Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo can easily make it onto the list of Zimbabwe’s richest citizens if we are to believe his estranged wife Marian. She has filed for divorce from him, citing his bed hopping as having wrecked a marriage that had lasted a little over two decades. The divorce case has attracted widespread national attention, not least because it has laid bare salacious details of the minister’s ostentatious riches. He may not be in the same league as the country’s richest man, telecoms mogul Strive Masiiwa, but his net worth would make an average English Premiership footballer go green with envy.
In the divorce papers that she has filed, Marriane claims that she and Chombo own several homes and plum pieces of land in Harare’s leafy suburbs of Mount Pleasant, Alexandra Park, Greendale, Borrowdale, among others. The bitter Marian also claims that they also own houses in South Africa. This is on top of homes in other medium and high-density suburbs of Harare. Chombo’s wife also wants a share of houses, residential and industrial stands that are scattered across the rest of the country.
Marriane also claims that the family owns a fleet of top of the range luxurious cars that include 1 Toyota Hilux truck, 2 Nissan Wolf off roaders, 4 Toyota Land Cruiser SUVs, 3 Mercedes Benzes, 1 Toyota Vigo truck, 1 Mazda BT-50 truck, a bus and 1 Nissan Hardbody. A quick check with car dealers in Harare confirms that total value of all these vehicles could easily exceed a million dollars. To top it all, Marriane also claims that the Chombo treasure dome also includes some lucrative mines and hunting safari lodges in Chiredzi, Hwange, Magunje and Chirundu. She also cites several farms located in some of the country’s prime zones.
Some of you may be asking, ‘but Charles, what does that have to do with the price of rice in China?’ Well here is the juicy part, as Zimbabwean writer Ken Mafuka would say. The only paying jobs that Chombo is known to have held are those of university lecturer and government minister. Zimbabwean university lecturers are some of the poorest in the world. And so are its government ministers and members of parliament. Most university lecturers struggle to acquire just one decent home and a functional motor vehicle. When I was in undergraduate school (incidentally Chombo was a lecturer at the university of Zimbabwe then) my colleagues and I used to make fun of one of our professors’ ramshackle Mazda 323. My friend Gari always used to say the professor spent more time under the car than he did riding it. The question that many have asked is how did Chombo acquire such a vast array of assets over a very short period of time. Is he such a business genius that he has managed to juggle a full time job with profitable business enterprises? How does he explain owning several homes in a country where banks can hardly finance mortgages?
Predictably Chombo has dodged all these questions. In a country where ministers’ lives are beyond public scrutiny, Chombo has found it easy to avoid answering such pesky questions. But many Zimbabweans have made the conclusion that if the minister’s wife’s claims are true, then his riches were corruptly acquired. In October 2006 the Financial Gazette newspaper reported that Chombo, in unclear circumstances, had received a top of the range Toyota Landcruiser SUV for personal use from the state-run Zimbabwe United Passengers Company (ZUPCO) acquired at a whooping cost of US$77 000. Many wondered at the time how a cash strapped state enterprise would purchase a car for a minister who has access to government vehicles. Police never investigated the allegations and no charges were laid against him.
While Chombo’s divorce case and the allocation of assets between him and his wife are matters for the courts to decide, what has irked many Zimbabweans is the minister’s disingenuousness in dealing with matters of corruption and criminal abuse of office in Zimbabwe’s local authorities. Although Zimbabweans generally abhor corruption (a majority of them are honest and hardworking people) they view Chombo’s interference in local authorities as a classical case of the kettle calling the pot black. While residents of local authorities have persistently spoken out against corruption and abuse of office by local government officials including councilors and managers, they have also detested Chombo’s malicious meddling in the affairs of most local authorities especially those that are run by the MDC.
Take the case of Harare for example. In March 2002 the residents of Harare overwhelmingly elected the MDC’s Engineer Elias Mudzuri as mayor of the capital. In no time the city began to show signs of improvement following years of dilapidation under successive ZANU (PF) run councils. Streetlights were repaired; road surfaces patched and refuse collected. Fearing that this would expose the ineptitude of previous ZANU (PF) councils, the meddlesome Chombo devised a plan to get rid of the popular Mudzuri. Firstly he blocked funds that were badly needed for improving service delivery in the city. Then he sent a rented crowd of ZANU (PF) hooligans to demonstrate against Mudzuri’s ‘incompetency”. He then fired the mayor in April 2003, replacing him with an appointed commission run by political turncoat Sekesayi Makwawara, who had served as Mudzuri’s deputy. This was to be Chombo’s strategy as he went on a nation-wide crusade to rid local authorities of MDC mayors that had been democratically elected by residents.
Chombo is at it again. Following the MDC’s takeover of almost two-thirds of the country’s local authorities in the 2008 harmonized elections, ZANU (PF) strategists have been at war trying to devise strategies of reversing the MDC’s electoral gains. They have gone on a propaganda campaign through the public media to rubbish MDC run councils as corrupt and incompetent but this has come to naught. Under ZANU (PF) management, most local authorities had been run down and were failing to provide basic services like refuse collection, water reticulation and provision of other basic social services. In the case of Harare this resulted in a cholera outbreak that claimed thousands of lives. Chombo never intervened to save these councils from collapse. Now that the MDC is in charge of most local authorities he is abusing the Local Government Act to settle political scores with the MDC.
Residents and ratepayers of local authorities need to be reminded that Chombo is no Messiah and that it is their duty and responsibility to fight corruption in their communities. Granted there have been cases of corruption and criminal abuse of office by some MDC councilors and some city mangers. But that does not give Chombo the right to fire elected councils in order to replace them with commissions that are composed of ZANU (PF) zealots.
No comments:
Post a Comment