26th November 2008

It is reported today that Mr Gideon Gono has been re-appointed for a further 5 year term as Governor of the Reserve Bank. This man is responsible more than any other for the complete destruction of the Zimbabwe dollar and the imminent complete destruction of the Zimbabwe Banking Industry – so why reward him with a further term? Most probably because he knows more about who in the ZANU PF hierarchy has been looting what remains of the economy and if he were to spill the beans there will be a lot of muck spread around. Be wary, Mr Gono, for there is only one way to keep your mouth shut for ever and there must be many guilty looters who would like to see it that way.

On another tack on the same kind of issue – money that is – I see today that Old Mutual has declared a dividend of 453 trillion Zimbabwe dollars per share but has been hampered in distributing the dividend because the ‘Zimbabwe Banking system cannot process the zero’s’. Others have been able to transact numbers in the quintillions so why not Old Mutual I wonder? As a matter of personal interest I own 400 Old Mutual shares. This makes my share of the proceeds 181.2 quadrillion Zimbabwe dollars. But there’s no reason to get excited. On the assumption that Old Mutual transacts my share into my account as they usually do, I can’t get my hands of any of it, so it is not money but only useless, worthless numbers. Like all the other money that I have in my bank account right now, all I can do is watch as it wastes away to nothing.

But a story more to the point is the ‘ongoing negotiations for an inclusive government’ that are said to be taking place in South Africa today – or was it yesterday? Who cares, really? Tsvangirayi and his MDC are being ‘persuaded’ by the Elders Group to join the Mugabe Government – well, so the media tells us. But while this is supposedly going on, Mugabe’s police force has ‘arrested’ some 12 MDC members some 14-16 days ago who have not been seen since their arrest and a High Court order to enforce the police to produce them before the courts has simply been ignored. Who in their right minds negotiates with anyone who performs such acts of indecent brutality against ordinary people? One can only assume that those arrested have been tortured to volunteer admissions that they are clandestinely ‘training terrorists’ in Botswana, as Mugabe would have the world believe. But the worst of this incident is that no-one seems to care – not the South African President or his government, not even the Elders Group who profess to be ‘concerned about the welfare of ordinary Zimbabweans’.