Few home truths about Tendai Biti

IF you have been following the news long enough, and in recent weeks, you may have noted a particular trend in which Tendai Biti and his People's Democratic Party have been posturing as the biggest economic minds in the country.

The online news website, Newzimbabwe.com has been generous with Biti.

And true to fashion, Biti has grabbed the opportunity with both hands - and he appears to be enjoying it eternally.

Which by the way, gives him the room to prance about - or we can imagine - pontificating, frothing on the corners of the mouth and beating his haughty chest.

Can it come any better for a grandiloquent, albeit deluded individual like Biti?

Let us demonstrate.

A fortnight ago, the site screamed that Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa was a thief who ought to be jailed.

That came from Biti who accused the Government of misusing depositor's funds hence, in his view, the present cash shortages.

He then, typically and very important for this piece, hankered after his own days as Finance Minister and how he found an unlikely partnership in then Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor Gideon Gono.

He said: "It's because we managed the economy well; we did not steal people's money which was in the banks. This (bank crisis) is a direct result of Chinamasa's theft. He should be at Chikurubi."

According to the report, he said banks queues will not disappear under zanu-pf rule.

"They will never go away. It's impossible because zanu-pf cannot monetise the huge hole that they have created. In fact, the bank queues are going to increase.

"Now they are stealing exporters' money including the money that is due to tobacco farmers so the gap is going to be bigger and bigger."

Now, there are a couple of interesting points flowing from this. And we do not want to make imputations that may otherwise land us in trouble.

So, we will pass Biti's excellent working relationship with Gono and their wonderful successes at the helm of fiscal and monetary ladders.

We are drawn to his unremitting attack on Chinamasa which, for all that can see, goes beyond professional commentary.

Interestingly, his are the very imputations that one would ordinarily shy away from when dealing with lawyers.

We are sure he sure had in mind a defence when called, in his imagination, to make good of such defamatory statements.

That is how clever Biti thinks he is. But who can give him the pleasure of wrestling in the mud?

It brings us to the necessary conclusion that this is just political banter by a proud, but virtually hopeless politician.

Nobody can take Biti seriously as a political quantity.

And it will be useful to point out here and now that we do not believe that Mr Tendai Biti would make a good Finance Minister anywhere in the world.

He is just a lawyer, if a preponderate one.

His stint at Treasury and whatever happened there were just a function of a political dispensation he was lucky to be part of.

And we know that there were many factors that made the so called inclusive Government.

And that chiefly includes interference or lack of certain outside powers that at the material time were too eager to move and shake things.

We all know for a fact how Western countries, especially, were all too willing to help ministries held by the opposition so that it would project better on the electorate.

Even then we also know for a fact that the Western powers were not entirely open.

Who can forget that letter Biti himself wrote to the US one angry December day as he failed against the US' sanctions of diamond companies which Biti felt keenly as Finance Minister, projecting as he did to get a cool $600 million to fund the fiscus?

We do not have a short memory.

And that incident, which we hope Biti remembers well to this day, is emblematic of the obstructionist and hostile stance that the West adopted towards Zimbabwe all within the spirit and matrix of seeking regime change in the Southern African country.

And save for the brief interlude of the so-called GNU which Biti was part of as the Finince Minister, the West has been hostile and have little interest in seeing the economy of Zimbabwe improve.

They seek the opposite.

And that is enough to tell us that when the GNU ended, the West reverted to its old worst that had been tempered by the presence in government of their lackeys, including Biti.

There is nothing exceptional about Biti.

It is like attributing the same improvements on the economy, whether real or imagined, to a Morgan Tsvangirai as though he knows anything about how a country is run.

Their mutual masters were just around to give them a hand. As is now common cause, Tsvangirai and Biti and the opposition failed this goodwill.

Instead, they were walloped in the elections of 2013 as Zimbabwe voted, zanu-pf won.

This is what gave us Patrick Chinamasa, another lawyer.

He has performed fairly well in the circumstances, given the fact that the West is in its old, default anti-Zimbabwe mode.

He has even managed to clear some arrears, which Biti could not do, and he is on course to land the country better in terms of its obligations.

Under difficult conditions.

You get the feeling that Biti feels anything between envy and voyeurism.

Let us illustrate.

In October last year Zimbabwe cleared arrears to the International Monetary Fund.

Here was Biti's reaction, captured by one daily newspaper:

"It's a joke in the Halloween month not in April where there is a Fool's Day.

"The IMF should not have accepted that money because what is needed is a reform of the economy."

If this is not some envy or voyeurism, somebody explain to us what it is?

Or is it some kind of sibling rivalry between these lawyers that have been at the helm of our finances for close to a decade now?

Yet Biti is the more childish.

This is the truth. Somebody tell him that, and that he is not as smart as he imagines himself to be.

Tisu tadaro!

And we notice his minion at PDP, the diminutive Jacob Mafume appears to be carried away in the same megalomania.

He is a lawyer, too!

This week on the same Newzimbabwe.com he was pontificating on the economy and ended up accusing Chinamasa of "voodoo economics" — one of our columnists here was this other day asking whatever this is.

Short (no pun intended) of any sound economic appeal or alternative, little Mafume heaped cheap insults on Government and Chinamasa.

He said that, " . . . Chinamasa's voodoo economics have destroyed this country's economy and that Chinamasa himself is easily the worst manager of this economy in the 126 years of its modern existence."

He added: "Regrettably this economy is on its knees because of hooligans in Zanu-PF who, like broiler chickens, believe that you can eat irrespective of source and the reason.

"They suffer from a disease called Fiscalities which is the belief that money grows on trees."

There we go!

Anyone can see that these are just poor shots from an infantile opposition.

This is the PDP of Tendai Biti.

Somehow they want to convince us that they are the best we ever had and will ever have.

That's laughable, isn't it?

Meanwhile, the whole opposition in Zimbabwe is just as pathetic.

Which is why it has failed to unseat Zanu-PF since 2000 and face another grand defeat in 2018.