Mr President

YOUR Excellency, ancient wisdom has it that a guest sees in a minute what the host will have been blind to for a lifetime. Oftentimes successive generations stumble, one after the other, on the same obstacle.

They succumb to a particular predicament. Yet, the solution will be conspicuous, but hidden to their plain sight. As I see it, the ongoing socio-economic meltdown is a case in point. It is clear that corruption and oppression are your Achilles heel, as they were to your predecessor.

Although you promised to turn around the decades-old economic quagmire, my observations are that you are as blind to the remedy as was the late deposed former President Robert Mugabe.

Since attaining independence, citizenry has been living in abject poverty, haunted by corruption, oppression and economic meltdown. Despite bountiful minerals and other resources, the populace is nonetheless impoverished. Even the born frees are not free from deprivation.

Despite a number of economic recovery programmes, notably the hyped Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (Esap), the country has been in perpetual socioeconomic meltdown.

Meanwhile, international debt accumulated on the backdrop of corruption and misrule.

Evidence of the worsening of living conditions manifested in the immediate aftermath of the militaryorchestrated ejection of Mugabe. It was widely agreed that his fall was not the panacea to the country's socio-economic challenges.

Life has become a grind for citizenry true to Seneca’s presage: “Sometimes to live becomes an act of courage.”

One does not need to be a rocket scientist to realise that an egotistic