DON’T LET DAYDREAMER GWEDE MISLEAD PEOPLE
THE Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “daydream” as “a series of pleasant thoughts that distract one’s attention from the present.” This is what Gwede Mantashe did last week.
Mantashe told the whole world that the mayhem we are witnessing in Zimbabwe today has been engineered by foreign forces seeking to institute regime change.
It is true that there are people somewhere in the world who find President Robert Mugabe deplorable, but to suggest that they instigated last week’s protest in Zimbabwe is bizarre.
The protests were triggered by a stupid and corrupt decision taken by the government to ban certain imported products – mainly from South Africa.
The decision was stupid in that currently there are no factories in Zimbabwe that produce most of the banned products. If you say Zimbabweans must not bring bottled water from outside, when their government cannot provide clean drinking water, you are essentially saying they must share water with animals from dirty rivers and wells.
The decision was corrupt because there are politicians in Mugabe’s cabinet who import for sale the very same products Mugabe’s government has banned.
These corrupt politicians want to force Zimbabweans to buy the banned products from them, at exorbitant prices. It is like causing starvation in order for morgue runners to make money from the dead.
But this is not the beginning of the story. The collapse of Zimbabwe started when in the late 1990s ordinary Zimbabweans began wondering what happened to the better life for all promised by politicians during the liberation struggle.
When Mugabe sensed growing restlessness among his people, he remembered suddenly that the British government had committed to provide money for the Zimbabwean government to purchase land