Source: OPEN FORUM: Arresting economic decline, ZANU-PF style | The Financial Gazette September 28, 2017
#Thisflag pastor, Evan Mawarire
THE September 2007 press roster has articles on a price blitz, food shortages, a ZANUPF women’s league head (Oppah Muchinguri at the time) pushing for the ouster of a vice president (Joice Mujuru then).
Addressing a meeting in Plumtree, Muchinguri said: “There are some women that we put on top to represent the women’s interests and needs but they have failed and continue to be linked to coup plots and the succession issue every day. We will ask them to step down at the coming party congress in December.” Also in the news, that September, was a constitutional amendment; the 18th. Inflation was galloping and the economy was in free-fall.
Fuel shortages, money printing and the arrests of business people accused of economic sabotage were also common themes. Fast-forward to September 2017 and the common news threads read eerily similar. Food shortages haven’t quite materialised. Yet. But the signs are not good. A ZANU-PF women’s league leader is, once again, gunning for a vice president.
The country’s new constitution, adopted by 94,5 percent of voters, has just been amended for the first time to give President Robert Mugabe untrammeled power to appoint the chief justice. The new charter had handed the Judicial Service Commission significant influence over the appointment.
The country is experiencing fuel supply interruptions due to acute foreign currency shortages. Inflation is once again on the march after a 29-month streak in the negative. Government has not (yet) arrested any businessperson for “economic sabotage”, but it could just be a matter of time, if history and pronouncements by President Robert Mugabe and Home Affairs Minister Ignatius Chombo are anything to go by. Police arrested #ThisFlag proponent Evan Mawarire on Sunday, charging him with subversion.
“We have information that there are elements who want to cause upheaval and revolt against the government during our absence,” Mugabe told supporters upon his return from the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Monday. “I’m back, we’ll fix this. This isn’t something we can sort out in a day or two.” It would be stretching credulity to expect Mugabe and his government to suddenly set about dealing with an economic crisis they have not only caused, but compounded and ignored over the past year. What the president means by sorting things out had quite possibly been laid out by Chombo, hours before the president’s Boeing 767 landed at the airport soon-to-be known as Robert Mugabe International.
The recent price increases and panic buying triggered by a sense of déjà vu and fears of impending shortages of basic goods, amid a worsening foreign currency crisis are nothing more than press and social media falsehoods, Chombo warned in a statement issued on Sunday. “Spreading alarm and despondency is not an expression of democracy nor is it media freedom. It is a criminal offence and is therefore punishable.
In the circumstances, government is closely monitoring the press and social media reports with a view to taking decisive action to deal a telling blow to the perpetrators of the crime in terms of the laws of the country’s criminal justice system,” Chombo said. The last time inflation took off, ten years ago, government froze prices and arrested thousands of business people on charges of disregarding the controls. Because Mugabe and his government seem intent on going over the 2007/8 script, arrests may not be too far away
COMMENTS