MATUMWA MAWERE RISES AGAIN

Today's ZWNEWS as rivetting as ever:

“The ferocious battle among Mugabe's cronies and information emerging over the goings-on in the operations of the SMM empire have clearly exemplified the nature of the relationship between politicians and businessmen in Zimbabwe. Since Gono is Mugabe's closest ally, sources say his recommendations will soon be implemented and Mawere will get his companies back. For all that, Mawere will have to thank Zuma for enabling his chance meeting with Mugabe which kickstarted the events that have resulted in Gono's recommendations”.
250709 from Basildon Peta in The Star (SA).

Colonial Relic (DM)’s comment:
Marvellous! We watchers at the time knew full well what was going on. Mawere was not about to hand over his profits (or a large proportion of them) to Mugabe, Gono, ZANU (PF) or any of those profit grabbers. To understand this, you have only to remember what happened to Strive Masiywa when he succeeded with Econet. He too was required, seriously threatened in fact if he did not share or hand over substantial profits of his successful business at around the same time. “Where’s ours”, they asked him. “If you want a share, you must buy shares in the business”, was his reply. (I got this indirectly from the horses mouth).The excellent Basildon Peta, reporting from South Africa now was at one time prepared to lay down his life in opposing the ruling party’s kleptocracy (among other crimes) through his work as a journalist on the Financial Gazette. Thank goodness he fled and still lives and writes to bear witness to what went on and is still going on in the upper echelons of business in Zimbabwe.

I was once a friend of Ariston Chambati who genuinely believed that an economic liberation from the grip of whites should follow political liberation. He believed that black Zimbabweans had the capacity to succeed greatly in business. (He was a personal protégé of my neighbour, a British subject who had big business interests in Zimbabwe and Malawi. But that is another story). Ariston was right, but he could not have fully understood that Mugabe’s cronies, known or unbeknown to the man ZANU (PF) now calls their `Great Leader’ would be surrounded by people who wanted a short-cut to riches, regardless of their incapacity (unlike Mawere et al) to succeed in building big businesses. Ariston was formally a great (PF) ZAPU stalwart but he joined ZANU (PF) in order to achieve his ambition to prove what Zimbabweans could do in business. He was a top business executive at the time. He became Minister of Finance but died relatively young before he could show what he could do.

My own less than humble opinion is that he would not have been allowed to function in competition with the ambitions of to Gono whose major ambition was to retain the financial favours and thus, by cronyism, the power of Mugabe. With Mbeki gone there is plenty of room for speculation about the way the new S.A President Zuma will act vis-à-vis Zimbabwe’s business potential (rich deposits of diamonds recently discovered is one item that comes to mind). Cecil Rhodes a mining magnate, among his other talents, founded Rhodesia which is now Zimbabwe in the belief that gold, not diamonds would help finance his great investment. It was in Kimberly in South Africa that diamonds excited him.

A pun sparkles here: Rhodesia, in spite of the absence of diamonds, and for the sake of gold this and for reasons more complex than mining, became a gem of a country.