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Happison Muchechetere

Reason Wafawarova
Zimbabweans stand appalled by the expose of self-awarded predatory salaries earned by chief executives running the country’s State-owned enterprises, as well as executives in local government structures, and by extrapolation, throughout the entire economy’s production and service industry, perhaps including the national executive.

Reports that certain elements of the executive arm of Government could be making efforts to cover up the malfeasance are nauseating, just like reports that there are some high-ranking Government officials making vainglorious, politicised conspiracies against the media for publicising the scandals are ominous.

Surely, exposure of corruption cannot constitute a national security threat, unless we agree that we have come to a point where the country has been transformed to a criminal cartel.

One is reminded of the words of Leon Trotsky: “The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.”

If Zanu-PF is content with window dressing punishments and opting for slap-on-the-wrist actions, the party must not fool itself that the people of Zimbabweans will take it lightly.

We cannot pride ourselves in a country where the labour of the masses, their faith in politicians, and life itself, remain articles of political expediency, of sale and purchase, of robbery and exploitation, rendering the principle of the sacredness of human life a shameful lie, only uttered with the object of keeping the poor in hopelessness — perpetuating the ill-gotten privileges of the bourgeoisie.

We have a crisis whose victims are the poor masses yet somehow the looting bourgeoisie may be interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited and cheated masses, or even gag the media.

The masses will not cheer some of the ludicrous “corrective measures” so far announced by our authorities, like the harmless suspension of offending executives, and the sugar-coating firing or suspending of illicit boards or selected board members.

We have read about abstract legalistic requirements concerning certain aspects of the needed corrective action against the nauseating malfeasance, and this appeal to abstract norms is not a mere bureaucratic philosophical mistake, but an absolutely necessary element in the art of class deception.

Some people have emotionally charged that Zimbabwe’s salarygate scandal is unprecedented the world over.
This kind of magnification is understandable in the context of the mass anger prevailing at the moment. However, there are telling examples from many other countries, perhaps with the most recent being some of the malfeasance leading to the United States’ economic crisis of 2007.

In 2005, an investment bank by the name Credit Suisse aggressively promoted loans to resorts. The loans offered instant personal proceeds to borrowers and high yields to investors.

A resort catering company, Yellowstone Club, responded by taking a us$375 million loan, immediately transferring us$209 million to the founder’s personal accounts.
Startling is the fact that the terms and conditions of the loan actually permitted this kind of transaction.

This may leave our own malpractitioners green with envy.
Credit Suisse barely bothered to appraise the ability of the borrower to repay, perhaps because it had no money of its own at risk.
The loan package was part of a “collateralised loan obligation,” and it transferred all potential problems to institutional investors such as pension funds. Put simply, all risk was transferred to public funds, just like Cuthbert Dube freely transferred all potential problems to the paying members of PSMAS. These could go without healthcare, if only to accommodate Dube’s alleged ostentatious salary and allowances.

In total, Credit Suisse did six resort deals of this nature in four years, totaling approximately us$3 billion.
By 2007, the Yellowstone Club was in serious financial trouble, and at the centre of these problems was poor management, as well as unmanageable heavy debt servicing on the Credit Suisse loan. By the time recession was officially announced, the club’s only option was to file for bankruptcy, and it did.

Citing “first lien” rights, Credit Suisse proposed an interim rescue plan which involved massive retrenchments for hundreds of the club’s employees — yet again passing the pain back to where it belongs.

The wealthy will always ensure that the poor take the responsibility of shouldering the economic heat, and one can visit Harare City Council to see a classical example of this norm.

With executives reportedly earning in tens of thousands of US dollars per month, the ratepayers are forced to complement this luxury by drinking contaminated water, walking on streets of darkness, or by driving through menacing potholes.

A Montana bankruptcy judge fortunately saw through the Credit Suisse tricks, and he blasted the bank and the club owner for “naked greed” and a “predatory loan.”
This had made the two rich “while laying all the risk and consequences on the backs of the working class people of the area,” borrowing the words of Timothy Keller in the book “Counterfeit Gods,” from which this story has been borrowed.

Keller writes that the judge stripped Credit Suisse of its first lien position, making it possible for another buyer to purchase the club, and that way many jobs were saved. So this idea of explosions in executive salaries is indeed precedented, just like is the increased appetite for luxury.

But this does not exonerate the kleptomaniacs in Zimbabwe’s economic spectrum, nor their protectors in positions of power. Rather the precedent must help tell us on what to do with the culprits.

Keller writes about Paul Krugman’s incisive take on the self-serving tendencies of the rich.
Krugman compared the trend to the sexual revolution of the ‘60s, which he described as “a relaxation of old strictures, a new permissiveness.”

While the permissiveness in the sexual revolution was about sex, we have today this financial permissiveness that allows people to engage in predatory looting as has been happening in Zimbabwe — all at the expense of the poor.

In 2013 the Malawians have a similar expose they have christened “cashgate,” and the case is under investigation in that country.
We probably have come to a point where Zimbabwean culture has been adulterated so much that our otherwise deeply religious people have replaced the love for God with that of money.

Why is it that our upper class is shamelessly indulging in legalised fraud?
It is important that we establish the kind of demon behind the ruthless selfishness so evident in some of these people.

No doubt Zimbabwe has immensely transformed from a God-adoring nation to a money-addicted state, and that is why some of these youthful con-pastors masquerading as “men of God” or “prophets” find it easy to prey on unsuspecting masses, milking the poor and the desperate in the most ruthless of ways.

The phenomenon reigns unabated across the continent of Africa, and it is quite sad to see that would be pastors have lowered the bar of fellowship to insensitive levels of self-aggrandisement.

Our economy is down and continues to decline because we have allowed the culture of greed to flourish across our national ethical fabric, eating away our conscience. The sad thing is that we will not allow ourselves to see the greed and avarice within ourselves.

The only comment so far attributed to the suspended ZBC CEO Happison Muchechetere is “I am not bothered,” and those four words reveal the inside of a man so obsessed with naked greed that he cannot even understand the people’s anger over his obscene self-awarded salary.

Greed, as a sin, hides itself from its victim, and this money god reigning supreme in Zimbabwe today blinds its victims to their own hearts.
Those in the grip of greed do not seem to see anything sinful in their behaviour, and they sanitise their heartlessness by revolutionary rhetoric, or by contrived misplaced bible verses — all to the detriment of the overly trusting masses.

Those in the religious sphere, particularly those purporting to be of the Christian faith, must of necessity take note that Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about fornication, adultery and homosexuality put together. But hardly do modern day pastors preach against greed, or offer counselling services to remedy it.
Rather we have some of these outrageously unscrupulous prophets teaching the “zvangu zvaita” gospel doctrine — a veracity of self-centred ambition that celebrates personal achievement even at the expense of all others.

This naked greed is not limited to bad governance as the politically minded would want us to believe, and neither is it limited solely to the political landscape of our country. Rather it is a calamitous culture cutting across our entire socio-economic-political fabric.

Perhaps we are at the moment dealing with the tiniest level of exposure, and even that tiny bit has shaken our entire population into outrageous rage. The mass reaction could be catastrophic if the entire truth were to be told.

The private sector is by no means any holier, the national executive is not any cleaner, and the legislature is by no means seraphic.
Even the church itself is not as consecrated, not with the mushrooming “gospreneurs” emerging.

It does not sound exceedingly great that our hope in addressing the scourge of corruption has been placed into the hands of our cabinet ministers, many of whom are either accomplices in this crime or complicit to the malfeasance.

An independent board of inquiry into the payroll scandal would have been a great idea, and many people would have more confidence in such a body than trusting the very ministers under whose noses the egregious mischief happened in the first place.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!!

• Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.