No sympathy for ‘incompetent’ Chinamasa but ‘arrogant’ Chombo will be worse
By Jacob Mafume
The man at the centre of economic decline in the Motherland is in the United States attending to meetings meant for treasury officials, with the shock from non-event called a reshuffle in ZANUPF diction, poor Patrick will enjoy the longest and lonely trip back home.
On arrival he will be faced with an obligation to report for duty at a Ministry with no office, no desk and secretary to at least bring him a bottle of water, falling from the highest rung of addressing press conferences with 500 scribes at the World Bank to be a nobody waiting for a Ministerial scale salary.
The People’s Democratic Party however has no sympathy for this chap, he must face the music, we warned him that the reptile infested party had no respect for economics and that he would fail, in fact we even offered him the opportunity to practice law at Tendai Biti Law which offer he chose not to take.
Beyond the offer we wrote blue prints and asked him to adopt our emergency recovery strategy including a self-explanatory 16 point plan we published in 2014, all this fell on deaf ears.
In an endeavour to save our people, President Biti even made attempts to give him personal advice over the phone on things that would take him at least three years to learn; in his self-importance he rejected the advice.
In a mere three years Chinamasa plunged this economy into an unprecedented fiscal and financial mess. He redefined failure.
A strange crisis of a deformed economic situation has developed under Chinamasa, an inflationary situation in the middle of a recession with the highest levels of under accumulation.
How a country with absent aggregate demand develops inflation rates of up to 53% boggles the mind, Chinamasa must be ashamed of himself. His removal from office was long overdue obviously not for the same reasons that ZANUPF has in mind.
He should have been fired the moment he started spending unbudgeted funds. Chinamasa borrowed without parliament approval against the dictates of the Public Debt Management Act.
The Public Debt Management Act prevents government from contracting any debt which will cause total outstanding public and publicly guaranteed debt to exceed 70% of the previous year’s GDP.
The moment Chinamasa attempted to secure a loan to pay World Bank in a criminally irresponsible and treasonous way, he must have been fired.
We in the PDP thought a proper Minister must have sought major fiscal stimulus in the economy, injecting resources needed to resuscitate collapsing industries thereby creating much needed employment amongst the huge pool of the jobless poor in Zimbabwe.
The chap must have been fired the moment he started raiding RTGS balances and NOSTRO accounts as well as the issuing of toxic treasury bills.
There was shocking economic mismanagement since Chinamasa took custody of economy in 2013, which saw the economy contract by 40% in such a short space of time with unemployment reaching 95% is what Chinamasa must have been fired for.
At the same time poverty levels have increased, 75% of Zimbabweans are now living on less than US$1, 25 per day. In this crisis economic recovery entails doing the following basic things:
- Reforming the wage bill which has ballooned owing to the ghost workers who are part of ZANU PF’s election rigging infrastructure.
- Rationalisation and retrenchment of the government expenditure which is dominated by executive travel abroad and financing of ZANUPF activities.
- Crafting a new Mines and minerals act
- Crafting a new diamond policy to deal with transparency, value addition and gem retention proportions.
- Repealing the Indigenisation Act to promote Foreign Direct Investment and Capital in floors.
- Address the cash, liquidity, currency and banking crisis crippling the economy.
- Implementing a holistic agriculture program not the command madness
- Soliciting for a fund meant for Distressed Industries and Marginalized Areas Fund (DIMAF), Zimbabwe Economic Trade Revival Facility (ZETREF) as well as major capital projects including rehabilitating the railway network.
Now the new man’s balance sheet reflects failure, incompetence but more importantly he is a selfish person who will only pursue a personal and narrow agenda of self-aggrandisement.
The dilapidation of urban infrastructure happened under his nose, he is the mastermind of urban land invasions, the king of land barons. This guy must be credited for getting Zimbabwe the status of being the pothole capital of Africa.
While Chinamasa was incompetent and arrogant he at least had some decency, Chombo is both incompetent and arrogant but more concerning he is a shameless master of primitive accumulation, Zimbabweans must be very worried.
The only reason why he finds himself at the helm of Treasury is that he hails from the central kingdom of Zvimba.
We in the PDP would want to restate that ZANUPF ought to be jettisoned; the current window of voter registration must be taken seriously. The current crisis is solely a crisis of leadership and the best people ZANUPF will offer are individuals of Chombo’s ilk.
Jacob Mafume, PDP Spokesperson
