It is in the state’s interest to capture those rents as you rightly point out, but corruption always follows when it does. The question you raise on how to curb the corruption is, therefore, valid.
The reputed size of the diamond find requires resources that the Zimbabwean government alone may not possess. Resource-wise at the moment the government is out-gunned by global crime syndicates which are believed to bring in, collectively, US$2 trillion per year.
According to a recent article in the HBR, these monsters such as the Russian Business Network, South America’s Superzonda, the world-wide Shadow Crew, have become especially adept at expropriating legitimate business tactics to create highly efficient global teams and set new best practices in adaptive strategy, supply chain management, the use of incentives, global collaboration and other disciplines.
Quite clearly our under-funded and technologically poorly-equipped security machinery will be no match for them. The danger, as you point out, is that government and its security establishment may wholly be hijacked by these global syndicates.
To leverage our resources, by learning from these syndicates, the Commander in Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, President Robert Mugabe should move quickly for a “coalition of the willing”, and seek to collaborate with the World Bank and intelligence organisations from Israel, India, China, the USA, the UK and Russia at a formal level.
This will reduce legal obstacles for our law enforcement officials. We need all the help we can get to preserve the integrity of the nation state, and to keep it out of the hands of crime syndicates.
Recent events involving the Russian and the Israeli, not to mention General Solomon Mujuru’s gruesome death, are warnings that we may in fact be running out of time.
The syndicates, no doubt, hope that one of their own will make it to State House. They may already have Cabinet representation.Painona
