Patrick Chinamasa and George Charamba offside

Pic: Left Patrick Chinamasa and George Charama aka Nathaniel Manheru both of Zanu PF


In his latest offering of vile politics Nathaniel Manheru aka George Charamba, Information and Publicity Secretary of Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe’s personal spokesman sheds insight into the retrogressive thinking that characterises a Zanu PF party in turmoil.

So astounding is the revelation of the Zanu PF conclusion about the cause of the economic demise in the country as evidenced by the outpourings of its Chief Executive and self proclaimed President of the country’s spokesperson, it defies all logic.



According to Charamba and by extension Mugabe and his Zanu PF party, there is no connection between the devastating hunger gripping the nation and the inclusive Government formation stalemate in the country.

The casual connection is in their view between the smart targeted sanctions imposed against filthy rich Zanu PF despots by America, Britain and their allies rather than the devastating hunger and faltering inclusive Government formation talks.
The outrageous conclusion aside, we did not miss the real cause behind filthy rich Charamba’s pretence to champion the poor’s cause.

A paranoid obsession to cling to power and shift blame for the causes of debilitating economic hardships in the country to anyone else other than the real cause Zanu PF and his swaggered foul mouthed adulation for its unworkable policies.

Since coming to power Zanu PF has pursued self enrichment policies that have diminished productivity, encouraged corruption, disenfranchised citizens and reduced them to paupers.

With each election they stole, Zanu PF perfected a patronage system that discouraged the work ethic it inherited and condemned the majority into a dependency syndrome on Government handouts to survive.

The motive was to keep the poor, poor or make them poorer and subservient to the rich. That way Zanu PF would ensure they remained loyal to its scorched earth national management policies and should they decide to demand self reliance, Zanu PF would simply threaten them with withdrawal of Government handouts to coerce compliance.

Charamba does concedes that the Zanu PF Government has cultivated and religiously pursued the dependency syndrome in people for decades when he boasts;

“How do the two disputants cause hunger? How do they resolve it once they have recovered amity? This is not the first time we have faced a cereal deficit as a country. We have had it from 1982, soon after our Independence. As now, the cereal deficit has always played itself out in circumstances of political differences. And even war between 1982 and 1987. Yet Zimbabwe has never been this desperate. Why now? Why these politics? Why this hunger?”

For a Presidential spokesperson to brag about the Government he serves in at a very senior level having failed to guarantee cereal self sufficiency for the country and survived sanction from the citizens it claims to serve for such a prolonged period and question why desperation has now reached untenable proportions is the height of stupidity by anyone, worse so a Presidential spokesman.

How on earth does a Presidential spokesman fail to see that Government food handouts over decades to citizens well capable of producing their own food requirements diminished their productive capacity and carved a deep hole on the fiscus whose cumulative effect has reached maximum elasticity and has snapped because outgo was not replenished by production when demand has ever been on the rise?

The absurdity does not end there for Charamba. He does not seem to see the connection that the poor and the Zanu PF fat cats who have been “victims” of the poor by being served the obnoxious Mahanya (Hacha porridge) at their funeral wakes have all seen that the government he serves and belongs to has outlived its usefulness in terms of guaranteeing sustained food security in their country.

Al l that is bothering him is that these impoverished citizens are now a scourge for his rich fat-cat colleagues in Zanu PF. They now as he puts it, “have broken into the barricaded world of the rich, past the high, serrated Dura-walls,” in search of the wealth the rich have stolen from them and are extravagantly parading when they are in desperation of near starvation.

The opulence of Zanu PF fat-cats in lavish housing, luxurious cars and modern electronic gadgets amidst an impoverished peasantry has driven people nuts and they have turned to theft of anything, water taps, electricity cabling, power station engine oil, mobile phones, perfume, toothpaste, leftover food, electronic gadgets etal.

The days of a tranquil night are well and truly over for the rich who now must stay awake to guard their stolen wealth or pay exorbitantly for security watch lest they lose the accrued wealth to nightly raids on their properties by the people they have impoverished.

It is therefore time for the Zanu PF fat-cats who have amassed amazing wealth that is not commensurate with their official incomes to seek protection from the hungry poor and what better way than to empathise with the plight of the poor and lay the blame for their plight on the MDC and its Western masters.

It does not wash.

“What only matches their daily soaring prices is the poor’s needs, always unmet. Only those operating below the labour or wage counter begin to afford them. Such as those who have mastered the art of "burning". Yet live we all must, and in fact do, rich and poor. Which means daily we live and have to live below the counter, beneath legality, to become the systematic criminals we have all become: rich and mostly poor: the former from vapid greed; the latter from burning need,” revealed Charamba in resignation.

Indeed being a leading “Cash burner,” Charamba knows not what cash deficit means to the majority in Zimbabwe. He and all his overfed and stupendous Zanu PF colleagues only see the sanctions barring them from taking excursion into the Western world to enjoy their ill gotten wealth as the cause of the hunger stoking the Zimbabweans.

By his admission all the rich fat cats in Zimbabwe are cash burning criminals out of sheer greed while the poor are needy criminals.

But he assigns same moral blameworthiness to all and implores them to unite against sanctions so that he can get reprieve to go abroad and squander his ill-gotten wealth away from the gaze of the impoverished eyes of the people he and his colleagues have stolen from.

He wants them to abandon their quest for regime change to install a responsible government that may follow up the wealth stolen from the fiscus by corrupt Zanu PF leading hands and restore it to the common fund to fight the hunger and starvation of the poor because that would not support his vantage position.

Any wonder then why he does not see the formation of a transparent Government being instrumental in restoring more permanent food security for the impoverished and stimulate the work ethic he has fervently worked to destroy and replace with laziness, dependency and insecurity that renders the disadvantaged incapable of standing by their convictions for fear of deprivation of donations from the rich.

“Our NGO experts have become prophets who work for the realisation and passage of own prophecies, seers who project and exteriorise their misdeeds as agents for those seeking "democratic change", a.k.a. regime change,” whinged Charamba.

The truth is in Zanu PF there is an inherent belief that all Zimbabweans are perpetually grateful for their dependency on Zanu PF food handouts and need nothing more than that.

Regime change is taboo in Zanu PF vocabulary and must be punished with denial of access to food self sufficiency and or support if it remains a national agenda.
That is why NGO’s are subject of intense focus, banishment and over-regulation by the Zanu PF regime. They should never be seen to be the real suppliers of the food that sustained the poor over decades when Zanu PF was claiming to be the generous donor.

Neither should they teach Councillors on how best to execute their functions to empower people in their local authorities to be self sustaining as that sort of empowerment will unleash them from political food bondage and allow them to choose the leader most capable of leading them to their desired destiny.

Such leaders are rare species in Zanu PF and thus the party of patronising geriatrics will go extinct and that must be avoided at any cost including entering into falsified unity government arrangements the party has no intention whatsoever to live by but are useful longevity initiatives for a failed regime.

The best way to fight sanctions would be to include those that are deemed to be the instigators of the sanctions in the government and let them be subjected to the sanctions or call for their removal.

Why Zanu PF would like to hold onto power yet the power is not enjoyable in its exercise because of sanctions is a marvel.

No Mr Charamba the hunger you see and is nauseating and causing you sleepless nights in the comfy of your ill gotten walled and electric gated mansions when the majority cannot afford a single brick on your wall let alone your breakfast as a meal for their entire families is not connected to sanctions.

Rather it is connected to your Party and its successive regimes expediency and corruption that has emptied the fiscus and alienated itself from previous helpers leaving itself isolated and vulnerable to the ire of hungry former beneficiaries of a patronage system that can no longer sustain the expectations in people it raised based on never ending donations.

An accountable government is what people want and they elected one in March but the criminals in Zanu PF denied them their wish using brutal force.

The people want that addressed through peaceful means of which the transitional inclusive government where main political players hold equal power to determine the fate of the country is an acceptable starting point towards recovery from the ravaging hunger stoking them.

Sanctions will automatically be eased when the inclusive government starts upholding human rights, applies the law equally, guarantees property rights, desists from political brutality and thuggery and generally governs by consent.

We will never join you in calling for the relaxation of sanctions against your associates and self travel restrictions unless you have accounted for your wealth and the reason why our fiscus is empty when the regimes you served under inherited a surplus position.

To do so we need the people we elected in March to have access to audit how you have been utilising our taxes and if need be prosecute whoever was responsible for condemning us to surviving on foul smelling Hacha meals instead of our staple Sadza and relish.

Surely you should be able to see why there is a connection between our hunger and starvation with your desperate clinging to power when we have decided it’s time for overdue regime change in our country.

The there is Patrick Chinamasa who at one time used his foul mouth to insult Roy Pachedu Bennett and was shoved to the ground after charging at the then MDC MP four times stronger and thousands of times more productive than him and coming a cropper.

We would have thought that he learned some lessons from that unfortunate incident that provocation invites equal force from objects of such kind of unjustified insults.

He appears not to have learnt anything from that episode nor has he learned anything from his crushing defeat at the hands of a novice MDC fielding in a Constituency election in the area he claims is his place of birth.

Having been handsomely rewarded with a Senatorial appointment and elevation to Zanu PF Chief Negotiator in fraudulent initiatives to legitimise Mugabe and Zanu PF after their defeat at the polls in March, Chinamasa has assumed an exaggerated sense of self importance that is totally unacceptable.

It is for that reason that we have chosen to devote some space to chide him and remind him of his place.

He was and still is a miserable electoral failure that has never won in a single democratic election process and owes his Government position to Zanu PF patronage politics. We thus understand it if he has to sing in tune every time and he opens his mouth and talks about Zanu PF to retain the confidence of his handlers therein.
For him that is where his political relevance should be confined.

Of recent however he has been persuaded by whoever to champion issues we doubt he is conversant with.

On two occasions now he has been quoted by State media alleging that MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai is a reincarnation of the late Angolan dissident leader Jonas Savimbi who was killed by Angolan forces after unleashing armed mayhem in the country using abducted child soldiers who committed heinous crimes against civilians in their fight against the Government forces.

He has been building up to this by pushing for Parties to sign up to a joint statement denouncing involvement in political violence by their supporters during the run up to the charade 27 June 2008 “presidential runoff election” that no rational sane person has endorsed in terms of its processes and outcome.

We must remind Chinamasa that his straying into these unfounded accusations against Morgan Tsvangirai who leads the most critical Party in resolving the political impasse in the country that will legitimise Mugabe and his own appointment by the said Mugabe is most disingenuous on his part.

If the transitional government he has been tasked to negotiate for and painstakingly cobbled a Global Agreement for its formation should be repudiated on the grounds of his foul mouth and forgery in deleting and or altering certain agreements reached in negotiations, the greatest looser will be the most beneficiaries of that agreement.

It is no exaggeration to say at the moment, Robert Mugabe, Joseph Msika, Prof Arthur Mutambara, and himself are the greatest beneficiaries of the agreement to form a transitional inclusive government.

It is therefore outright stupid and politically suicidal for him to err into murky political waters of accusing the leader of the Party that has by entering into the Global Agreement with his defeated party of serious unfounded allegations of the nature of equating that leader with a renowned brutal, murderous rapist and terrorist of Savimbi’s repute.

The only organisation that has in recent years exceeded Savimbi’s terror is the Interahamwe in Rwanda and Zanu PF.

It is repugnant for Chinamasa who belongs to a party with similar credentials to Savimbi’s terrorist UNITA organisation to label the leader of a Party who has been vandalised by his party on uncountable occasions of inclination to his party’s renowned terror methods.

When considered in the context of the time when the false accusations are made and the manner the accuser has tempered with critical documents that could lead to some form of political accommodation that could ease political tensions in the country caused by recent vandalism Chinamasa spearheaded the accusation becomes a grave concern.

That the MDC like many other reasonable Zimbabweans do not take Chinamasa seriously does not license him to incite violence by making false and unsubstantiated accusations that many Zimbabweans without recourse to alternative sources of information than the State media Chinamasa abuses.

The gravity of his comments can be measured by the fact that the Editorial of the Herald has reinforced his fallacy by making the false accusation the subject of its editorial comment.

The meaning is that Zanu PF is scapegoating and was never in the Global Agreement whole heartedly but simply to use it as a means of gaining Mugabe’s international recognition as President of the country.

To the extent that Zanu PF is insincere about its desire to practically form the inclusive government as evidenced by the numerous times its spokespersons and key figure have been caught offside in the implementation of the agreement it is appropriate for the MDC to exercise extreme caution with what they agree to when the parties appear before SADC Heads of State in Pretoria on Sunday 9 November 2008.

Chances are Zanu PF will concede to the demands of the MDC to see off the meeting but come back home to ignore the agreement completely to buy time for the illegal regime.

If Zanu PF refuses to concede to a paired ministry sharing model, inauguration of the Prime Minister designate ahead of Constitutional Amendment No 19, dismissal of the 6 Governors Mugabe appointed to provinces his Party lost, allowing MDC to recommend its Permanent Secretaries, Ambassadors, Provincial Administrators and other Constitutional appointees proportionate to its Ministerial share, it may be time to consider putting the negotiations on ice and pushing the political agenda denouncing Mugabe’s Presidency.

Internationally supervised Elections must be vigorously demanded in place of the time wasting negotiations currently being pursued by the parties.

We all know who will lose in those elections don’t we?