The outrageous and gruesome nature of the murder of self-exiled Saudi journalist and American resident Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey on October 2, 2018 has left many people around the world in shock and suffering from some form of undiagnosed collective trauma. Personally, it has made me interrogate the darkness that resides in the human condition and the enormous capacity for ordinary folk, people like your next-door neighbour for example, or your colleague at work, husbands, fathers and brothers alike, to be wicked and vile in ways that are unutterable.
The Sunday Maverick with GLORIA NDORO-MKOMBACHOTO
People are killed in more ways than one, every day, around the world. So the premeditated assassination of Khashoggi should not have ordinarily come as a surprise given the other unlawful activities of the Saudi regime — actions such as the war crimes in Yemen, spike in executions, routine torture in custody, amputations as punishment, the detention of the Lebanese Prime minister and so on.
Despite Khashoggi’s well connectedness within the journalistic power elite of the free world, it is the nature of Khashoggi’s death that has touched people on a personal and emotional level. Khashoggi’s body was dismembered, his head and fingers cut off. Unconfirmed rumours have indicated that the dismemberment as part of torture, could have started while he was still alive. A top Saudi doctor of forensics was brought along by the assassins for the dissection and disposal of the body.
Who does that? Ruthless men who operate with impunity in broad daylight and under the cover of darkness executing orders for their masters, who in turn pay them handsomely.
These brutal and ruthless men are sons, fathers, husbands and brothers in families. These men have children, wives, friends and you and I could very well be their friend. Zimbabwe has got its fair share of these merciless and hard-hearted men. Whether it is the economy or people they are raping, the outcome is the same — eventually death follows, a slow and cruel demise.
The current shortage of medications in Zimbabwe — a torturous slow death Who is going to count the bodies when people are dying quietly in their homes? Assassins who kill and dismember are no different to those who maim and leave you to endure a slow and painful death through lack of medication. How has Zimbabwe got to a place where there is shortage of medications countrywide? How did it get to this new low? The economic saboteurs who are, in fact, economic assassins, in collaboration with their mates within the power elite and decision-makers in strategic positions in state institutions having been raping Zimbabwe systematically over the last three decades. They are members of the human race, but they are awful, dreadful and appalling beings. They will stop at nothing until they are the last ones on sale at the auction floor. For a coin of silver, they will eventually sell themselves.
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In the maximisation of supernormal profits, economic assassins work with whoever is willing to sell their soul to Lucifer and that includes some external multilateral funding agencies. In the original, his first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit , former economic hit man John Perkins, shared “how he and others he and others cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Then he reveals how the deadly economic hit man (EHM) cancer he helped create has spread far more widely and deeply than ever in the US and everywhere else”.
In his latest book, The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkins bares it all:
“I’m haunted every day by what I did as an economic hit man (EHM). I’m haunted by the lies I told back then about the World Bank. I’m haunted by the ways in which that bank, its sister organisations, and I empowered US corporations to spread their cancerous tentacles across the planet. I’m haunted by the payoffs to the leaders of poor countries, the blackmail, and the threats that if they resisted, if they refused to accept loans that would enslave their countries in debt, the CIA’s jackals would overthrow or assassinate them.
I wake up sometimes to the horrifying images of heads of state, friends of mine, who died violent deaths because they refused to betray their people. Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, I try to scrub the blood from my hands. But the blood is merely a symptom. The treacherous cancer beneath the surface, which was revealed in the original Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, has metastasised. It has spread from the economically developing countries to the United States and the rest of the world; it attacks the very foundations of democracy and the planet’s life-support systems.”
Zimbabweans are by themselves, all alone No one is going to come and save Zimbabwe because the economic assassins’ cancer has spread worldwide. It is now the new way of transacting with economic gangs operating as if they are the oligopolistic mafia. The world has changed. It is no longer what it was, say, just two decades ago. Economic hitmen are the shock troops of what Perkins calls the “corporatocracy, a vast network of corporations, banks, colluding governments, and the rich and powerful people tied to them. If the EHMs can’t maintain the corrupt status quo through non-violent coercion, the (murderous) jackal assassins swoop in”. Every country is grappling with its own fair share of these murderous assassins. As Perkins advises, the cancer has “become the dominant system of business, government, and society (worldwide) today”.
The shortage of basic food items is scandalous, to say the least How is it possible that in a country where there is land in abundance and a citizenry that is generally competent in agriculture, Zimbabwe is importing basic foodstuffs like peanut butter, flour, grains and so on? Nature gave us trees and bees. Worldwide, honey is produced by bees whilst the owner of the beehives is busy with other business. And yet Zimbabwe is importing honey. Zimbabwe has been importing honey from countries like Zambia and Malawi for the longest as if it does not possess abundant bee colonies of its own.
Now the prime markets are being sold to the Chinese Without Mbare, the oldest township in Zimbabwe, there is no Harare. Mbare has always been the oasis of trading in Zimbabwe. Mbare is the hub of free trade and enterprise where willing buyers and willing sellers transact through bargaining. Mupedzanhamo near Matapi Flats is like a business sanctuary, an enterprise wellspring of vendors and vendees. It is a prime spot for informal sector business in Zimbabwe and yet someone or some people of the economic assassin persuasion, in some state organisation, saw it fit to sell a national asset, a national heritage and an heirloom, to the Chinese. I have said this before and will repeat it here and now: If there is going to be a third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe, its origins would have been motivated by the removal of the Chinese in Zimbabwe because of their exploitative nature. They are extractors of Zimbabwean natural resources and wealth. They have a sense of entitlement and insist on wanting to compete head-on with Zimbabweans in sectors where Zimbabweans have prime advantage. The Chinese do not set up banks and many of them insist on cash because they do not bank their turnover. They do not build roads, schools and infrastructure wherever they are transacting. They do not support local businesses, instead choosing to bring everything, including their daily dietary requirements, from China. I am still perplexed as to why they remain the investment partner of choice by the Zimbabwean authorities.
Acton’s Law and Murphy’s Law rife in Zimbabwe Economic assassins are senseless, they do not have boundaries, do not value national histories nor spaces of national significance. Economic assassins are self-seeking, greedy, acquisitive and mercenary in nature. Thoughtless and uninformed decisions made by greedy and corrupt officials can be undone when there is commitment and goodwill from incorruptible decision-makers. The wholesale disposal of Zimbabwean prime spots to the Chinese ought to be reversed and all pending deals put on ice. Acton’s Law and the aggravating world of Murphy’s Law are rife in present-day Zimbabwe. This is because when bad people rule, things fall apart. The gruesome murder of Khashoggi is a metaphor for what the citizens of Zimbabwe are currently enduring. Like Khashoggi, the Zimbabwean economy has been assassinated and dismembered. It is not yet water under the bridge for it seems like the citizens play dead every time there is an economic attack, continuing to endure what appears to be multiple attacks and subsequent deaths at the hands of economic assassins. Zimbabwe is a “dead economy”. Zimbabweans require a “living economy” in order for its citizens to be masters and mistresses of their own destiny. The time is now for progressive citizens to create that “living economy” outside the sphere of the state.
l Gloria Ndoro-Mkombachoto is an entrepreneur and regional enterprise development consultant. Her experience spans a period of over 25 years. She can be contacted at [email protected]
