“I want to thank you all for your prayers. Those prayers made me to survive,” a reinvigorated VP Chiwenga told his audience.
“Since I started falling sick in October last year, there were not many who thought I would heal completely. There were not many who thought I would be standing before you like this.
“The sickness is called idiopathic oesophageal stricture. It means that you cannot take in food and also you cannot even vomit. It involves blocking of the oesophagus and I spent a lot of time in the intensive care unit.”
VP Chiwenga thanked President Emmerson Mnangagwa for facilitating his treatment in China.
Yes, VP Chiwenga, you must thank President Mnangagwa and your fellow Joint Operation Command, junta behind the Zanu PF dictatorship, members who staged the November 2017 coup and secured you lot’s strangle hold on power and your position as a member of the country’s exclusive ruling elite. Whilst members of the ruling elite have continued to enjoy five-star health care service the ordinary Zimbabweans have no access to even the most basic health care service.
It is no secret that the country’s health care, same as education and all the other basic services, had all but collapsed years ago due to decades of poor funding. The collapsing local health care did not bother the ruling elite because they preferred to shop for their health care needs up market as with everything else; money was not a problem for them.
The ruling elite’s extravagance knew no limits, it normal for them to travel half way round the world for route health care checks. In 2012 the President Robert Mugabe traveled to Singapore eight times for routine eye test, each trip costed US$3 million plus. A few years later his daughter, Bona, too travelled to the Far East for the birth of his grand son, the whole palaver costed US$ 10 million, at least! All this money was public money taken away from the country’s own health care services and thus accelerated the collapse of local health service.
VP Chiwenga attended last Tuesday’s cabinet meeting and must have learnt of the cabinet’s decision to summarily sacked doctors for daring to demand a living wage and not the pittance US$40 per month. Indeed, it was VP Chiwenga who fired the nurses early this year for demanding a living wage.
The sacking of the doctors was just the coup de grace to the health care service; it is now all but dead.
With no doctors, no nurses, no working equipment, no medicine, no water, no electricity, no food, no fuel, etc., etc. it is no surprise that the death toll in Zimbabwe soaring up. Zanu PF committed mass murders in the Gukurahundi massacre, the regime is guilty of yet another massacre, a “soft genocide” as some people are calling it. Zimbabweans are dying like flies of all manner of easily treatable diseases and ailments including malaria, high blood pressure, etc.
40 years of this corrupt, incompetent and tyrannical Zanu PF rule has turned the clock back 300 years plus for the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans dying of poverty, hunger, disease and dumb anguish. The whole nation is being sacrificed to feed the insatiable greed for power and wealth of the ruling elite whose arrogant indifference to the suffering and deaths of others is insufferable.
“We are the most educated country in Africa, but I do not understand what has become of the young people . . . Every day, they want to make rich pickings, with little sweat,” said VP Chiwenga of the striking doctors.
“Where is that spirit coming from?
“Let us put the interests of our country first and have a unity of purpose. That is the Zimbabwe we want.”
A Zimbabwe in which the local public health care services is all but dead and hundreds of thousands are suffering and hundred are dying everyday of curable diseases is NOT the Zimbabwe we, the ordinary people, want.
Zanu PF blatantly rigged last year’s elections, just as it has done repeatedly for the last 38 years, and thus denied us, the ordinary people, a meaningful say in the governance of the country, a meaningful say in what we want.
The Zanu PF dictatorship has brought heartbreaking suffering and deaths to millions of Zimbabweans. The economic situation in Zimbabwe is unsustainable and must be dismantled as a matter of urgency.
This Zanu PF regime is illegitimate and must step down to allowed the nation the political time and space to finally implement the democratic reforms necessarily for free, fair and credible elections.
The cup is full and overflowing; enough is enough. Zimbabwe needs meaningful political change and to end the tragic human suffering brought about by the 40 years of corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF rule.
SWAPO wins Namibian election amid corruption scandal
ReplyDeleteMany countries have ignored the problem of rigged elections and good governance in the hope they can, somehow still have competent and accountable government. This is just the classical case of having one’s cake and eat it too! The real tragedy here is that there are nations out there still pursuing this futile course of action, even after decades of failure and the country sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss. Zimbabwe is one such country.
@ Obey Sithole
ReplyDelete“The ZANU-PF led government has for long come to terms with the reality that they are unpopular and too weak to convince the nation hence they have mastered the regrettable art of coercion.”
I have heard this nonsense once too often and cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.
If MDC is as popular as you lot suggest then why has the party failed to win elections? Don’t bother telling me that Zanu PF rigs elections because that beggars the question: why has MDC insisted in contesting elections knowing the election are flawed and illegal?
The EU, the Americans, Canadians, the Commonwealth and everyone else with any democratic credential condemned last year’s elections for lack of “transparency, traceability and verifiability”, according to the EU report. ZEC failed to produce something as basic as a verified voters’ roll; for Pete’s sake!
MDC not only participated in the elections thus giving the process the modicum of credibility but endorse the result as free, fair and credible except the presidential result. Chamisa has refused to accept Mnangagwa as the winner insisting that he should be declared the winner although he too, just like ZEC, has failed to produce the documents so people can trace and verified where he got his votes from.
Of course, the whole election was a farce and Chamisa is only cherry picking! He has failed to get anyone in the international community to support his claim that he won the elections because no one with any brain would support such a foolish notion.
As much as the rest of the world would like to help end this Zanu PF dictatorship, there is very little anyone can do to help until we, Zimbabweans, show the world that we are serious about wanting to end the dictatorship. A nation that does not know that something as basic a verified voters’ roll is a must have for free, fair and credible, is clearly not yet ready for free, fair and credible elections!
“What happened has no precedence, save perhaps in banana republics. And the fact that it happened the way it did, has certified Zimbabwe as a banana republic. You cannot have the senior vice-president, who had been away critically ill and was receiving treatment in China for some five months, returning on a special Chinese plane to be received by China’s deputy ambassador in Harare, who was head of the welcoming party with no government or ruling party officials. That’s unheard of. The inescapable impression, if not reality, is that China was demonstrating its muscles and exposing Zimbabwe as a Chinese puppet,” said Jonathan Moyo.
ReplyDelete“While it is tempting to conclude that the Chinese did not give the Zimbabwean government flight arrival details, which is not sustainable because Chiwenga’s Zimbabwean security was there in numbers, this clearly means that things have fallen apart. There’s now a shell of a government with no centre.”
China has had Zanu PF in its deep pockets, ever since the day Mugabe blamed the IMF, WB and other western institutions for Zimbabwe's economic collapse in the late 1990s. The truth is Zimbabwe could not repay its mountain of debt with the West and picked the fight and used it as the smokescreen; it wanted the world to believe Zimbabwe had decided NOT to repay its debt and not that it COULD not because it was stone broke. Mugabe pursued his "Look East!" policy landing him in China's sphere of influence but with nowhere else to go. The Chinese have cashed on that weakness big time!
Of course, the Chinese have played a major role in Zimbabwe politics it is no exaggeration to say Zimbabwe is a Chinese banana republic!
“What happened has no precedence, save perhaps in banana republics. And the fact that it happened the way it did, has certified Zimbabwe as a banana republic. You cannot have the senior vice-president, who had been away critically ill and was receiving treatment in China for some five months, returning on a special Chinese plane to be received by China’s deputy ambassador in Harare, who was head of the welcoming party with no government or ruling party officials. That’s unheard of. The inescapable impression, if not reality, is that China was demonstrating its muscles and exposing Zimbabwe as a Chinese puppet,” said Jonathan Moyo.
ReplyDelete“While it is tempting to conclude that the Chinese did not give the Zimbabwean government flight arrival details, which is not sustainable because Chiwenga’s Zimbabwean security was there in numbers, this clearly means that things have fallen apart. There’s now a shell of a government with no centre.”
China has had Zanu PF in its deep pockets, ever since the day Mugabe blamed the IMF, WB and other western institutions for Zimbabwe's economic collapse in the late 1990s. The truth is Zimbabwe could not repay its mountain of debt with the West and picked the fight and used it as the smokescreen; it wanted the world to believe Zimbabwe had decided NOT to repay its debt and not that it COULD not because it was stone broke. Mugabe pursued his "Look East!" policy landing him in China's sphere of influence but with nowhere else to go. The Chinese have cashed on that weakness big time!
Of course, the Chinese have played a major role in Zimbabwe politics it is no exaggeration to say Zimbabwe is a Chinese banana republic!
Whilst he is pleased for getting the specialist treatment that save his life he has no human sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans are are suffering and hundreds are dying every day from the simplest of ailments all because the local health save has completely closed for lack of doctors, nurses, basic equipment, no medicine, no electricity, no water, etc. The country's economy is in total meltdown after 39 years of corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF misrule and VP Chiwenga is blind to it all.
ReplyDelete@ Samas
ReplyDeleteIt is very sad indeed that Zimbabweans have failed to take the task of holding their leaders to democratic account with the seriousness the matter demands. Zimbabwe's local health care services has completely collapse starved of fund wasted in sending the ruling elite outside the country for even the most routine health checks, in building palatial mansion for, buying 45 gold watches for individuals like Chiwenga, etc.
Nations get the government they deserve, we certainly deserve this corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship complete with its entourage of equally corrupt and incompetent opposition parties.