FINANCE minister Tendai Biti has described his four-year stint as minister in the inclusive government as a traumatising experience because the nation expected him to turn around an economy “vandalised” by what he termed a “moronic” Zanu PF regime. SENIOR REPORTER
Biti was appointed Finance minister at the inception of the coalition government in 2009 after the country had gone through a decade-long economic meltdown that saw inflation figures soaring to 231 million percent, the world’s second worst ever.
“Good people, being poor is a curse; painfully so when it is self-induced indigence,” Biti wrote on his Facebook wall yesterday.
“Traversing the corridors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with the narrative of a broken pick pocket economy vandalised by 33 years of assault by an indifferent, clueless, dishonest and moronic regime stretches one’s sense of being and humanity.”
Zimbabwe’s economic woes worsened at the turn of the millennium following a violent land reform programme which saw the Zanu PF-led government falling out with international financiers.
“This is the load I have carried for the last four years, living as a diaper mopping these gangsters’ wretched progeny of failure patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism,” Biti wrote.
He said all hope was not lost, saying the only way forward was to keep on working towards a better economic environment.
“Sad as it, there is no option, but to forge ahead and actualise this construct of a stable, healthy, green modern democratic developmental Zimbabwe. I see this dream and trust me friends, the moth will bloom in our lifetime. I see this Zimbabwe. I smell this Zimbabwe. It drives me on even if I am at my lowest. I like what I see,” he said.
