corruptionwatch:WITH TAWANDA MAJONI
Austerity measures are just one of those trademark optics from the Mnangagwa administration designed to give the impression that good things are coming when, in reality, very bad things are happening.
They are part of the administration’s political gardening. A crude way of doing business whereby you give the impression that you are delivering on your talk, when you are just cheating. Pretty like getting into the garden and coming back into the house with a big sweat down your neck and mud on the overalls when, in fact, you have been playing with the dogs.
A bit of history on this. After the 2018 general elections, President Emmerson Mnangagwa plucked Mthuli Ncube from self-imposed exile and made him Finance minister. In his first budget, he talked of austerity for prosperity like he was the first person to craft that phrase. That budget was part of his puffy Transitional Stabilisation Programme (TSP).
The thinking was, if you cut down on public expenditure, you would start eating what you grew or hunted. He then went straight into the fake garden and announced a 5% cut on the president’s and senior government officials’ salaries. The austerity measures also included a drastic cut on the civil service wage bill by laying off thousands of already poorly paid people. For a measure, government would also reduce spending on socio-economic projects mainly meant to benefit the poor. Not that much was going there in the first place.
Well, it wasn’t going to be a clever idea in the first place sending Ncube to preach austerity. That’s similar to making Adolf Hitler an apostle of racial humility. At one time, Ncube got into trouble for his lack of probity and austerity. He was the principal shareholder in Barbican Holdings, a company that ran Barbican Bank. You see, Barbican Bank was set up in 2003 and, within a year, it had collapsed and Ncube couldn’t be seen for dust.
He fled Zimbabwe because the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was snorting hard down his neck. Barbican Bank had been abusing depositors’ money, was trading on the forex black market and doing all sorts of other nasty things. The bank’s directors were getting filthy rich very fast. That’s not austerity. It’s the opposite of that, and criminality too. So it’s not clear what Ncube did or gave to Mnangagwa to drag him from foreign lands and make him our chief accountant after last year’s elections.
What followed was predictable. The Mnangagwa administration assumed it could fool the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by talking austerity in its budget and TSP. And when it noticed that the IMF wasn’t going to play ball too early, it did what successive Zanu PF government have always done. Mind your business and never care about the rest. Austerity collapsed.
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That’s not a lie. These chaps still claim that they are doing austerity. The truth, though, is that the generality of the citizenry has been left to do austerity on its own while the elite is living large and high. Let’s start with the following case that is not yet known by most people out there. A Zimbabwean delegation that was led by Mnangagwa travelled for the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) in late August.
The Foreign Affairs and International Trade minister, SB Moyo, split from the group and went to Dubai first and joined the rest of the team later. God knows what he went to Dubai for. We were never told what official business the minister would have or had there. Then, on his way to Tokyo, Japan, he chartered a plane. It was only him and some three aides in a flight that could accommodate a whole village from Mberengwa where he comes from. It was going to be hugely cheaper if had he taken a connecting flight, but SB didn’t do that. That’s crazy extravagance, the direct opposite of austerity.
Mnangagwa was in the know. Ncube too. But then, who is going to be surprised by that? The president, by habit, hires unbelievably expensive jets — from Dubai too. You will remember the Airbus A318-100 that Mnangagwa, so we learnt, hired from good Dubai and used to fly around in at a cost of US$12 000 an hour. A cool US$288 000 a day. That means US$2 million in a week. Now, if you can keep that kind of money on you and decide to pay doctors and teachers the salaries they deserve, who would bother to abduct a hapless doctor protesting for better working conditions and soil the image of the Mnangagwa administration in the process?
The Dubai coincidence stinks far and wide. And it brings out all sorts of naughty theories. What if the planes they are chartering are not exactly owned by Constellation Aviation Services or some such company? What if these companies are being used as fronts? What if ED, in fact, owns the airbus but can’t tell the world that? But then, he would have to be filthy rich—considering that his salary was cut by 5%—to be able to own such a private jet. The rest of us who are already being austere, not out of choice, wouldn’t like a president so rich and flaunting. Because we would, among other things, get busy and dizzy wondering where he is taking the money from.
Forget it, the Mnangagwa administration severely lacks the capacity for austerity. This is the political establishment that overblew the budget by close to US$4 billion in 2018 alone. It now wants the nation to forget about that wastage by having Parliament to sanitise it through a financial adjustment bill. The Office of the President and Cabinet was among the culprits. That’s not flattering on the president. The ruling elite is saying, “This is our thing”, and doesn’t care a whisper about how it spends money because it knows that what most people will do is to complain and then go home to sleep. That’s called impunity.
This is the same administration that is giving billions of dollars to a useless and thieving farming project called command agriculture. We know what’s happening there. Cronies of the powerful are running the show and stealing millions. Yet the government keeps pumping out money to the project with no proof of delivering. There is brazen cheating in that too. Because, you see, they don’t include these extravagant expenditure in the national budget but sneak them in through the backdoor. Why? Those sneaky projects give them an opportunity to loot and squander.
The list is long, of course. The next time you hear Ncube talk about austerity measures, quietly pick a huge egg, hide it in your hand and nicely walk up to the minister. The least you can do is to leave him with egg in the face.
l Tawanda Majoni is the national coordinator at Information for Development Trust (IDT) and can be contacted on [email protected].
