Tendai Biti vs Gideon Gono: The Saga Continues

Feeling the heat: Gideon Gono, seen here with his principal, Robert "The Solution" Mugabe, is now twisting this way and that, fighting to get back the enormous powers that the Zimbabwe dollar gave him. All his suggestions and justifications in the Fingaz newspaper today are merely designed to help his case for the return of the Zimdollar, so that he can yet again print more money and exercise the financial indiscipline for which he is famous the world over.

Harare, Zimbabwe, 20 August 2009

Zimbabwe is very lucky to have Tendai Biti as Finance in light of recent noises by Gideon Gono, the Reserve Bank Governor calling for the reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar.

The calls by Gideon Gono defy common sense, but not if you know what his game is.

The advent of the US dollar and South African Rand in Zimbabwe has cut the ground from underneath Gideon Gono.

He was used to printing money willy-nilly, which money he would disperse at Roadport in Harare and other centres all over Zimbabwe to buy cheap foreign currency to fund Grace Mugabe's extravagant trips t Malaysia and Singapore.

Gono, now finding these powers taken away from him, is fighting for the Zimdollar to be returned so that he can once again reign supreme and make grown men quake in their boots, terrorising not only bankers but businessmen of every hue.

Tendai Biti is aware of this and that is why he s holding out. Gono must not be allowed to get back that power because he has proved incompetent and inconsistent with policies, veering this way and that all through his tenure.

Today Gono has a long-winded article in the Financial Gazette, which he owns, explaining himself on the issue of the reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar.

Last week, he also published the same "case for the Zimbabwe dollar" in an online newspaper that he is said to have bought, together with the CIO.

It is all nonsense and the idiot should be left to swing in the wind, no one should pay any attention to him at all.

His case, be it Gold Standard or whatever is simply designed to give him some of the powers that he lost under the Inclusive Government era.

Gono himself lacks discipline in fiscal matters as evidenced by private debts he refuses to pay, printing money like it was going out of fashion and so on. If, by some mistake, he is given the Zimbabwe dollar back, he will simply revert back to his old ill-disciplined ways and blame everybody else but himself in the process.

Biti and Tsvangirai are correct, the environment for the reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar do not exist yet.

Gold deliveries continue to plummet, the value of our diamond reserves is not properly quantified and besides, if we can not benefit from any sales of diamonds now, how can we ever use the same resources to anchor our currency?

His case is an idiotic one and should hit out of the park with the contempt it deserves.

Biti made it clear within his own circle when he took over as Finance Minister that he expected Gono to be begging for money to run the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe within six months. He abolished all the little irksome levies that Gono had used to fund his own "government" at the Reserve Bank, which now had thousand upon thousands of workers meddling in every sphere of life.

Let Gono continue wearing raincoat and hawking loose diamonds at street corners. Our economy is better off without him. He can concentrate on his newspapers, online and offline, his chicken business and everything else, but he could leave our economy the way it is. People are happy with it like that.

His concern for our rural folk, displayed in his article in the Fingaz newspaper today, is the height of hypocrisy. These rural folk never benefited from any of schemes to any significant degree, because Gono used his powers to spread patronage instead of helping the country.

He is just making noise and should be ignored by the Minister of Finance, who has now finally put him in his place.