Opinion / Columnist
Give Grace Mugabe a million dollars
15 Jan 2017 at 18:14hrs | Views
Zanu PF has defied the old saying that you can't have your cake and eat it. The party has been chomping away for 37 years and believes there is an inexhaustible supply of cake.
But then comes the sad case of Grace Mugabe's million dollar diamond. The poor woman was conned. She says she paid up but the Lebanese businessman didn't deliver. This is simply not supposed to happen to her.
Zimbabweans en masse have been conned for 37 years so we must sympathise with her predicament. Especially as it was such a romantic idea of the President to give her a ring to mark 20 years of wedded bliss.
And as Grace noted: 'This was hard-earned money saved over the years . . . It's a lot of sacrifice that my husband did from our farming and dairy business.'
It certainly must have been some sacrifice: getting up before dawn every day to milk the cows. And then there's the ploughing to do . . . No wonder the old man falls asleep when he gets to the office.
The Vigil has a brilliant suggestion: why doesn't the 21st February Movement use the million dollars it is raising for Mugabe's 93rd birthday bash at the Matopos to buy a ring from a non-Lebanese businessman? That way Grace could lose her ring and still have it! Better still, they could go to another Lebanese businessman and pay him with bond notes! That'll serve these Lebanese right.
Mind you, the missing ring is only a symptom of the problem. The eating your cake syndrome affects all aspects of life in Zimbabwe. Only this week the deputy labour minister Tapiwa Matangaidze insisted that the government would not sack any employees despite them costing more than 90% of government revenues.
He agreed the salary bill was unsustainable but said the answer was 'natural attrition'. As workers died off they would not be replaced. He didn't explain what would happen to the ghost workers. Wouldn't there just be more of them?
But nothing is beyond the hutzpah of a government which can seize Chinese assets and then go to Beijing and ask them to give us more cake.
Source - Zimvigil
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