Interrogating Mthuli Ncube's 'Austerity for Prosperity': Will ESAP 2 work where ESAP 1 failed?*

In the weeks leading up to the poorly kept secret of his impeding appointment, he campaigned hard for the position, coming out of a long diasporan silence to write articles outlining what he would do to tame Zimbabwe’s unwieldly economy. His many slavish supporters played up his scholarly qualifications, the international finance organisations where he had been a functionary and so forth.

It was as if the man could walk on water like Jesus purportedly did, or leap over skyscrapers with a single bound, like Superman. Given all the hype around him, his eventual appointment in October 2018 was almost an anti-climax.

It wasn’t long before he began to backtrack on some of his pre-appointment expressed views, such as the need to swiftly ‘abolish’ the widely derided ‘bond note’ currency/non-currency (which it is depends on who you ask, and what time of day it is.) Having been parachuted into his position after more than a decade in places like Switzerland, the Zimbabwean social, economic and political realities quickly, rudely began to dawn on him.

READ MORE - Interrogating Mthuli Ncube's 'Austerity for Prosperity': Will ESAP 2 work where ESAP 1 failed?*

Zimbabwe's inflationary plague of doctorates

“Zimbabwe is the most literate nation in Africa,” you will often hear it boasted.  While we instinctively reject not-so-flattering measures of our national performance as ‘machinations of the imperialists,’ this one we eagerly, unquestioningly embrace as obviously true. To ask how much we have used that high literacy to improve our national condition is to risk being accused of being unpatriotic  and counter-revolutionary.

So prized has become the generalised notion of ‘being educated,’ or at least being perceived to be so, that it now matters little whether we seek education as a means to live better lives or to be more productive and innovative citizens. In Zimbabwe the idea of ‘education’ now is to a great extent another means to satisfy our national obsession with ‘status;’ or convincing ourselves that we have more intrinsic human worth than the people next door. 

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The real origins of the ZIFA soccer cheating scandal

Chido Makunike

There is a huge, terrible new 'crisis' in Zimbabwe that is causing much public gnashing of teeth and weeping and wailing. It threatened to eclipse this week's Harare constitutional conference. It diverted media and public attention away from the sexscapades of the randy prime minister. What new calamity has befallen hapless Zimbabwe? The national soccer team lost a match in Angola under what are widely considered to be disgraceful circumstances, meaning they are out of competition for the 2013 African Cup of Nations. As a result there were brief fears of a soccer insurrection in parts of the country last week. This came just a few days after a lengthy corruption investigation of officials of the Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA) and many prominent players. Several big sports-linked personalities have been banned from football for life for throwing games in foreign lands for money. What is the fundamental problem?

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The strange collaboration between religious fundamentalism and Zimbabwe's media

Chido Makunike

Alongside Zimbabwe's great economic and political challenges, another big social phenomenon of the last decade or so has been the astonishing rise of an aggressive form of religious fundamentalism. Still to be well-studied and explained, it is perhaps not surprising that when a society is under deep stress, fundamentalist thinking and answers including the religious have huge appeal. There are now signs that the gradual 'normalization' of Zimbabwean society from its 'crisis decade' has also began to create the conditions for more people to question many of the more outlandish claims and practices of the religious fundamentalist wave. But if that fundamentalist wave has finally peaked and is now waning, it is in spite of rather than because of the role of the media in this strange period in Zimbabwe's development.

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Alarming disconnect between Zimbabwe banking sector and its customers

Chido Makunike

Zimbabwean banks and their customers might as well be on different planets about their ideas about what is minimally acceptable service. While banks have previously been firmly in the driver's seat in this regard, recent and growing political and public pressure on them is shifting the power dynamics somewhat, with the customers' concerns at least getting more of a public airing than before. However, the banks remain largely tone-deaf to the reasons for so much public disgruntlement with their levels of service.

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