ride. To believe so is a direct attack on your credibility, and an assault on your ego. This is why it is easy to say God’s works are inexplicable whenever we get questioned over any likelihood that we could be victims of deception — albeit in the name of the Most High.

When we are reminded to try and distinguish between fantasies and miracles sometimes we get agitated and we accuse those asking us of being vessels of the evil one. If rationality threatens our integrity and our spiritualised egos we chose irrationality in the name of faith in God.
We find ourselves no longer interested in finding out the truth. This is because the bamboozled would have captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we have been taken in.

In religion once you give an overzealous novice power and unlimited control over you, you almost certainly won’t be able to regain any of it. You become a victim of deception, indoctrination and manipulation. This is precisely why youthful charismatic preachers can easily pass on their boyhood fantasies for God’s miracles and they get cheered for the fiction. We have this raucous cheering of unverified and unverifiable miracles that has gripped many of the African nations, and the hoopla has reached catastrophic levels, if the confusion in Zimbabwe s anything to go by.

We hear of performer-narrated “miracles” of cash being created from thin air, gold falling from heaven, hair miraculously growing on balding heads, fat people becoming super skinny instantly, teeth emerging from bare gums; and we must believe all this without any form of evidence or verification whatsoever, or else we are accused of trying to limit God’s ability to perform signs and wonders.

The miracle performers are audacious enough to host Press conferences without any of the beneficiaries of the testified miracles as exhibits, and without the gold that supposedly “rained” from the heavens, and we still are expected to elevate these fanciful stories to levels of bona fide miracles.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the book “A man without a Country”, “No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.”

Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. That is a simple sad piece of political logic. Even spiritual charlatans in religious circles are just as predatory.

Sub-Saharan Africa is rated the most underdeveloped and most corrupt region in the world today. We have some amazing government priorities as the region stands out as the top market for luxurious vehicles like Mercedes limousines or Range Rovers, all in the midst of unprecedented poverty.

The people who make the decisions to purchase these obscene vehicles preside over the world’s worst poverty levels ever, and they see absolutely nothing untoward in their conduct.

Corruption can be defined as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain, both in the private and public sector, and sadly in religion too.

Essentially corruption is all about taking advantage of a people’s trust and faith – manipulating that trust and faith for private and selfish gain. Politicians egregiously do it, religious leaders do it too, and so do other social leaders. Always the victim is the vulnerable of society.

The prevalence of bribery has assumed cultural levels in countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe where public officials openly solicit for bribes, embezzlement of public funds has become fashionable and admirable, and kickbacks in the public procurement system have assumed official status. The anti-corruption efforts in sub-Saharan Africa are unquestionably cosmetic – and this explains why the MDC-T can fire an entire urban council on grounds of “proven acts of corruption,” and the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission finds no logical reason to be involved any way.

The Corruption Perception Index for Africa in 2010 showed Somalia, Chad, Burundi, Angola and Equatorial Guinea to be the top most corrupt countries in Africa, and the statics had an absolute benign effect on the politics of those countries. The bamboozled masses could not lift a finger to have the situation corrected, and the perpetrating politicians continued the mess unabated.

The implicit cost of corruption is that it transforms itself into a regressive tax that takes a toll on services that the poor cannot afford. It is the poor that end up going without education, healthcare, clean water, infrastructure, food or shelter. Corruption is Africa’s greatest implicit killer, and it accounts for the death of thousands of children each and every day. It is estimated that diarrhoea alone kills about 2000 children every single day, and that disease is 100percent poverty related.

Corruption hits worst on the vulnerable and the poor of society and as such it must be treated as a crime against humanity. Corrupt officials are implicit mass murderers and must be treated as such.
Those among our people who choose the route of corruption must be reminded that corruption deviates funds intended for development, undermines government’s ability to provide basic services, undermines the rule of law, promotes inequality and injustice, and makes the country unfriendly to investment. Corruption is a full package of destruction.

The vociferous noise against corruption that used to be the character of MDC politicians has dramatically died down in the last four years, not exactly because corruption in Zimbabwe has declined by any measure, but precisely because our erstwhile anti-corruption advocates have joined government and suddenly began to understand the logic and nobility of corruption.

We are caught up in this pitiful predicament where political office has become a platform for self-aggrandisement, and our people have resigned to the reality that in Africa politics is about taking your turn to loot, to practice nepotism, and to take advantage of your subordinates and those to whom you are supposed to offer service. The rot is as bad as to normalise sexual abuse by public officials against their female subordinates, with sad cases of some females seemingly taking it as acceptable.

The lack of transparency, integrity and accountability in Africa’s governance systems is the major cause of the continent’s retardation in development. There are a lot of hidden costs that corruption brings to a nation. A corrupt system breeds poor performance in the civil service for example.

A good example is when a staffing officer in the education sector demands bribes from teachers so they can be deployed at better stations. Many remote areas in Africa have been deprived of quality education because only those teachers who cannot pay bribes get deployed there, and sometimes there are acute cases of understaffing in these areas.

The net cost for this are scores of children deprived of quality education, and having their academic potential completely wasted alongside their entire future and destiny. These children are essentially condemned to an adulthood of hopelessness.

When corruption is allowed to flourish unabated it does not only erode the prospect of development. More dangerously it deeply weakens the legislature and the judiciary. A legislature comprising of corrupt wretches is corrupt by definition, and it is so weakened that a country can easily become incapacitated in its ability to combat the scourge corruption. It suddenly appears like nobody has the power to stop corruption.

Equally a judiciary run by judges and magistrates that solicit or accept bribes is not worthy the name judiciary, and it destroys completely the essence of the rule of law, making bribes look as innocent as weddings.

We have in many African countries this sorry status where law enforcement is not only compromised but almost totally ineffective. This in itself is not a cause of corruption but a result of it, and without the willpower to enforce laws a country is simply ungovernable.

The main reason Africa’s accountability institutions are dysfunctional is the rampant prevalence of political patronage. Patronage is the tool used by power hungry tyrants to retain power. All that has to happen is for the leader to turn a blind eye to acts of corruption so he can wield these same acts as a blackmailing tool whenever he needs to control those who carried them out.

In the end everyone owes their political existence to the one who wields the power. Political patronage erodes independence and professionalism in both the public and the private sectors. Even in the churches we now have church founders that basically surround themselves with pliant junior pastors who will not question any action from the founder member.

This is precisely why church funds count for the most unaccounted for money in the world today. There is almost one billion dollars deposited in US banks every Monday from the churches in that country. There are no corresponding church assets that can explain satisfactorily where this money is going. Surely Zimbabwean banks must be pretty busy on Mondays too, hopefully with church money being deposited into church accounts, not the leaders’ personal accounts.

What lacks most at the moment is the means to bring perpetrators of corruption to account. Meanwhile the vulnerable and the poor continue to be deprived of basic necessities to life, and the continent of Africa suffers so much poverty that lives are unnecessarily lost as children succumb to famines and starvation, while the adult population dies from easily preventable and curable diseases.

The highest obligation of patriotism is to fight corruption in both the public and the private sector. Corruption is murderous and ruinous to mankind, especially to the vulnerable and the poor. It is a crime against humanity and must be treated as such by everyone with a sense of decency. We must all tremble with indignation at every instance of corruption.

Zimbabwe is heading for elections this year and people are faced with two choices, voting out the corrupt or voting in the rhetoric sold to us by the eloquent voice of the politician. We can make a bold statement as a nation, and through our vote we must.

We have known urban councils that have institutionalised corruption to unprecedented standards, and the controlling political party for such councils still hopes to have its candidates retained, or to have a new set of the corrupt lot voted in. Harare, Bulawayo, Masvingo, Mutare and Chitungwiza councils are all controlled by the MDC-T and never in the history of these councils has so much corruption been seen as evidenced in the last four years.

This is not to say Zimbabwe’s corruption is limited only to local government. Far be it from this writer that we exonerate the endemic corruption in central government, or that we sanitise the tattered image of executive. The electorate must know how to wield the axe on corruption; otherwise we all become complicit to this gigantic crime.

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

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.

You Might Also Like

Comments

Take our Survey

We value your opinion! Take a moment to complete our survey