via Media reveal Mugabe cronies’ graft in parastatals IOL News February 2 2014 By Peta Thornycroft
Shocking details of greed, sleaze and looting by powerful players in President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party have been unfolding in Zimbabwe’s domestic media.
Surprisingly, the pro Zanu-PF media, including the state broadcaster, have been breaking most of the reports about party loyalists who have been ripping off parastatals for years.
Some analysts believe the revelations, which have been making front page news, are part of faction fighting within Zanu-PF over who will succeed Mugabe when he dies or retires.
So far most of those exposed as crooks are loyal to Vice-President Joice Mujuru who easily won majority support at provincial Zanu-PF elections late last year.
Although his loyalists were defeated in those provincial elections, justice minister Emmerson Mnangagwa has never abandoned his ambition to replace Mugabe. His supporters control the public media, which are publishing details about the scandalous looting of public funds.
Others in Harare said the exposés, although real, were mainly “propaganda” designed to clean up Zanu-PF’s image as it cannot deliver on election promises it made before last year’s polls.
One of the most shocking revelations is the R5 million monthly salary paid to Cuthbert Dube, the chief executive of the Premier Service Medical Aid Society, which serves civil servants and is regularly unable to pay their medical bills. He has been sacked, but critics called for all his executives to be fired as well seeing they earn exorbitant salaries.
Political analyst Ibbo Mandaza does not believe the exposés are political infighting but are designed to shore up Zanu-PF’s image.
He said looting at parastatals had gone on for decades and that he expected more revelations.
Sunday Independent
COMMENTS
These stories of top managers being paid exorbitant salaries while the same body is failing to pay the pittance wages of the ordinary workers is a reflection of the sorry state in Zimbabwe today.
How can the publication of these stories spruce Zanu PF’s image when the whole world knows all the top leaders themselves are the worst looters. Mai Mujuru has a fortune worth $3 billion not counting what she will inherit from her late husband’s $9 billion pile! Mugabe has his 13 family farms plus a lot more beside. Only last week a story broke out of his $5 million house in Hong Kong; a property he denied in 2009 that he bought and claimed he only rented it foe Bona Mugabe.
Those who think these stories of corruption and looting are a result of factional fighting in Zanu PF are wrong too. It is inconceivable that only supporters of one faction would have occupied all the top posts in ZBC, for example. The drag net will catch Mnangagwa and Mujuru supporters alike.
Zanu PF was a party of thugs held together by the glue of looted wealth. Whilst the likes of Mai Mujuru would have been content to own a house in High Fields in 1980 her appetite has grown exponentially over the years; today she owns houses, farms, mines valued at $3 billion and still she wants more! The years of Zanu PF misrule has resulted in the economic melt-down and the shrinkage of the national cake and hence the serious in-fighting amongst themselves. The glue that has held them together is dissolving away!
The other reason these stories are coming out is that the standout like Mount Everest in the middle of the flat lands. How can these CEO be earning these vast salaries when the institutions are so broke they cannot pay the lowly paid workers’ wages for months on end?
Zanu PF is imploding and there is nothing Mugabe or anyone can do to stop it! It is to be expected, it is a party of thugs; it was a matter of time before they turned on each other.