Zim exporting excuses
THE big news of the past week was that our alert security agents, a month ago, fished out some no-good Americans and sent them packing.
The whole affair would have never come to light had a US agency, USAID, not come out to whine about not being allowed to do as they please in our country.
USAID told us it had sent in a group to “assess the development and governance context in Zimbabwe to help inform USAid’s work to support civic participation, democratic institutions, and human rights.”
We all know that is just Ngo-speak for regime change.
Luckily, and to everyone’s relief, our intrepid spies out-spied the American spies, and they were put on a flight out of our brand-new airport.
According to USAID: “Members of the assessment team were subject to aggressive handling, prolonged interrogation and intimidation, unsafe and forced nighttime transportation, overnight detention and confinement, and forced removal from the country”.
Aggressive handling?
Prolonged interrogation?
Intimidation?
Detention?
It seems our security forces mistook this USAID lot for our local pesky opposition.
Quite daring
Two weeks after Joe Biden put his sanctions in a new bottle, our gormless government officials are yet to find a coherent way to respond to his dastardly acts. It has been a competition of anger, between Africa’s most bored US embassy, and Africa’s most insecure ruling party.
Remember, first, we were told to pour into the streets to celebrate the victory of our re-engagement strategy.
Then Africa’s angriest Presidential spokesperson chimed in, with a four-page tirade, suitably distributed to the world via grainy images. It reminded Muck of those pictures that his tech-averse uncle sends, from inside his kraal in Mhokonye, to proudly announce the birth of new goats.
Even more entertaining was the man’s desk-thumping demand for the Americans to prove their obviously spurious allegation that our owner is corrupt.
He thundered: “We demand that the Biden Administration provides evidence in support of these gratuitous accusations, failure which the Administration must, without any further delay, withdraw them unconditionally”.
Surely, nobody would want this. There is not enough time in the world.
Clarity
Of course, in all the noise, and amidst all the incoherence of the reeling party and its rudderless mouthpieces, we all looked to one man for clarity of thought. Enter Chris Mutsvangwa.
He sat down – and we assume he was sitting down given that he is always carrying a large thesaurus – to speak with his party’s website.
It was a lengthy time, in which his infatuation with America stuck out like basic sense at a Zanu PF gathering. He said he was relieved that America had taken one foot off the necks of our land.
Said the man: “That as it may, we all remember Floyd George. He said: ‘Please take off your boot, I want to breathe’. They have taken off one boot, we can breathe a bit more.”
Much to nobody’s surprise, the whole article was deleted from the Zanu PF website and, one has to assume, printed out and burned.
Prophetic ponzi scheme
Muckraker commiserates with a bunch of followers of one Walter Magaya. It was reported that the followers are taking him to court, suing him for scamming them of their money, allegedly.
They claim he convinced them to buy shares in some phantom mining deal. “Victims were made to deposit amounts of over US$1 000 and told that the amounts would attract 40% interest after six months,” one report said.
Forty percent interest rates? Phantom investment instruments? This sounds like something from John Mangudya’s book of economics.
Magaya and Mangudya need to sit down and take notes from each other.
Another statue?
We were proud to hear that there is a national tender being floated for a new statue of our old owner. It will be placed at the airport named after him, the Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport.
“The National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe has invited tenders from interested fine artists to bid and produce a life-size statue of the late former leader who ruled for 37 years since the country’s independence in 1980,” the tender in the government gazette said.
This is a fitting honour. It is only fair that the man who used the airport the most should be granted the honour of having his statue placed there. All travellers should pass by and admire the frequent flyer.
Suicidal
It was reported that people at the Zimbabwe Council for Higher Education (ZIMCHE) are clearly suicidal.
The council, which has the job of making sure that people do not strut about our streets with fake degrees, came out to tell us that we should not take any degrees from the International Institute of Philanthropy seriously.
The outfit, ZIMCHE said, “is not authorised to award degrees in Zimbabwe as it is not a registered higher education institution”.
It “undermines the integrity” of the entire higher education system in Zimbabwe. ZIMCHE has also ordered the chaps to “publicly withdraw all awarded degrees and inform all recipients accordingly”.
Thankfully, nobody in this country takes such trivial things as the law seriously. The people of ZIMCHE are either just jealous of the doctorates that some of our leaders have received, or they are being used by the West, or both.
Either way, it is obvious that whoever authorised that statement no longer wants to keep their job. Have we run out of patriots to do these jobs?
Exports
Like many other bored adults, Muckraker has been following events in South Africa, which is holding alleged elections in May. One must always watch elections from other countries, just so you can admire the good work we are doing here with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, Africa’s finest election management body.
This week, it was reported that the Democratic Party, an opposition party for the white elites in South Africa, sent a letter to the ruling regime in America, calling for them to come down and run elections in South Africa.
The party does not trust the local elections body to do a good job.
Naturally, the ruling African National Congress, the party for the black elites in South Africa, responded.
They brought out their deputy secretary general, Nomvula Mokonyane, who said on television: “The DA is funded by those who want regime change, not only in South Africa. We’ve seen it in our sister countries in Africa, where formations will be sponsored to call for regime change in the form of trying to cast aspersions on the electoral process. We’ve seen it in Zimbabwe”.
And yet some useless people say our country is not exporting anything of value. We are exporting excuses in industrial quantities.
No to bribes
It was reported this week that the chefs at Sugar Candy Mountain, the only organisation where the economy is booming, have shocked their minions by telling them not to take bribes.
According to a report, a memo was sent to staff, telling them to report upstairs if they are offered expensive gifts.
A memo reportedly said: “Any gift received on behalf of Zimpapers must be reported to the employee’s supervisor or the HR department and recorded for transparency and audit purposes in the company’s gift declaration register.
.The staff were told that “violation of this gift declaration policy may result in disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment”.
It is clear that the higher-ups at Zimpapers want people to die of hunger. Surely, when did eating become a problem? If chefs themselves started writing down the gifts they got in a book, from foreign trips to cars and land, would there be enough books left in that organisation?
Let children eat also.