Posted on 07/07/2003 9:59:03 AM PDT by Pan_Yans Wife
If a man comes up to you in the street and asks you for your wallet, do you beg him to take your cellphone too?
Do you strip off your clothes and shoes and give them to him and then lie down on the tarmac and say: “Oh please, here are my house keys, this is my address, go and clean out everything else I own too?”
No I haven’t gone mad, but I begin to think Zimbabwe has, because this is exactly what we are allowing our government to do and have been for the last three years and four months.
Zimbabwe has so many national assets that belong to each and every one of us and yet, day by day, month by month we are just giving them away.
To Libya, a country most of us know absolutely nothing about, we have given farms and hunting concessions.
Then we gave them service stations and hotels and now our government talks of giving them our oil pipeline and Msasa fuel storage facilities.
To Libya, a country whose leader has been in power for 33 years, and to whom 57 young Zimbabwean people recently went for some sort of “training”, we have sold our souls.
To the jointly owned Belgian and French Total Fina Elf, we have sold the Beitbridge storage facilities and are in the process of selling 51 percent of the shares in Zimbabwe’s oil blending enterprises.
To China, we have awarded tenders to work parts of our farming lands – the very land that the government tells us every day belongs only to black Zimbabweans.
“Our land is our prosperity” is the ZANU PF slogan and yet they cannot give it away fast enough.
To a country on the other side of the planet, we have sold our pride and dignity.
To South Africa’s Reserve Bank we have handed over surety and securities to the value of R82.5 million (Z$8.83 billion) in the last few years. What are these sureties – mines perhaps or the Hwange coal reserves or the Kariba turbines?
To a country whose leader will not say that the murder, torture and rape of Zimbabweans are human rights abuses, we have mortgaged our present and future.
What about the national jewels that have been sold that we do not know about? How did we pay for all the water cannons and riot gear that came from Israel?
How did we pay for the fuel that has come from Kuwait and Angola? What did we give to Malaysia and Indonesia in exchange for their kindness to our government?
To the ZANU PF elite, the army and political chefs, we gave all our farms, our homes, the jobs of half a million workers and the food on our tables. We gave them the wildlife conservancies, the game and the indigenous trees.
We gave them the dams and boreholes we had built, the millions of kilometres of underground water pipes, irrigation lines and reservoirs.
Then, when we had given them all this, we let them tell us what a shambles it was all in.
We let men who had taken all these precious national and individual assets conduct an audit and say: “Oops, sorry Zimbabwe, we’ve taken everything but we still cannot grow food for you, put petrol in your cars or bank notes in the finance houses.”
To a party that has taken away our freedom of speech, movement and association, we have given our self-sufficiency, diversity and food from our cupboards.
So who owns Zimbabwe now that our national treasures and family jewels have been given away? Is it Libya or China, Kuwait or Belgium, South Africa or ZANU PF? It certainly isn’t us, the ordinary Zimbabweans.
When our government has given, sold or mortgaged everything in our country, what will there be left for your children and mine?
How many decades will it take for us to buy back the family jewels, the birthrights that our government have given away?
The national treasures are almost all gone. Our children, be they of ZANU PF or MDC parents, will have nothing to inherit.
Colin Powell was right when he said that soon there would be nothing left to ruin in Zimbabwe. The biggest irony of this tragedy is that our government is turning us into a foreign-owned colony faster than we can read their slogans that proclaim “Zimbabwe will never be a colony again!”
By Cathy Buckle
Cathy Buckle writes on social issues
Only marginally worse than Bonnie and Clod.
If these dictators were to lose their billions over nite, believe me, we would see changes just as quickly.
They are all gambling on stepping down and out of power, into another country to live their lives as kings.
So now before its to late. Pressure the Swiss......
These tyrants around the world would not be so quick to build up billion dollar fortunes at the detrement of their own people, if it could be disclosed what they had and where they had it, at any time and at the end of the day, that it could be confiscated.
If the Swiss will not change the laws then we should close their banks, do not do business with swiss banks or multi national companies (Nestle, ABB etc. Famous watch companies) Then lets see them go back to making chocolate and milking goats.
At the end of the day, why would a non Swiss national need to put millions of dollars in a foreign account without anyone knowing about it?
If we really want to stop terrorism, the drug trade and Tyrants, then lets stop these invisible foreign bank accounts for individuals and companies.
Then we could ban the opening of accounts to foreign nationals unless you were working in that country, and all amounts would be disclosable to all, including the tax-man.
All foreign politicans, leaders of countries etc. would not be allowed accounts in foreign countries. We should also stop this 3rd country transfers, Someone from Dubai calls Switzerland and asks them to transfer US$20,000 dollars to someone in Sudan, and with no names in Switzerland, just numbers, its untracable.
How they could do it in the US is another thing. However I think when a President is elected he should by law, delare all is interests, except for his current account. All Investements, Trusts and properties etc. no matter how small.
This should also apply to all senators and governors, in fact any elected offical, this way nobody would be able to hide conflicts of interest. At the end of a tenure they should be auditored and any discrepancies made public, also at any time during their tenure they would be subject to audit. If you have a clean house it is much easier for you to tell others to get theirs in order. However you will probably find a number od senior US and British politicians have Swiss bank accounts with untold amounts of money.
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