Opinion / Columnist
Chinamasa says scraping Zimdollar damaged the economy; is he minister of nonsense?
22 Jul 2014 at 08:59hrs | Views
Is Patrick Chinamasa the Minister of Finance or the Minister of Nonsense because to say the scrapping of the Z$ in 2008 damaged the economy is nonsense!
"The migration from hyperinflation to multi-currency did a lot of damage to our economy. It pitched our cost structure too high and unsustainable," he told a parliamentary committee on finance.
Remember the nation was not facing a two or three percentage digit inflation rate but world record inflation of 500 billion%. Prices were changing so fast that if you picked a product from the shelf by the time you got to the till to pay for it the price would have doubled. Was it any wonder the shelves were empty, it was impossible to do any business for shop owner and customer alike.
Things were so bad that Bank imposed a limit to how much their customers could with- draw a day, which was not even enough to pay the bus fee back home! What a life!
Minister Chinamasa tells us the workers were over paid after the scrapping of the Z$, what a load of rubbish. Civil servants were paid an "allowance" of $200; even government was too embarrassed to call such pittance a wage or salary. Many civil servants still earn $400 or so today six years later, why government call that a wage is a complete mystery.
How the likes of Cuthbert Dube, the CEO of PSMAS, have come to earn $ 500 000 a month and some Ministers have become multi-millionaires, literally overnight, is some- thing Minister Chinamasa should have left no stone unturned and had rooted out. In the end he failed to stem much less stop this criminal haemorrhaging of public funds by the top managers and board members whilst the institution is so starved of funds it cannot carry out even the most basic service it was created to provide and the lowly paid workers are not paid for months on end!
We all know the Zimbabwe economy is in a dangerous nose dive because of the decades of gross mismanagement, rampant corruption and an all-out looting spree of the last fifteen years. Donors and investors have shied away from Zimbabwe because they know the regime cannot be trusted to uphold the rule of law; they fear being the next victims of the looting brigade.
The country's economy is in the ICU because this Zanu-PF regime has denied there was no corruption, etc. allowing these cancers to grow and spread. We need these cancerous tumours removed now or the economic meltdown will continue and drag with it millions of our people into new depths of grinding abject poverty and despair.
Zimbabwe needs a Minister of Finance who will tackle the country's economic problems and not one who spends the day daydream solutions to imaginary problems. Of all the feeble excuses given by this corrupt and incompetent Zanu PF regime for the country's economic woes blaming the scrapping of the Z$ in 2008 sure takes the biscuit.
"Multi-currency did a lot of damage to our economy"! Indeed! What are you; minister of nonsense?!
"The migration from hyperinflation to multi-currency did a lot of damage to our economy. It pitched our cost structure too high and unsustainable," he told a parliamentary committee on finance.
Remember the nation was not facing a two or three percentage digit inflation rate but world record inflation of 500 billion%. Prices were changing so fast that if you picked a product from the shelf by the time you got to the till to pay for it the price would have doubled. Was it any wonder the shelves were empty, it was impossible to do any business for shop owner and customer alike.
Things were so bad that Bank imposed a limit to how much their customers could with- draw a day, which was not even enough to pay the bus fee back home! What a life!
Minister Chinamasa tells us the workers were over paid after the scrapping of the Z$, what a load of rubbish. Civil servants were paid an "allowance" of $200; even government was too embarrassed to call such pittance a wage or salary. Many civil servants still earn $400 or so today six years later, why government call that a wage is a complete mystery.
How the likes of Cuthbert Dube, the CEO of PSMAS, have come to earn $ 500 000 a month and some Ministers have become multi-millionaires, literally overnight, is some- thing Minister Chinamasa should have left no stone unturned and had rooted out. In the end he failed to stem much less stop this criminal haemorrhaging of public funds by the top managers and board members whilst the institution is so starved of funds it cannot carry out even the most basic service it was created to provide and the lowly paid workers are not paid for months on end!
We all know the Zimbabwe economy is in a dangerous nose dive because of the decades of gross mismanagement, rampant corruption and an all-out looting spree of the last fifteen years. Donors and investors have shied away from Zimbabwe because they know the regime cannot be trusted to uphold the rule of law; they fear being the next victims of the looting brigade.
The country's economy is in the ICU because this Zanu-PF regime has denied there was no corruption, etc. allowing these cancers to grow and spread. We need these cancerous tumours removed now or the economic meltdown will continue and drag with it millions of our people into new depths of grinding abject poverty and despair.
Zimbabwe needs a Minister of Finance who will tackle the country's economic problems and not one who spends the day daydream solutions to imaginary problems. Of all the feeble excuses given by this corrupt and incompetent Zanu PF regime for the country's economic woes blaming the scrapping of the Z$ in 2008 sure takes the biscuit.
"Multi-currency did a lot of damage to our economy"! Indeed! What are you; minister of nonsense?!
Source - Wilbert Mukori
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