Another deal in the offing?

Always interesting to see what I wrote this time last year! I wrote about the government propaganda machine and the view that ‘illegal economic sanctions’ were the crux of our economic crisis.

Not surprisingly, this morning I listened to ZBC and heard how the US Government was making preliminary moves to ‘lift illegal economic sanctions’ against Zimbabwe. Today’s report has something to do with Mugabe attending the United Nations in New York and he had some kind of meeting with some un-named US government official.

‘Illegal Economic Sanctions’ has been on the daily diet of all ZBC and ZTV listeners for well over a year now. The words Economic Sanctions cannot possibly be stated in the government propaganda media without the prefix ‘Illegal’. From hereon and to save valuable print, I will refer to them as IES. The IES, to remind the readership of this blog, are targeted sanctions against members of the ZANU PF hierarchy and clearly from the recent rants of that hierarchy, they are really hurting the individuals. We even had Mr Gono declaring that ‘if IES were lifted he would ‘consider’ resigning from his office at the Reserve Bank. All these thieves, for that is what they are, have ‘their’ money stashed away in Swiss and other banks locked up by the IES. The fact is that all ‘their’ money has been looted in one way or the other from the ordinary Zimbabwean people. But the thieves want it and they want it now. For them it will be an opportunity to escape and in so doing hopefully, avoid being arrested in Zimbabwe for their crimes against humanity. So the strategy now is to hold on to power at all costs until the IES are lifted and they can access their loot. The worst case scenario for the looters would be to not get their hands on their loot, not get out and end up being arrested for their crimes.

I wonder how this is going to pan out. You can be sure there is going to be a deal struck somewhere. You can be sure that there are a lot of people working on it right now from every angle. The thieves and their protectors (South Africa and SADC) from one side, the MDC and the western governments from the other. How can a deal be engineered in such away that nobody looses face and everybody gets what they want?

No doubt we will find out soon enough.