Kubatana.net ~ an online community of Zimbabwean activists

Zimbabwe government and its money sucking

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There’s a level of totalitarianism that pinches my nerves that is clearly visible in Zimbabwe. The people are always stuffed under the heavy hand of the despot either in the guise of ‘home grown solutions’ or ‘catching up with international standards’. Whenever the government wants to suck money out of us they do it to catch up with international trends.

Good examples are the introduction of toll gates, increasing toll fees, debates about urban tolls, spot fines, increasing import taxes and levies, new police and ministers’ vehicles, etc. International standards are unceremoniously dumped whenever issues of accountability and good governance are brought up and replaced by ‘home grown remedies’, which in most cases have only looked well crafted on paper but void in implementation.

They work these things like magicians in our eyes; most of the time we fail to connect the two dots in the line in the use of the terms from the start of the con plan to steal money from us to the point where we want the result and details of expenditure. A good but sad example is the toll fees which were forcibly introduced on our roads to catch up with regional and international trends and without fail, every motorist is paying but the amount of potholes on our highways by far do not reflect the tremendous amounts of money that is being collected in toll fees everyday.

Interestingly the government is still working ‘flat out’ to craft ‘home grown solutions’ that will insure that the system is water tight and any corruption be brought to book. Others who have tried to question the accountability of the government and police over toll fees and spot fines have been labeled western puppets whose agenda is to serve their western masters and to push for a regime change in our country. Anyone who asks questions about the diamond revenues (including the former Finance Minister, Biti), Zupco unfair operations, civil service inflated wage bills and unfair distributions of farming, energy, water and security resources etc, has been placed in this neocolonialists puppet bracket.

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