In April Mugabe rebuked Chinamasa for bonus or 8% wage cut now he accepts a 50% - 'penga udzoke!'

In his Mid-Term Fiscal Review in Parliament Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa, told the house the regime is planning to cut the public sector wage bill to 40 percent of total revenue from the current 83 percent.

Mugabe has successfully managed to cheat, bamboozle and even intimidate and murder his political opponents from within his own party Zanu PF and from the opposition to stay in power all these last 35 years. But in the economy he has found more than his match; he has failed to cheat or bamboozled it and his attempt to rig economic recovery by throwing billions of dollars at the economy has all but failed because he failed to get any donor to bankroll his $27 billion ZimAsset plan.

In the last two years Mugabe has been trying another dirty trick to outwit the economy - ignore it. Sadly for the tyrant the economic meltdown has matched on regardless and when the tyrant has been forced to once again pay attention to the economy he has found the situation a lot worse than it was before. Running away or ignoring the country's economic problems has been an exercise in futility for Mugabe. "Penga udzoke!" as one would say in Shona.

When Finance Minister tried to reduce the country's bloated civil servant wage bill by a modest 8% by cutting the traditional annual bonus 13th cheque it was none other than Mugabe himself reversed the move and even public rebuked Minister Chinamasa for suggesting it. Of course this was a cheap, stupid and totally misguided populist move by Mugabe, he got his brownie points but now it is payback time - "Penga udzoke!"

The scrapping of the 13th cheque will not be anywhere near enough to achieve the 83% to 40% drop in the civil servant wage bill; the bonus will be scrapped and hundreds of thousands of civil servants will be fired.

It is a heart breaking experience to find oneself out of work but in a country with unemployment rate of 90% plus with an economic that continues to shrink this is a nightmare many people cannot even begin to imagine!

So Mugabe, in his infinite wisdom slammed down Chinamasa for proposing an 8% hair cut for civil servants in April 2015 and now, four months later, the tyrant is accepting a 50% hair cut! Sadly, such is the history of this nation these last 35 years refusing to deal with minor routine problems for cheap brownie point only to be completely overwhelmed by the problems later.  

Zimbabwe is in this economic mess with 90% plus unemployment, millions now living in abject poverty, etc. because for the last 35 years the Zanu PF regime denied that corruption, the cancer that is killing the national economy and with it the nation, was a problem. So for 35 years corruption has had the time and space to grow and spread and today the nation is in ICU with terminal cancer.

Zanu PF is finally accepting the need to cut the bloated civil service but that alone is not near enough to revive the dying economy. We need a surgical operation to remove the cancerous tumours of corruption, mismanagement and lawlessness. To carry out the operation we must first of all implement ALL the democratic reforms necessary for the holding of free, fair and credible elections. Only free and fair elections will deliver regime change or, at worst, a transformed Zanu PF regime, to produce a common sense government competent to implement the economic reforms.

As long as this corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF dictatorship remains in power there will never be any meaningful economic reforms and the cancers of corruption, mismanagement and lawlessness will remain untouched and even get worse because  the regime is the source of these cancers!