Could this be the Penultimate Nail in the ZANU PF Coffin?

The Comptroller and Auditor General’s report tabled in Parliament earlier this month is the most damning evidence ever publicly produced of the ongoing kleptocracy that is Zimbabwe today. The staggering theft of public funds by ZANU PF ministers, military leaders and senior bureaucrats is shaking the ordinary people to the core. The theft of public funds is said to be ‘unbelievable’ in its enormity but in the realty of what Zimbabwe has become it is very believable. It simply goes hand in hand with the enormous theft of land, land improvements, growing crops and stock – including very recently some 8,000 crocodiles raised by a Chiredzi farmer – that has taken place in Zimbabwe in recent years. That it is being exposed to public scrutiny is what I find to be ‘unbelievable’ but perhaps the arrival of the MDC to Parliament has enabled this exposure to take place.

The report tells us that 10,277 youths were employed in the Ministry of Youth Development as so-called Ward Officers without nay authority. They were employed in the run up to and during the 2008 elections. It is crystal clear they were employed to ‘ensure victory’ for the ruling party in the usual way they do these things – holding night pungwes, beating up the local people, threatening death for voting ‘the wrong way’ and committing other like criminal acts. Mugabe and his coterie of thugs have never been more exposed for what they are.

But then the report tells of the brazen thefts of public property – generally motor vehicles ‘donated’ by the Reserve Bank Governor, the notorious Gideon Gono, to various ministries during the year under review. Some have simply not been accounted for by the ministries and departments concerned, others have been taken away by the drivers – mostly ministers in government, senior civil servants and military personnel. Add to that the theft of fuel where these same people entrusted with governing the country have been ‘allocated’ as much as 5,000 litres a month for fuel.

Now at last – well just perhaps – the people who continually like to defend Mugabe as a ‘hero of the liberation struggle’ will come to realise just what kind of heroes he and his cronies are – and have been all along.

South Africa should take note before they suffer the same fate. If you allow corruption to survive because it is ‘not really significant’, it just grows more heads like Medusa until it suffocates an entire nation of ordinary people.

The End is nigh? In a normal society one would think so. Zimbabwe is not a normal society.