How to predict which month Mugabe's government will fall

Thus far, #shutdownzim has called for two stay aways. The one was very successful and the other not so successful. This would have made the total score 1 - 1 between the movement and the Mugabe. The government however, scored an own goal when they accidentally gave #shutdownzim their very first ever rally outside the court thus making the score 2 -0 in favour of #shutdownzim. We applaud #shutdownzim for their work.

The main reason for the success of the first stay away was because of two factors. The first is that the government has created an explosive milieu by creating an economic environment that is makes it almost impossible for the citizens to put food on the table. With such an environment, all you need is a spark and then you get an explosion. The spark this time around came from the #shutdownzim movement. Even if the government somehow managed to neutralise the #shutdownzim movement, it would not guarantee them any peace as sooner or later a different spark would arise from elsewhere and cause another explosion. The only long term solution for the government is therefore to fix the economy and to achieve this they need a major cash injection that will be well managed so that the economic engine starts up again. This is very unlikely to occur for obvious reasons that I will not go into right now. What is more likely to happen is that the government coffers will continue to shrink.

From the government's perspective, there is a pecking order for who should be paid first and it is as follows; army, police, teachers, nurses and doctors, pensioners and others. The army are at the top of the food chain and the pensioners and others are at the bottom of the food chain.Who actually gets paid is now the most sensitive indicator of how the government is doing financially. As the money runs out, the pensioners will be the first not to be paid. This is why everybody is eager to see whether they will truly be paid on the 19th of July. Once it is the nurses and doctors not being paid, they may go on strike but the army medical staff will be brought into the hospitals as a stop gap measure so that the system can continue to limp on. Once the teachers are not paid, then there is likely to be trouble again in the streets but as long as the police have been paid, the government will try to put out the fires.

The real danger will come when the police have not been paid as the only law enforcers that the government can rely on then will be the army. The risk of blood on the streets then increases. If the situation is ever allowed to reach a state where the army is not paid, there is a genuine risk of a military coup. We all hope that the government will never allow things to reach that stage as we do not need military solutions to this economic problem but political solutions.

In the coming few months, as you watch who is not paid, you can then gauge how much of a shelf life is left in this government.