Mnangagwa spending spree and the ghost of Mugabe
President Mnangagwa is in China with a large entourage of cabinet ministers, business leaders others who can best be described as a band of parasites. What is most disappointing about the trip is the large size of that delegation as well as the hiring of a luxurious private plane for the journey. Mnangagwa seems to be failing in many things, more especially those that many people had expected him to easily do differently from the way they were done by his predecessor Robert Mugabe. It is common knowledge that Mugabe liked globe-trotting with large entourages made up largely of parasitic blood suckers who brought nothing of value to the country. Mnangagwa seems to be doing just the same. We did not expect him to take along so many people and to snub the much cheaper Air Zimbabwe that is run by his own government in favour of a Swiss-owned private charter plane. He should have known better that the country is in a severe economic crisis that makes the blowing up of over US$2 million on a foreign junket outrageously extravagant. Some people with a stricter sense of austerity even suggested that whatever Mnangagwa is discussing with his Chinese friends could still have been accomplished through video conference. China does not inspire confidence in many people after all, given the dominant perception of Chinese complicit in the rape of this country’s economy and the prolongation of Robert Mugabe’s brutal rule. The Chinese are known in Zimbabwe more as looters of local wealth than as descent investors in pursuit of a fair profit therefore, for a leader to blow even more of the scarce national resources seeking deals with such a people is hardly deserving of respect. Mugabe went there a few years ago and he came back with a bagful of ‘megadeals’ as his State-owned media termed them, but nothing came out of them. Instead the Chinese have continued to externalise hundreds of millions of dollars from the country as shown by Mnangagwa’s own list of looters. We hope the President will from today onwards try to make decisions that will make him more popular with the people of this country and differentiate him more from Mugabe. We also hope he will get better advisers as his current team has not been doing him any good.
