HARARE - According to the United Nations Development Programme poverty index, a poor person is one who lives below $2 per day.
If such individuals could manage to just get the basics in life they would truly find happiness and purpose in life.
This explains the importance of basic needs such as food, housing, shelter, health and clothing as the real benchmarks for a decent life.
But when people have everything money can buy in a sea of poverty and they do not care, then such a society is rotten beyond any reasonable doubt.
The almost immoral display of obscene salaries by some public corporations like the Premier Services Medical Aid Society (Psmas) top executives is an affront to all poor people in this country.
It makes being poor a very big joke, a joke reflected by the popular Shona saying “Kusekesa mbavha yakahwanda”.
In a country where millions of children are dropping out of school and many are in dire need of food aid and urban poverty is on the rise leading to the adoption of survival strategies like peri-urban farming among other strategies, it’s a shock when an executive can earn a quarter of a million dollars a month.
Those who doubted the existence of dual societies in the Third World need no further evidence.
We have in our midst first world citizens living in a sea of poverty, while others are struggling to just eke out a living.
In that case, can we talk of Zimbabwean society? What really constitutes such a society?
Is there such a thing like society when there is no commonality of values?
It seems some people care less about what is happening around them, they have no shame at all.
The kind of distortions that we have in this country has reached pandemic levels as at one time it was reported that varsity professors who are expected to be the intellectual leaders in the society earn less than security guards.
At one time former Copac co-chairperson Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana appeared on television arguing that if someone is earning a higher salary we should not campaign to have such a salary cut down but rather we should fight to have our salaries also raised to higher levels.
Indeed he was right but there is no morality in earning some obscene and astronomical salaries in an organisation that depends on impoverished health insurance subscribers.
Such salaries have no justification especially when members are getting a substandard service at the medical clinics where they have to endure long hours crammed on benches waiting to be attended to by doctors.
Some health service providers are now reluctant to accept medical aid cards from the society citing unjustified delays in disbursements of payments.
All this becomes intolerable when executives are getting salaries that are ballooning to over $30 million a year.
That kind of utopia is a mockery of the poverty levels that the majority of Zimbabweans are enduring.
It seems those who are trusted with making decisions which should improve the health of subscribers have found an eldorado.
The callous attitude is now a moral cancer in Zimbabwe as some town clerks in local authorities and senior executives are following the same trend of earning obscene salaries while service provision has become virtually extinct.
They just do not care but they expect residents to pay bills every month so that they can satisfy their appetite for money.
Indeed the poor shall inherit the earth, its penury and death for the masses and splendour for the elite.
This immoral behaviour should be condemned by all progressive people.