Mugabe family named in corruption report

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace have been named among 56 other
Zimbabweans - mostly Zanu PF bigwigs –implicated in corrupt activities
fleecing the country of billions of dollars at the expense of the general
populace.
Mugabe and the Zanu PF elite were also cited for poor leadership practices
in the country.

According to a report by the Anti-Corruption Trust of Southern Africa (ACT),
a non-governmental organisation established in 2004, the First Family and
the top Zanu PF component in the inclusive government were fingered in
multi-billion-dollar corrupt activities.

Regional co-ordinator of ACT-Southern Africa Alouis Munyaradzi Chaumba said
all the cases should be reopened, investigated and all culprits prosecuted.

“I do not understand why the Zimbabwe Republic Police and the
Attorney-General’s Office have been consistently refusing to investigate and
prosecute senior government officials, their families, friends and
associates implicated in corruption.

“The impression created is that they are above the law. All these cases
should be investigated or else we are going to compel them to do so through
the courts of law,” he said, adding that people implicated should not be
allowed to participate in future elections until they were cleared.

But, Zanu PF spokesman Rugare Gumbo said he needed to see the report first
before he could comment on the document.

The report, compiled by studying newspaper reports in post-independence
Zimbabwe, examined corrupt activities ranging from the late 1980s Willowgate
motor vehicle scandal to the farm mechanisation programme prior to 2008. It
also focused on corruption in government entities such as Noczim, Zupco and
Grain Marketing Board as well as the War Victims’ Compensation Fund (WVCF).

Mugabe was implicated in the Z$7 billion Harare airport expansion deal in
1999, the report said, while Grace was fingered in the VIP housing project
in 1995 when she, alongside top Zanu PF hawks, allegedly grabbed houses
meant for low-earning civil servants in the “pay-for your-house scheme”.

Most of the cases, the report states, were not investigated as most
enquiries were kept under wraps by the government to allegedly protect
corrupt officials.

The President’s case, according to the report, came to light after a Saudi
national, Hani Yamani, owner of Air Harbour Technologies (AHT) - a company
that Mugabe seconded to win the tender to expand the airport - wrote to him
in July 1999 complaining of “excessive kickbacks”.

“Alongside the construction of the airport terminal, AHT funded the
construction of a private residence for President Mugabe. Furthermore,
Yamani donated $50 000 to Zanu PF and made payments to two senior Cabinet
ministers,” the report reads.

Grace is also fingered in alleged illegal diamond deals together with
Vice-President Joice Mujuru, Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Gideon Gono
and Mines minister Obert Mpofu. 

Fresh assault on Zim media

It is truly tragic that the Zimbabwe Media Commission (ZMC) has now
launched its Media Council.

Indeed, there can only be one outcome of this Zanu PF-driven and managed
political project — a fresh and savage assault on the country’s fledgling
independent media, at the same primitive level as was witnessed when the
Daily News was maliciously and unjustly shut down in September 2003.

What this also means is that the well-known lunatic fringe in President
Robert Mugabe’s former ruling party, with their scotched earth approach to
politics, are now firmly in charge of Zanu PF again.

This in turn means that Zimbabweans ought to be very afraid again, for the
signs are all too ominous, all round. To decode things further, this fresh
assault, as was the case a decade ago, is ultimately aimed at ordinary
Zimbabweans — rather than the independent media per se.

The question to ask is what is next after they decapitate the private media
as they intend to do?

A decade ago it was literally the beginning of a traumatic ride to hell that
culminated in the likes of Murambatsvina, rapes and murders in 2008 and the
worst economic disaster that the world has ever witnessed!

Beleaguered Information minister Webster Shamu set the ball rolling on this
fresh tilt at anarchy earlier this week when he bluntly and unashamedly
promised to shut down the private media if they continue shining their
bright torches in the dark corners of Mugabe’s and Zanu PF’s kleptocratic
worlds.

We say beleaguered of Shamu because we believe that he is acting under
pressure from his party’s hardliners, and that deep down he does not believe
in this barbarism. Indeed, why would he sanction this insanity now and not
earlier?

And was it not under his overall sympathetic watch that Zimbabwe’s leading
media brand the Daily News was able to come back?

Shamu’s shocking rantings were on Thursday followed by the launch of the
Zimbabwe Media Council itself, to the further trauma of all right-thinking
Zimbabweans.

Among its supposedly impartial members who will run this august body are
Justin Mutasa, the CEO of Zimpapers, and Happison Muchechetere, the CEO of
the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. Whoa! Really?

Is Mutasa not the same gentleman whose company publishes the rabid Zanu PF
propaganda missiles that include The Herald, The Sunday Mail and The
Chronicle?

And is Muchechetere not the head of the monopoly television outfit that is
headquartered at Pockets Hill and that beams nothing but hate speech against
political opponents of Mugabe and Zanu PF?

Indeed, are state newspapers and broadcast stations not guilty of the worst
editorial excesses imaginable in this country? Do they not day-in and
day-out weave disgusting Zanu PF spin and incite violence against those
perceived to be critical of the establishment?

Given all these incontrovertible truths, we ask with tears in our eyes how
this media council is supposed to work with any semblance of legitimacy with
the likes of these two gentlemen as part of the team in charge? To what
effect?

We want to state unequivocally here, that any nation that seeks to regulate
the media this way is truly a banana republic, no matter how much this
statement will upset these anarchy mongers.

After all, we already have the Voluntary Media Council which is working
perfectly.

Just watch the carnage as it unfolds from here onwards, for you can’t
entrust the chicken run to hyenas.

It is that bad.