Jim Devine wrote:
>> Out of the necessity to exist, to ensure my people survive, I had to
find myself printing money.<
Translation: "my people" means the Zanu(PF) elite.
>
> it's more likely that he was forced to print money because Mugabe
> couldn't balance the government's budget
It's just as likely that he skims off a fair bit, according to local
wisdom and some embarrassing evidence. It's also likely there's a
long-term capitalist crisis in Zim which is met with ultra-Keynesian
crony capitalism. A longish riff in the Devinian tradition (I think):
http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/Bond%20Zimbabwe%27s%20Long%20Economic%20Crisis.pdf
***
Sunday Times (UK), 21 December 2008
Lavish life of Mugabes looter-in-chief
As starving Zimbabweans face their bleakest Christmas ever, the head of
the state bank puts the last touches to his 47-bedroom palaceJon Swain,
Harare
In the rich and leafy northern Harare suburb of Borrowdale Brook, Gideon
Gono, who as governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe is President
Robert Mugabes right-hand man and financial adviser, is having the
finishing touches put to a lavish mansion that he started building
several years ago. The castle-like house has 47 en suite bedrooms and a
glass swimming pool with underlights, a gym bigger than many good houses
in the Zimbabwean capital, a mini-theatre and landscaped gardens. His
house is one of the biggest in Harare - bigger, in fact, than Mugabes,
which is nearby, hidden behind a high wall and guarded by soldiers. No
one except Gono knows for sure how much the mansion cost, but the
architects originally said they expected it would reach more than $5m on
completion. This is enough to build and equip at least four primary
schools in Zimbabwe.
Gono is not ready to move in just yet. Extra security sensors were
recently installed on the outside perimeter and biometric iris
recognition and finger print authentication systems were fitted in the
interior, but he has yet to be convinced that it is entirely safe.
Whether he moves house or not, Gono is hardly facing a miserable
Christmas, unlike the millions whose lives have been wrecked by the
once-prosperous countrys economic meltdown. They are coping with
constant power and water cuts, food shortages and now the terror of
cholera. The disease has struck because the government has spent so much
money corruptly rather than investing in a clean water supply for its
people. More than 1,100 have died in the epidemic, nearly 21,000 have
been infected and there is no end in sight.
"Where is the joy this Christmas?" asked Mercy Gunda, a housewife, as
she stood in a long queue at a bank to withdraw money last Friday. "The
city is full of people queueing at banks. They are not doing Christmas
shopping. If there are any Christmas presents to be bought for the
children this year it will be school uniforms." Last week I met Palimaga
Malani, a 67-year-old blind widow whose task this Christmas is to look
after seven children whose parents have died of Aids. They live together
in Bulawayo in a house hardly bigger than a walk-in wardrobe in Gonos
mansion. Somehow she makes sure that with the donations she receives
from a local church the children are neatly turned out and fed. "I am
very well really, but I am hungry," she said. The cataracts that caused
her blindness are curable but she cannot afford the operation to restore
her sight. A few streets away was another family of orphaned children,
the youngest two being cared for by a 15-year-old girl, Anyanga. They
survive by selling ice lollies on the streets.
Gono, however, has plenty of houses and several farms that were seized
from white commercial farmers over the years. Zimbabwe was the
breadbasket of southern Africa and one of the worlds top exporters of
tobacco until 2000, when Mugabe started seizing white farms under the
guise of redistributing them to black Zimbabweans to right the wrongs of
the colonial past. But he gave them largely to his cronies and
entourage. This chaotic land reform programme, plagued by violence, was
condemned as racist by five African judges in southern Africas regional
court in a test case bought by 78 farmers, a ruling that Zimbabwe has
refused to accept although it is bound by treaty to do so. The land
seizures have created chronic food shortages and a crisis that has led a
third of the population to flee abroad and half of those remaining to
depend on food aid to survive.
As Mugabes right-hand man, Gono is a beneficiary of the crisis. "He has
been looting big time," said one of his many critics, a once wealthy
Harare businessman who had crossed swords with Gono several times.
"Mugabe has just reappointed him governor of the Reserve Bank of
Zimbabwe [RBZ] for another five years, so it must be great for him. Any
loot that comes in he grabs. It is no longer the Reserve Bank of
Zimbabwe; it is a bank reserved for him and the president's cronies. If
Mugabe has a degree in violence, which he has often said he has, Gono
has a degree in corruption." In fact, Gono, who started out as a tea boy
at the central bank, has a doctorate in strategic management, but it is
from a nonaccredited American university. Some of Gonos farms are not
in working order - far from unusual among Mugabes entourage, who have
so many farms that they sometimes do not know what to do with them.
Take the case of Elias Musakwa. A stalwart of Mugabes Zanu PF party, he
is a gospel singer at night with his own recording studio, a banker by
day working with Gono in the upper echelons of the RBZ, and an
occasional farmer at the weekend on a farm he seized. Last year he
grabbed a dairy farm that once supplied 2% of Harares milk. It now has
four goats and a few sheep, while hundreds of cows that produced the
milk have perished. "If you do not have a sense of humour you dont
survive here," said one Zimbabwean, who told of government officials
using their posts to steal fuel, pay their childrens school fees and
fund the inflated wages of their gardeners and maids, all for a few
hours work a week. "Everything is weird in this country," he said.
While so much is collapsing all around, one of Gonos biggest farms near
Norton, 50 miles from Harare, where he has installed two white managers,
is fully functional, a glaring example of how he and the powerful men
around Mugabe abuse their power. When it is dry, the farm draws water to
irrigate the fields though a pipe-line linked to a reservoir 25 miles
away which Gono installed at vast expense. The reservoir water is
supposed to be for the people of Harare. The city has minimal municipal
water of its own. In the poorest suburbs, where houses are made out of
tin and plastic, children were playing in pools of untreated sewage last
week and families were still collecting water from broken pipes. Cholera
has killed 224 people in Harare, with more than 9,000 suffering from it.
Many affluent parts of the city have no municipal water but survive on a
system of privately dug boreholes.
In 2003, when Gono took office, inflation was 619%. It is now well in
excess of 231m%. A police inspectors Christmas bonus last week was
worth one American cent on the widely used parallel black market. Little
wonder that, on Friday, anger against Gono spilt into the streets of
Harare for the second time in a month. A mob threw rocks at the Reserve
Bank building. Many were low-grade civil servants such as prison staff
who had been trying to get money for Christmas, only to find that the
banks had run out of cash despite the introduction that morning of new
Z$1 billion, Z$5 billion and Z$10 billion notes. "We have fallen into
the abyss," said a friend. "Economically we were teetering on the edge.
Now we have fallen over and it is demonstrable for a number of reasons.
You go into a shop and if you dont have US dollars you starve. People
dont want Zimbabwean dollars. They are worthless." He pointed out of
the window into a grubby lane below where people had dumped thousands of
banknotes which had become redundant.
There are many heroes in Zimbabwe still trying to make the country work.
One is a 28-year-old male nurse at a Bulawayo hospital who was
struggling this weekend to care for a ward of 63 children on his own.
Unable to obtain their wages from the banks because of the shortage of
banknotes, many of his colleagues have given up coming to work. It was
too burdensome and expensive for them to travel or they have moved to
South Africa to try to earn a living. Behind the male nurse was the body
of a two-year-old boy lying under a sheet on a table. He had died that
morning from severe malnutrition and septicaemia from sores on his body.
"We survive by so many ways," the nurse said. "We adjust; we barter. I
have been tempted to leave like many of my colleagues so many times, but
I need to look after my mother, father and young brothers and sisters."
Looking at the small bundle beneath the sheet, he said: "This boy should
never have died." "When you meet somebody like that young man you feel
that is why there is still hope in this country," said Stella Allberry,
health secretary of a faction of the opposition Movement for Democratic
Change who has been jailed before. "The one God-given thing we have is
hope. And the one thing I dont want Mugabe to take from me is hope."
Hope for too many has disappeared, however. At a cholera clinic near the
Mozambique border, a 23-year-old mother was watching her seven-year-old
daughter die of cholera and malaria on Monday. It had taken her almost
12 hours to bring the child to the clinic on foot. Others were carried
there in wheelbarrows. As the country crumbled, Mugabes ruling Zanu PF
party was desperately trying to put on a show of unity at its annual
party conference. Even before it began, the facade of unity was
cracking. The party is increasingly riven with factionalism, shown by an
unprecedented outbreak of fighting at its Harare headquarters on Monday
night. Police had to use water cannons to break up a pitched battle over
the election of a new leadership for Harare province. This internal
party violence followed the mysterious wounding of Perence Shiri, the
powerful air force chief, in an alleged assassination attempt, and the
arrests and abduction of opposition members, human rights activists and
journalists who have vanished without trace. The government charges that
the opposition has set up secret military training camps in Botswana to
overthrow it, aided by the West.
Zimbabwe is entering an unpredictable, unstable and dangerous phase. In
the next few days Gono is expected to head off for a holiday in
Malaysia. Mugabe would normally go there, too. Apart from a holiday,
both men have assets in the region in the aftermath of western sanctions
and it is a favourite destination. But diplomats last week wondered
whether the 84-year-old president would risk leaving Zimbabwe at this
time. He has been in power for 28 years and is outwardly still defiant.
"Zimbabwe is mine," he said on Friday, rejecting calls to step down. "I
will never, never sell my country. I will never, never, never
surrender." Nor, say many suffering Zimbabweans, are they going to
surrender hope for change as they celebrate the bleakest Christmas of
their lives. In Bulawayo, 1,000 people, black and white, turned out for
a candlelit carol service in the rundown amphitheatre of a once
beautiful park. The children were delighted. There was a nativity play
and a brass band played. "It made the children happy," said a mother.
"When it came to the end we prayed for them. Our prayer was that the
children would not be hungry next year."
***
21/1/2004
How Mugabe mans suitcase full of dollars fuelled buying spree
EDWIN LOMBARD
ZIMBABWES Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono personally facilitated the
deal which saw the countrys former Finance Minister Chris Kuruneri buy
a multimillion-rand mansion in Llandudno, Cape Town, with a suitcase
full of cash.
Lorenzo Bruttomesso, Kuruneris lawyer in South Africa, who handled the
transaction, told a Cape Town court this week that his client had
arranged the payment through the Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe, and dealt
directly with Gono, the banks chief executive at the time.
Bruttomesso said Gono assured him that the funds were legitimate.
Kuruneri told Bruttomesso that he earned the money by doing consultation
work overseas.
Kuruneri was arrested after the Sunday Times exposed his purchase of the
Llandudno house. Zimbabwe wants to prosecute him for illegally syphoning
foreign currency out of the cash-strapped country.
Once one of President Robert Mugabes favourites, Kuruneri has been
languishing in a Harare jail for seven months, his bail applications
denied, and no trial date yet set.
While he is in jail, the Mercedes-Benz he never managed to collect
gathers dust in a Claremont showroom, and weeds overrun the site of one
of his properties.
Some of Kuruneris business associates gave evidence to a Cape Town
magistrate this week after Zimbabwean authorities asked the South
African government to help with their investigation against him. The
Cape Town Magistrates Court heard how Kuruneri spent money freely, buying:
A R548 000 Mercedes-Benz;
A R5.2-million palatial mansion in Llandudno, on which he spent a
further R1-million renovating;
Another R2.7-million house in Llandudno which he had demolished to
build a three-storey mansion costing R7.8-million; and
A R2.5-million flat in Sea Point.
One of the key people to testify this week was Chris Hayman, a Cape Town
property developer who acted as a go-between in Kuruneris business
deals. Hayman said he did not find it strange that his client carried a
suitcase stuffed with cash.
The court heard that Kuruneri had so much cash he had been forced to
install a safe so big that it had to be hoisted by a crane into one of
the properties he bought.
Hayman said he met Kuruneri in 2001 after being told by a client that
the Zimbabwean was interested in buying 17 Apostle Road, Llandudno, a
large home with sea views.
Hayman recalled that he met Kuruneri, who was holding a suitcase
containing about R5-million in US dollars, at the President Hotel in Sea
Point in 2001.
Kuruneri wanted to buy another two properties, one at 38 Sunset Road,
Llandudno and a Sea Point flat belonging to businessman Neil Bernstein.
Hayman arranged for Kuruneri to pay the money into a bank account.
Bernstein said he thought Kuruneri was a gentleman of questionable
integrity and contacted the Scorpions.
Hayman, however, said he researched Kuruneri on the Internet and found
nothing suspicious. He is still acting as the jailed politicians agent
and managing his properties.
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