By Lance Guma
“Don’t throw stones when you live in a glass house” might be an overused clique but it will have stung home last week for former Finance Minister and expelled MDC-T Secretary General Tendai Biti and his MDC Renewal Team ally, Lobengula MP Samuel Sipepa Nkomo.
The two have not missed any chance to talk about what they see as MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s womanizing past. Biti has even started calling Tsvangirai “Gumbura” after convicted rapist Pastor Robert Martin Gumbura who was sentenced to an effective 40-year-jail term.
After months of what he hoped would be a dignified silence, Tsvangirai decided to hit back last week during an address to party supporters in Bulawayo.
“I said if you continue I will tell you that you (Sipepa Nkomo) took someone’s wife when you are an elder in church. I will also tell you that you (Tendai Biti) left Harare saying you were going to Nyanga but later got involved in an accident in Chegutu while in the company of a girlfriend,” Tsvangirai said.
Mugabe married his small house
Another to learn the “Don’t throw stones when you live in a glass house” lesson last week is our own President, First Secretary of Zanu PF, Head of State and Government, the Commander in Sleep of the armed but starving forces and Chancellor of all the struggling Universities, Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
Mugabe who married his own “small house” urged people to be morally upright, saying he felt pity for Tsvangirai who is always in the news for flirtations with various women. On Thursday the 90 year old was addressing mourners gathered at the National Heroes Acre for the burial of Major-General Eliah Bandama.
Tsvangirai’s spokesman Luke Tamborinyoka was however having none of this codswallop and hit back saying, “Whatever President Tsvangirai did, he was a widower. He is now happily married to his wife, Elizabeth. As for President Mugabe, he has no right to lecture anyone on morals.
“This is a man who, as President of the country, had a child with his secretary while his wife, Sally, was dying of a kidney ailment. His eldest daughter, Bona, is a child he had with his private secretary while his wife was terminally ill.”
Millionaire Billy Rautenbach refuses to pay for $15 hair cut
My sources in Harare tell me Zanu PF’s golden child businessman Billy Rautenbach sent his bodyguards to a salon at Sam Levy’s village in Borrowdale, Harare to announce that he was on his way for a hair cut.
So Rautenbach arrives, gets his haircut and then leaves without paying. He mumbles something about his PA coming to pay later and this I’m told never happened. Meanwhile I’m also told the guy owes numerous suppliers millions of dollars for work done on his Chisumbanje ethanol project. Makes you wonder if the guy can’t even pay $15 for his haircut what about those he owes millions?
Last week fuming Chisumbanje villagers threatened “war” on the ethanol plant investor whom they accuse of taking their land without compensation. The villagers say they have lost land, livestock and livelihoods as a result of the plant, while others say they have faced violence and intimidation.
Rautenbach has a very controversial past. In 2008 both the European Union and the United States added him to a list of officials and companies under targeted sanctions for allegedly aiding the regime under Mugabe. In return for this financial support he was given lucrative mining and land deals.
In 2002 the UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, described Rautenbach as a man “whose personal and professional integrity is doubtful.” But for Mugabe’s anti-white regime, Rautenbach remains a protected species.
What sanctions? Belgium top buyer of Zimbabwean tobacco
For years Zanu PF has been recycling the excuse that the Zimbabwean economy has collapsed because of Western sponsored sanctions. You can imagine my surprise at reports that Belgium is now the top buyer of Zimbabwean tobacco. Belgium purchased 10,8 million kg of our tobacco worth $50,5 million.
According to figures from the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Board, Belgium is the top buyer followed by (2) United Arab Emirates (3) South Africa and then (4) China. I do not think this news and these figures will get any prominence in the state owned but Zanu PF controlled media.
Even Mugabe’s current Information Minister Jonathan Moyo admitted sanctions were just mere propaganda. Off course Moyo’s is not saying this now that he has joined the feeding trough but I will use his own quotes when he was out in the wilderness having been fired from Zanu PF for plotting the ‘Tsholotsho Coup’.
Moyo in his own words said, “despite spirited attempts to attribute the present economic turmoil to the so-called illegal sanctions, all available indications suggest that the sanctions issue is indeed nothing but propaganda. That is why there is no response to it either in the fiscal or monetary policy.
“Yet Mugabe and Murerwa (Finance Minister at the time) understand that the sanctions talk is pure Zanu PF propaganda for mobilising political support from the masses by seeking to make them believe that their suffering is due to economic sanctions imposed by imperialist foreigners and not a result of the failure of their government.”
