29 July 2009: MDC Tsvangirai Minister Arrested For Stealing Mobile Phone

Inclusive Cabinet Being Sworn in, February this year. A deputy Minister from the MDC Tsvangirai in this cabinet had been arrested for stealing a cellphone belonging to "War Veterans leader" Joseph Chinotimba.

First, apologies, it appears I spoke too soon. No sooner had sung the praises of Nelson Chamisa than Internet connection in Zimbabwe collapsed entirely.

While we are back online at the Mavambo offices, with out phones and internet connection restored, my other internet connections went completely dead.

Curiously, last night, as I was working on some posts for the blog and doing other housekeeping things, electricity at the office was also switched off. It is almost unheard of for power to go in the city centre and, even more suspicious, the power went only on the block where our offices are (about ten building on one side of George Silundika. As I drove out, everywhere else there was power).

But we could never expect anything else from this Inclusive Misgovernment.

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Anyway, to today's embarrassing story:

A deputy Minister from Prime Minister Tsvangira's party has been arrested for stealing a mobile phone belonging to Ware Veterans leader Joseph Chinotimba.

The cellphone, it is alleged, went missing at the recently-ended and intially-disrupted Constitutional Conference at the Harare International Conference Centre.

Chinotimba says he left it on the table where he was sitting with other delegates, including MDC-T Deputy Minister of Youth Development, Indigenisation and Empowerment Thamsanqa Mahlangu.

Apparently Chinotimba, upon coming back and seeing his cellphone missing, announced that someone had taken his Nokia phone from where he had been sitting. No one owned.

The police subsequently tracked the phone down to a woman in Hwange, who is said to have been using the SIM card. When she was arrested by the police, she said she had picked up the SIM card from the trash bin, where Mahlangu had thrown it.

The minister was duly arrested.

It all sounds rather fishy, does it not? And it is almost certainly part of the ZANU PF ploy of trying to reduce the majority of the MDC-T in parliament.

It is a well known fact in Zimbabwe that if you lose a cellphone, unless you take action yourself and succeed, there is no hope of recovering the thing. Police are notoriously inept on matters like these. They are are even inept on matters of murder.

It is then surprising that they acted so quickly and were successful in getting a SIM card from Hwange. Certainly the new-found efficiency is surprising.

If the MDC-T had not abandoned its own MPS who are being harassed by the State, it would have been interesting for them to investigate the woman herself. It may well turn out that she has close ties to ZANU PF or that she is was a delegate at the Conference on behalf of ZANU PF.

If the accusation against the Deputy Minister is true, then it really shows the sort of characters we have leading us now. We have known for years that ZANU PF is full of thieves and murderers, but most people thought the MDC-T was driven by the desire for democracy and protection of life and limb and property for Zimbabwe.

This would now be exposed as a lie.

Let us just hope that, if convicted, the Deputy Minister will not be jailed for six months or more, because this would immediately make his seat in parliament vacant under Section 45 of the Constitution and a by-election will have to be called.

With all this happening, we can only wonder when we will be rid of this avaricious and corrupt

lot.

This comes as reports at the weekend also revealed that 54 000 British Pounds (Sterling) has gone missing from the coffers of the MDC Tsvangirai in the United Kingdom, amidst reports of wives of MDC-T Senior officials calling the UK office from South Africa to ask for 10 000 pounds to be transferred to them, whch has not been accounted for!!

The matter of the Deputy Minister was postponed yesterday at the courts.