dyton mupawaenda
You Can’t Make This Up!
IN the grand annals of Zimbabwean get-rich-quick schemes, this week’s entry from Mutare will go down in history.
Not for its daring, nor its scale, but for its spectacularly bad return on investment.
Enter Liberty Chagwiza, the chap who has just traded 10 years of his life for four metres of copper cable worth about US$40.
Let us do the math.
That works out to roughly US$4 per year of freedom.
Even the most predatory loan shark in Sakubva would blush at that extortionate interest rate.
Well, the 25-year-old Chagwiza was spotted by a sharp-eyed City of Mutare employee near the Sakubva roundabout a fortnight ago.
The scene, as described, was less “Mission: Impossible” and more “Mission: Incredibly Foolish”.
There was no cunningly planned heist under the cover of darkness. It was 4pm on a Tuesday. Broad daylight. Near a busy roundabout. With a municipal worker watching.
To be fair, the authorities have been crystal clear: Messing with electricity infrastructure is a serious offence.
It plunges suburbs into darkness, costs cash-strapped councils a fortune and generally makes life miserable.
But there is something almost poetic about the sheer scale of this particular enterprise.
We are not talking about a sophisticated syndicate making off with a truckload of valuable metal.
We are talking about four metres — enough cable to maybe rewire a small kitchen.
This was just a one-man criminal enterprise that spectacularly collapsed.
Crime, as they say, does not pay.
But in Liberty’s case, it did not just refuse to pay; it presented him with a bill for a decade of his life, payable in hard time.
So, for transforming a US$40 scrap metal run into a 10-year sentence and for proving that you do not need a master plan to become a master criminal, just a pair of wire cutters and absolutely terrible timing, Liberty Chagwiza is our Mampara of the week.
Tinaye Agere
Online Reporter