(HERALD) Thank you, Manheru for turning the tide

Thank you, Manheru for turning the tide
By B. T. Manyati

AS I write my eye is very sore. One good thing is that it still sees. That eyes will always bulge is to me quite an occupational hazard. Research and more research is the order of the day with my chosen area of work.

A lecturer by profession, and one who has made it a point to lecture to majors, yes indeed I am one who went this way for survival? For with an economy under sanctions you had to survive somehow. If the office and wearing a tie had become too uncomfortable you had to think outside the box and see how else you could surge ahead, at least without selling out your beloved country.

To imagine they still do not want to remove sanctions and that for some among us no matter how educated, deliberately mistake the sanctions for restrictive measures.
The question we should ask ourselves is why be restricted by anybody anyway? Every human being errs. Worldwide papers are awash with sins of both the restrictor and the restricted. Perhaps any self declared restrictor should read again and see that when the Holy book says all are sinners it is not condoning sin.

It is simply instructing the restrictor to sort out the very log in his own eye. We stand vindicated to challenge sanctions no matter that it now appears anyone who has spoken against them would have invited sanctions to his or her doorstep. The more a restriction is thrown at almost every disagreeing voice the more it is rendered laughable and petty for which it is.

The beauty of the matter is even he who sets a restriction through a lie deep down inside knows only the truth will set him free. In a similar sense many a brother among us has sold out and deep down we know it. We deep down know how true it is that which our old men narrate. Then get barraged and bruised but still they call many a time a spade a spade.

Lies will imprison us if the truth is what will set us free. Izvowo hazvo tinongotaura mati pane paungabvuma here kuti ndakaita Mari nekutengesa nyika? Our old men and women have stood strong under very challenging times; there is not much else they should do anyway because they are on duty, if they sleep on duty, day and night guard of Zimbabwe that is when they may as well be called to resign.

Are there any strong young men out there? I challenge you to come out of that shell and speak up for your country. You may wake up to find the time you want to speak the country would have already gone to the woods, dead and buried the tie will be.
The young ones I have heard the most bellow out certain selected choruses for the money. They want it easy. Flying to the US or Europe on donated tickets. But easy does not come cheap. Promises of the future young leaders of Africa are cheap too. Lest our hope and dreams and we, all perish cowardly. We all crave to attain riches but the bottom line is how we accrue those riches.

They should never be celebrated if attained through chicanery, or betrayal. Had I been writing from a rich man’s house you may well have said, after all he who writes is the kith and kin of a colonel. I say it because that is now the tendency. No I am not. I do not remember being related to any such from the day I realised I was Zimbabwean by origin and got told who I relate to by the conceiving parent.

Manheru, Minister Misihairambwi and Minister Biti from where I stand are all bold and coincidentally rich (at least) too. Let me now add my insights from the least expected side of the not at all rich (just for now). Whoever has got the motto vasingazive ngavadzidziswe let me say I like it, just do not know the manner of teaching practiced after yelling out.

Let me touch the one of the various issues that Minister Biti wrote on in my beloved Saturday Herald. Beloved is it because of Nathaniel? All I can say is talent is easy to pick in politics or sport, yes anywhere. We all write but some write better still. I used to come second to some left handed guy. I saw a question in one of our papers whether left-handedness is a curse or a blessing.

My answer is the last of the two. I could not help noticing he was talented. To eventually beat him on the last O-Level second term I had to get him closer to me, give him my own Mathematics past exam papers and let him work every question while I followed and reserved the paper scribbled over to myself, of course for later reference.

I would love to think people like Minister Biti know very well how once listed Randalls Holdings disintegrated. He may be well aware that we now no longer have the once vibrant Fredk. Sage P/L in the construction circles. Then I was young and very observant. Liquidity crisis was hugely cited for the downfall, I bet you there will be more than meets the eye.

That liquidity crisis song got so many renditions in years that then followed accompanied with restructuring exercises. To think companies are run by the educated executives with a chain of qualifications but still have their current and investment accounts run dry and very much so to the negative of all negatives without proactively noticing through practice of well learnt theory, does anybody out there remember the Baumols and the Miller Orrs.

Manheru is right when he claims we cannot all be fooled but some. In my view some of the management very much on its own failed, but if you check the dates of the collapse and how they coincide with the early 2000, you will also realise how it can be easy for our detractors to tell you it was all because of authoritarian tendencies that all companies fell apart.

Why I also lament this is because one day I had to sit with a son of one of the directors that you my dear Minister claims our government sent fleeing. Yes, the son was bitter at Dr Gono, as to how could he treat his father this way and felt pity which people we were that did not want to see our own thrive. I took that opportunity by the horns, sat the young man down lest he emotionally and foolishly followed his father’s steps.

I happened to be a finance man at his father’s premises so I showed him several of transactions between the bank his father served and my employer company then, his father’s.

Loans my dear Minister that would come from a then reputable bank those days in an influx, just channelled out like that from unaware depositors’ money and see how the recipient company’s kith and kin would abuse.

After all there being no checks and balances funds borrowed for productive sector funding would buy the 4x4s, the gimmick would of course be that they are to be used in rough terrain which cleverly matches business operations. But you want to pick how these four wheel drives were quite an in thing round about the time. I am glad the young guy ceased to be emotional learnt not to follow his father`s malpractices in a way.

The time Dr Gono came in he appeared to very much have been noticing the underhand deals in the banking sector and when the whip had been passed into his hand he just had to crack it, hence the bellowing and the loud cries, some of them misrepresenting as they echoed and reverberated even louder.

When Dr Gono cracked his whip, the company I have cited was caught up heavily indebted, the source of funding remember had been forced to skip borders citing a witch-hunt of course, the then managers managed to hide the originality of the indebtedness anyway and eventually had to sell it, and quite obvious too workers got retrenched.

See how we all suffer silently and some just want to wake up and blame it all on Dr Gono, uyezve kusanyara, doing all the blame game while residing in far away places.
Is this not a case of uncontrolled borrowing and lending? Were not all these hard earned saved moneys being siphoned towards wrong ends all due to malpractices of the well to do only in appearance? Let us have hearts for the people they cried out loud when they woke up to find there was no money in the bank. This explains to some extent how that money was getting siphoned out wrongly.

My advice, Minister is let’s not be too quick to cleanse and exonerate all the names you listed as the persecuted by the Zanu-PF government. Let us rather say when we decide on forgiving one another we should simply end at that. The forgivers better be the people not any one political party above all who up until now do not know where their money went and how.

Minister as it appears, you have been hoodwinked into believing the very government you serve is like a mother that lets a baby suck and at the same time suffocate it. It amazes me how lies can end up winning even the supposedly very brilliant minds. Read the Holy Book it proffers advice and says in the last days even the very elect will be deceived.
To be fair to you Minister foreign papers and local but foreign owned papers we will read because they are a must read, however for the simple and good reason that they betray the inner thinking of the more informed components in the foreign lands. Your own efforts towards helping shape up are laudable and also given the fact that you have since stopped lambasting your colleague in the Press. Honourable Minister, our government like any government anywhere in the world might err here and there but not all gospels should become acceptable to the extent of being used in arguments without close scrutiny.

I guess that Nathaniel’s bone of contention half the time, that lets scrutinise first or else we are laughed at by those who would have known we have taken or grabbed and ran with their gospels, not knowing the very guns will blaze at us sooner or later.
At another point I asked one top manager at some company why they opted to sell to just one buyer outside Zimbabwe. My Maths was not adding up when I found that they were selling to the company in a neighbouring country at slightly above cost price and hence forth making huge losses.

Such a monopsony situation whereby a Zimbabwean owned company chooses a buyer’s market yet you are tilling and growing in a bleeding economy is just not premised right. Lacks wisdom all the excuses the top manager tried to array before me.
Perhaps he thought I was still a kid in knowing about transfer pricing, parent companies and foreign subsidiaries, not knowing I teach that day and night. My point exactly Minister is not all companies collapsed due to economic hardships or the misrule of a government as they want us to believe all the time.

We also need to agree a good number got swept off the feet due to imprudent governance and also tell the world out there part of that story. You the politicians should because none among the private sector would want their faults mentioned.
Above all we should know it squarely that no political party which is fancying its chances will want to speak loudly about this misrule in private entities lest it weaken its self perpetuating points. But winning that way will be like losing.
Let me turn on to the white man and the black man. It is somehow big than the Shona and Ndebele issue, given that the white man appears to amass a good amount of support externally.

There is nothing wrong with any one among the two skin colours neither should any one skin colour look up to the other. If any one colour demands the later you realise the wrongness. Most black owned companies are fond of employing staff that is under qualified so as to save money.

Money served in the wrong way will naturally get lost. You see so many Accountants, Administrators and Managers very much under qualified and categorically should not be blamed on the government.

How whites work this one out to me is a miracle. I have visited several of their companies where any unqualified kith and kin call the shots but the company is still run proper and smooth. I also have realised it must be because of some thing they benefit from us blacks. The unqualified white fellow is given all the respect by the highly intellect and more educated blacks subordinated to him.

That kind of respect lacks in similar black intellects under a not so qualified leader. The white fellow looks stable as a leader as these guys already have ownership of the money.

This tells us blacks to raise ourselves to owning the money. There is nothing wrong with our leadership, let us sort out the money element by accepting real change which comes through owning and sharing the resources that multiply the money or we continue to be looked at as if the bringing in of the black skin colour comes with some inefficiency or ineffectiveness.

Black skin has tended to hide its arguments against the white skin colour on face to face situations but only to share sentiments that these folks should catch up on A,B,C and D. The benefit of speaking openly before one another is to ensure that the other party knows you beg to differ, the same manner they beg to differ with you.
Now if we confess half truths or full truths away from real confrontation, it does little to help matters. It actually worsens a status quo that is in its very state the reason for so many discomforts this world has had to endure.

Something else better to discuss is that there must have been something wrong with the whites of old too. Why for too long they forgot to share in a foreign land. It must be due to the relaxation that comes from thinking we have fooled everybody else. That is tantamount to living a falsehood, hence they woke up to a rude awakening with the advent of what their foreign mouthpieces have chosen to call a land grab yet I call it a land reform exercise.

Land was the footnote of the armed struggle and I do not need many jingles on ZTV to stand reminded of that. Was it a case of mutorwa ane hanganwa? Is there anybody out there telling them that shona is this rich. I personally believe whites of today are now better experienced to share. Nobody can just have it all. This piece alone reminds me of my working days at farms in Karoi, Kadoma and Chegutu and my on foot visits to a good number of farms in Musana area. For interest’s sake I have asked a number of farm workers whether there were any specially built compound houses (maKomboni) before land reform. I developed this question because the very first time I visited a Komboni I did not at all like the habitation.

So I was interested in knowing whether there was anything better for the farm labourer in the days of occupation of our land by the old white men. To my surprise I have to today got a string of open ended no answers. If there was nothing better in respect of compound residences before land reform this leaves my new farmer with an opportune direction to take in as far as labour relations and good marketing of the land reform are concerned.

To new farmers I would advise, build the farm workers better compound houses or better still remove the name komboni from our vocabulary. During my workdays at farms I would be made to sleep at the Guest house and at times dine at the country club. Then of course I would visit the compound to learn better for myself. Imagine the findings, paltry if not despicable habitations.

We need to speak out that this did not result with our new farmers they found it had been that way for years. The challenge to new farmers is to grow to the extent of building schools and clinics that are convenient. One day I was saddened to see a shoeless farm worker’s son travel some long distance to a school and wondered what it meant with this kid doing it every week working day, to and from.

Obviously some cars zooming past, cars of them who were supposed to know better that they had for along time not invested to the extent that satisfies social welfare to the full. We should all see that some times skin colour is a big issue that we also underplay, for the survival of humanity or else all hell can easily break loose.
For a fact the compound residences started during the occupation of he who claims to have been better. Again to the new farmer let me hasten to say, in all for the farm worker lets just ensure with time we pay better fortnightly wages, do not make him or her walk long distances on foot and wave at our landrover jeep while we zoom past.
We should know better for he is the same skin colour as us. In a similar vein let us see reason in fighting for control of Kingdom bank and all such, for it is that Kingdom Bank and other scrupulously managed black owned institutions that should know how to confront risks of all kinds and bless our new farmer consistently with seed money. The co-existence of the haves and the have nots comes impregnated with a lot of uneasiness. To those who used to and still think they can divide us and rule, continue to dream.

To all young Ministers of the present day inclusive government and those prospective, by the way I am much younger than most of you, lets shift from a wanton need to engage in reckless criticisms, lets shun talking to please wrong masters in the first place.
What do we expect from a young guy who has been selectively flown to some privileged meeting that promises him or her to be the future leader for Africa?
You expect them not to belittle the very country they are being promised to lead by an outsider or to tell the correct view if at all they are learning leadership principles correctly but no they do not. To think these are the guys we will share boardroom meetings with in the future that will then have arrived, you realize we will be in much trouble than our predecessors.

Let us not shun reading issues about consistency and consistency in attaining Heroism, I was grateful to how our late Minister Zvobgo drove the ball on who should or not be and they should attain that status only when they have dropped dead. Let us not have promised leadership on sand. Yes, sand. It is good that it is none of us who would have made the promise but a wishful outsider who will be long gone when the anticipated fails to materialise.
Criticise one another we should. Let us not sweep our faults under the carpet. We just have to mind the manner we say things out, vakuru hava bvisiswe bhatye padare, uyezve seka urema wafa. We have our own peculiar way of dealing with faults of mukadzi waSabhuku abatwa nechikomba.

It is wrong to think our culture will not deal with her case all because it demands you to open your mouth with the respect of her title still. Our culture is rich in knowing Mai Sabhuku is human and can err as such. But she has a big role that she still has to continue playing even after erring and for that she has to be protected.
The rate at which the westerners substitute one another in the event of even slight errors is amazing, I am sure it will go on until it dawns on them one day that there is no more willing substitute. The substitute will be quite aware he too can still default.

Let us build from where our fathers and grandfathers have left than spend time brandishing about this and that in their past lives.

Ndingadzipedza dzakaitwa nababa vangu here, to the extent of gaining a law degree, ndoti ndari wana tsve zvekurishandisa zvemberi ndoda kuinvestigeta my dad’s past.
Inga handizvo zvatinoita mumhuri saka tirikurasika papi on national matters. Once in office all Ministers should get down to work, why should our legal personas continue to underpay taxes from extractions, under declare export sales, roads remain potholed and streetlights globeless, which countries will we be serving, we ask?


The vote that every political party craves for comes from the thinking internal. That’s why it should be agreed that any mock polls at this moment in time can be very misleading. Yes, they can be very misleading. Yesteryears some of us would have voted for either side because either way we were worried.

Give us a peaceful atmosphere we will not just vote, but show you our minds as well. All I am saying is in a peaceful environment today no body can claim they already have my vote. I would rather ask for much better and convincing effort in terms of service delivery, infrastructural development than voting for car buying sprees.
What was this about the Ndebele women being prettier, Nathaniel? Hey. Kudos to the Ndebele women, however, semuZezuru kudai I am already married to my beauty of Mozambican origin. I can only say had you shared that in you previous years’ readings who knows.

Anyway, let me leave it to my young elegant maZezuru bachelors to pursue. The Ndebele man too, my African history is proud of them. They were the most trusted Izindunas of King Chaka, warriors who would stop at nothing, the Shona of the old days felt them hot brazen. That spirit we want it when we fight together as one for the country. I believe the Shona and the Ndebele of today to be better than those of old.

I speak blessedness to my unborn child can only be for shaping up Zimbabwe. This is also an area where Manheru has to be credited. For how long was the foreign press going to make more money on what they thought should be the very divisive issue.
The agenda of some media houses surely, if Manheru had not turned the tide the way he did, was to try and finish us somehow by touching on certain issues in a manner that scaffolds bitterness.

With your initiating article and later Minister Misihairambwi’s in response we showed we are much better than what detractors think about us.

It leaves me in a sad state when the democracy that some push for today is that which only meets their limited edition and should fit no other. Those who share the democratic space and say out that they were saddened by the retrogressive rulings of an improperly sat regional court are referred to as undemocratic.

Many are times when people who argue for the country and African cause are branded Zanu-PF. That is where the democracy that some people cry for misses the point. In as much as they fight for their own instinctive beliefs they should expect contrasting views along the way.

Is it not that Zanu-PF’s esteemed views are being challenged, by the same token any other newer parties’ views will be challenged in the same way I expect my own views to be challenged. That is the true meaning of democracy from my book.

Zanu-PF members own membership cards so he who does not have one should not be branded one for the sake that they have shared beliefs on the very African ness of us all. I would want to end this sharing of insights by declaring in the name of my Lord Jesus that we will go into the future building only, we will not accept any petty civil wars that unfortunately many of our African neighbours have been dragged into.

Let us refuse to come up on their cable news as another war zone. Let us continue to discuss freely and constructively those very divisive issues. I have read so many suspect pieces in the private media.

Jehovah God will just not grace treacherous wishes because we will pray and continue to educate one another in the best manner we can. So help us God. HECHO!
B T Manyati is an advanced financial accounting and corporate reporting lecturer. He can be reached on btmanyati *** yahoo.com