Fears of Zimbabwe implosion grow

There are growing fears that Zimbabwe's battered economy, which has seen State revenues continuing to dip and the government failing to pay its bloated civil service, is headed for an imminent implosion.

The warning comes as the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) recently announced that it had once again missed its collections target for the first quarter of 2016.

"We are heading for a grinding halt because government continues to accumulate salary arrears.

"We will witness an implosion very soon and government will be paralysed. Even Mugabe won't be able to grab anything for his endless trips abroad," former Finance minister in the inclusive government, Tendai Biti, told the Daily News yesterday.

"What is needed is an inclusive transitional mechanism to soft-land the crisis and I am glad that Zimbabweans and all progressive movements, including Morgan Tsvangirai are of the same thinking.

"What we now need is a common platform of ideas. It really is time for thought leadership. If that doesn't happen, we will soon be eating one another because there will be nothing left to feed us.

"The greatest liability that this country has is having a 92-year-old as president, who cares about nothing else but his own survival, a president who now has difficulties identifying the toilet," the tough-talking leader of the People's Democratic Party (PDP) added.

His comments also come as the government had, for the second successive month, failed to pay the army on time and had also remained silent about the July pay dates for the rest of the civil service.

"Failure to pay civil servants reflects on the personal inadequacies of Patrick Chinamasa. He has failed in his personal capacity because it is the personal responsibility of a Finance minister to ensure that all government employees are paid.

"I would not sleep before making sure that civil servants' salaries were there when I was minister, so Chinamasa must just do what all decent people the world over do in circumstances of such glaring failure," Biti said.

Zimbabwe Teachers Association (Zimta) president, Richard Gundani, said at the weekend that the delay by the government to state their position on the pending salaries was "causing a lot of anxiety" among civil servants.

"There is clearly a lot of anxiety and worry out there. When we held our meeting with government, they could not reveal pay dates but said they would announce them late last week or early this week, so we are still waiting to see when they will announce them.

"But as it is, the government has not finished paying last month's money for pensioners, which was expected to have been paid on the 19th. Clearly, therefore, there is worry and it would help if the government effectively and timeously made the announcement," Gundani said.

Veteran economist John Robertson told the Daily News yesterday that the government was "doomed" if it did not make radical policy changes, especially with regards to land ownership.

"Government will not be able to raise funds to pay salaries if the country's productive capacity remains low. Only policy changes will improve the situation.

"Government needs to allow farmers to produce by making sure that it gives back collateral value to the land, so that farmers can borrow from banks and when that happens factories will be revived and there will be revenue increases. It's absolutely that simple," he said.

Academic and publisher, Ibbo Mandaza, said the current waves of protests against Mugabe were symptomatic of "a country in deep crisis".

"It is an expression of the crisis that we are faced with as a country and it needs an urgent solution.

"There is need for national dialogue to extricate the country from the challenges we are facing," he said, adding that the ban on basic imports was "as misguided as it was misconceived as it affects millions of people in the informal sector, hence the ongoing civil unrest".