"AfDB President, Akinwumi Adesina, told journalists in Johannesburg this week that while Zimbabwe is making progress, its economy and relations with lenders are still a way from being repaired," reported Bloomberg/ Bulawayo 24.
"Ncube's choice is stark: repay arrears in the hope of winning aid, or pay for essential imports such as the $100 million a month needed to forestall shortages of fuel.
"The signs aren't good. The coal supplier to the main thermal power plant has been placed under administration and one of the biggest gold miners has halted production at three operations because of a foreign-exchange shortage.
"While Mnangagwa's decisions to trim the cabinet and pick a respected finance minister are good signs, Van der Linde isn't optimistic that Ncube can engineer a quick economic turnaround.
"The odds are stacked against him, that's for sure," he said.
Van der Linde is being very kind; the truth is trying to delivery meaningful economic recovery in Zimbabwe, given the country is a pariah state, is an impossible task comparable to emptying the Ocean into the beach!
Let us just take one task Minister Ncube has promised “clear $2 billion in arrears to the AfDB within a year” He will do so if he stopped buying the fuel, costing $100 million a month, and direct every dollar of the $700 million from the 2% tax on all electronic transactions, soaking up all the available foreign currency.
The question is can the country survive a whole year with no fuel and no foreign currency?
Even if everyone could be forced to go into a year long polar bear hibernation so they do not need fuel, food, etc. this will raise a new challenge: where would the Minister get his money to pay the debt if all economic activity has completely seized.
The root cause of Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown is the decades of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption resulting in the criminal waste of the nation’s human and material resources. Ordinarily this problem would have been dealt with by forcing those responsible for the waste to shape up or ship out. Sadly this has not happened because the country’s ruling elite, Zanu PF, are not democratically accountable to the people.
Ever since 18 April 1980, independence day, Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF party have systematically undermined the country’s democratic institution, blatantly disregarded the law and even committed mass murder for the sole purpose of creating the de facto one-party dictatorship we have today. The regime has used its carte blanche dictatorial powers to rig elections and retain its iron grip on power.
Zanu PF has retain political power for all these last 38 years but this has come at a huge cost to the nation; the country was stuck with pariah state not only responsible for the criminal waste of resources but was scaring away all would-be investors. No one would want to invest in a country that is rotten to the core making it economically wasteful, political unstable and lawless.
When President Mnangagwa got into power a year ago, following the ouster of the Zanu PF dictator Robert Mugabe in last November’s coup, he promised to transform the country. The dictatorship was to be replaced with a “new Zimbabwe, new dispensation” and crowned by the promise holding of free, fair and credible elections.
The spirit was willing but the call of the wild, the primeval desire to hang on to the dictatorial powers to rig elections, was too strong for Mnangagwa to resist. After all he was Mugabe’s chief enforcer and beneficiary of the same dictatorial powers he was going to discard if he kept his promise to hold free and fair elections.
By rigging the 30 July 2018 elections President Mnangagwa confirmed to the world that Zimbabwe was still a pariah state ruled by the same corrupt, incompetent and vote rigging thugs of the Mugabe years. The criminal waste of the nation’s resources has continued as before the coup and the investors too shied away.
Solving Zimbabwe’s economic mess is not an impossible task, per se, what makes it impossible is trying to do it in the context of a pariah state with all the gross mismanagement, rampant corruption and lawlessness that comes with dictatorial rule! In other words, it is impossible to have meaningful economic recovery as long as Zimbabwe remains a pariah state! IMPOSSIBLE!
The greatest delusion of last November's coup was belief that whatever was wrong in our country had been completely cleansed by the coup. The hundreds of thousands of ordinary people came out on to the street in supported of the coup and then to celebrate what they considered a great day of liberation when Mugabe finally signed the resignation letter. The truth is even the coup leaders themselves believed the coup had transformed Zimbabwe from a dictatorship to a health democracy, a "new dispensation.
ReplyDeleteWithin weeks of the coup the country's new President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, was calling out that "Zimbabwe was open for business!" convinced the transformation was at least irreversible if not complete.
The tragic reality was that the coup only remove one corrupt and incompetent tyrant and a few others around him and replace him with yet another corrupt and incompetent tyrant. Mnangagwa, just like Mugabe, had an unshakable belief in his own ability; the very cursed thing that had dragged the nation into the hell-on-earth the nation was desperate to escape from.
Of course, Mnangagwa is nothing more than Mugabe mark 2; an arrogant Mr-Know-It-All, who knows absolutely nothing, not even the a, b, c and d, the Genesis of knowledge. The village idiot had clearly failed to learn the most basic and obvious lesson to be learned from the 37 disastrous years of Mugabe's rule - which is tyrant claim to know everything and yet know nothing. If Mnangagwa had learned that basic lesson then he would have never assumed the same arrogant and tyrannical airs of Mugabe.
Zimbabwe is in this economic and political mess today because the country, under Mugabe, was pariah state ruled by corrupt, incompetent and murderous thugs. Zimbabwe is still a pariah state or be it under a new tyrant. Anyone who expects the country to be free and prosper is naive and gullible.
Mnangagwa can claim that Zimbabwe is a new democratic dispensation, open for business and that the recent elections were free, fair and credible. What really matters is the reality: Zimbabwe is still a pariah state rule by the same corrupt, incompetent, vote rigging and murderous thugs of Mugabe days. The nation will never test freedom, justice and economic prosperity until the people finally do something to replace the dictatorship with a healthy and functional democracy.