ZimAsset on, Grace tells ‘rogue’ Charamba

via ZimAsset on, Grace tells ‘rogue’ Charamba – NewZimbabwe 03/12/2015

FIRST lady Grace Mugabe on Thursday appeared to hit back at a state media commentator believed to be President Robert Mugabe’s spokesman, George Charamba.

Herald columnist Nathaniel Manheru, who has been outed as Charamba, recently dismissed as redundant the government’s ZimAsset economic blueprint which was crafted ahead of the 2013 general elections.

Manheru declared that ZimAsset was not the big idea that would take Zimbabwe out of its decade-long economic malaise.

“(ZimAsset) is staid, dry and formulaic. It is academic, an economist’s explanation to an abscess. Very esoteric, far removed from mundane comprehension,” he charged.

“ZimAsset comes from the bureaucracy. However good it may be as a plan, as a tool of recovering a sanctions-battered economy, it cannot be the big political idea that enkindles the nation, sets it alight.”

But addressing a rally in Matebeleland South Thursday, Grace Mugabe dismissed Charamba’s criticism as rogue.

“I know there are some rogue elements who tell people that Zim-Asset is just a document,” she said.

“I want to assure the people of Zimbabwe today that together we’ll successfully implement it. The economic blue-print has four clusters and the most important is the food security and nutrition.”

In his Herald column, Charamba also appeared to suggest that ZimAsset was merely an election con.

He wrote: “If ideas that secured 2013 are now stale, what big ideas have been invented to replace them?”

The remarks were seized by the opposition which has since dismissed ZimAsset as an unfunded dream which has failed to deliver the two million new jobs Mugabe promised while campaigning for the 2013 elections.

Said MDC leader Welshman Ncube on Twitter: “Every suffering Zimbabwean knows that this government is clueless.

“We welcome the admission from the government’s chief propagandist.”

Zanu PF politburo member and higher education minister, Jonathan Moyo, however said the opposition was wasting its time giving Manheru any attention.

“It must be desperate times when idealess politicians hope for fortune from the ramblings of a maligned columnist,” said the minister.