HARARE - What has our country been reduced to by this merciless Zanu PF regime?
This is the question many people, young and old have been asking. When the angry and long-suffering people of Zimbabwe meet journalists they also ask us what we are doing to expose the rot that has seen them reduced to paupers when at independence all looked rosy.
At independence, people were promised honey and milk but no, they are surviving on tsaona (one dollar per day).
As journalists, we try to expose the rot but we have limits by the State or powerful individuals in our society. But this is a story for another day.
My heart bleeds when I see our people failing to access basics and day in, day out, I see people sleeping outside banks in this bitter winter weather waiting to withdraw their meagre incomes but come morning, they get nothing.
At one notorious bank in Avondale, hundreds of people sleep in bank queues and when I sought to find out from some them if they will be guaranteed their cash the following day, they emphatically said no.
They explained that they sometimes spend days waiting to withdraw money and when they finally get to the teller, they are sometimes allowed to access only as little as $20.
This is surely being cruel as this is a bank that virtually hijacks people in the street and persuades them to open accounts yet they fail to adequately serve their customers.
It might not be the bank’s problem that there is no cash in Zimbabwe, but still they should be able to manage what is there and stop forcefully persuading people to open new accounts because clearly the bank has no capacity.
Well, the argument is that we must use plastic money but most people can’t afford to buy from supermarkets. How do you buy tsaona using plastic money?
They can afford buying products at the informal sector and for those in rural areas, they would need to trade in cash. Why is the Zanu PF regime making people suffer like this?
Yes, it’s a heartless regime but the way they neglect the people who they force to vote for them is criminal and tantamount to crimes against humanity. Why is it that our politicians in the ruling party have never been seen visiting the people who sleep in bank queues to try and understand their grievances.
Where is Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa and my good brother Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor John Mangudya? Why don’t you take night tours to the mothers and fathers who sleep on pavements outside their banks?
Why don’t you go and talk to them at midnight and if the problem is banks, summon the bank directors and managers to attend to the plight of these people? Why don’t you summon them in the middle of the night so that they also feel the pain our mothers and fathers are enduring?
Chinamasa must act and must visit these people at midnight because he is part of a regime that has destroyed our economy to an extent that we do not even have our own currency to talk about.
This is the story at virtually all banks in the country and one wonders where we are heading. In Zimbabwe, it seems it is the majority that must suffer not the few ruling elite.
RBZ asks us to deposit money in VISA accounts if one is to travel outside the country. Fair and fine because we don’t have the cash. A few months ago, people used to transfer money from their accounts to the VISA accounts but all of sudden, the banks are forcing people to deposit cash not transfers.
God have mercy. Where on earth are these people expecting us to get the cash when the cash is not available and when the banks don’t give us cash? What is happening in our society?
Surely, it doesn’t make sense for the bank to ask me to deposit cash when the cash is not available in banks.
Is the RBZ aware this is what is happening but is this not promoting the criminality of buying cash on the thriving black market? Worse still, the banks want only the United States dollar but we were told when the cash crunch started that bond notes and the US dollar will exchange one to one but what is this now?
Well, they will tell you that they would want to fund the corresponding bank outside the country with hard cash but then is it our fault as ordinary citizens that the country is in such a mess?
Why is our government holding everyone hostage? President Robert Mugabe where are you when all this is happening?
Maybe it’s because when the president, his ministers and government officials travel, they have access to huge amounts of cash.
Or maybe because the president has made it clear that he doesn’t deposit his money in the bank it means we have to suffer.
Cry our beloved Zimbabwe.
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