Let's Get Zimbabwe Queuing Again

Teacher protesting in Harare late last month. The Inclusive Thingy is broke, Mugabe is calling US diplomats "idiots" and Prime Minister Tsvangirai says all is well and people should just "listen to me."

Just as I warned you all a few weeks back, Zimbabwe is now in the grip of an inexplicable shortage of fuel.

True, it is not as bad as the days when there was not even a drop in the whole country, but queues have started to form again at service stations.

And they are long queues.

(You will recall that I told you that an importer was telling me that "there just is no money in the country" to import fuel and that some importers were shipping in consignments as small as 2000 litres and these were being snapped by by companies like Caltex, which is supposed to importing fuel itself.

The problem is that, ideologically, the MDCs and ZANU PF are cut from the same cloth. Hence Tendai Biti had no compunction about putting penalty duties on fuel that is brought into Zimbabwe by road.

The Inclusive government "encourages" the use of the Beira Corridor, which is itself controlled by government and can be used by the National Oil Company, NOCZIM, to import as much fuel as they want.

Private capital does not trust the pipeline from Beira in Mozambique because this government has a record of diverting things that belong to other people (witness the raiding of foreign currency from private accounts.)

So, quite apart from the lack of any substantial injection of capital to even import fuel for Zimbabwe, we also have myopic, socialistic policies that seek to patronise the people of Zimbabwe and treat them like children.

The policies actually do more harm than the lack of funds.

For it is the policies themselves that ensure that there are no funds coming into Zimbabwe.

Nobody trusts this Inclusive Thingy. Only last week, a senior NGO official here in Zimbabwe was telling us of his horror when he found out what it that the Inclusive Thingy is doing with money that is handed to it. He was especially surprised at the behaviour of MDC ministers and officials, of whom better was to be expected.

We still suffer blackouts, electricity being switched off for hours on end.

There is still no water in our taps.

Out in the rural areas, they are selling their livestock and emptying their granaries of whatever little they harvested so that they may get foreign currency with which to buy basic stuff and the like.

I suppose when the Inclusive Thingy stole the Mavambo slogan: Let's Get Zimbabwe Working Again for their 100-day wishlist and the laughable STERP, this is exactly what they had in mind: Let's Get Zimbabwe Queuing Again!

There is no reason at all for tolerating any of this.