Poor Country facility is not only averse to the interest of the resource rich country but is tantamount to mortgaging Zimbabwe to its financial detractors.

Biti’s IMF bound policies reveals his bookish and antiquated approach to economic challenges facing the country. This amateurish approach to economic matters openly compromises Zimbabwe’s revolutionary thrust to indigenise its economy and thus squarely falls into his definition of selling out the country.