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NewsDay

AMH is an independent media house free from political ties or outside influence. We have four newspapers: The Zimbabwe Independent, a business weekly published every Friday, The Standard, a weekly published every Sunday, and Southern and NewsDay, our daily newspapers. Each has an online edition.

Now that tollgate fees have doubled, we are free!

Opinion & Analysis
Now that tollgate fees have been doubled, we should expect deeper and bigger potholes on our roads.

Now that tollgate fees have been doubled, we should expect deeper and bigger potholes on our roads for there is a high correlation between high revenue and poor service delivery in this country. The more revenue collected, the more poverty we experience and the bigger the fat cats’ pockets become.

Deja Vu with Kamurai Mudzingwa

These are the signs of our times. We should not complain lest we are accused of “derailing the gains of our liberation”.

Yes, we have been liberated. We are now free. We all recall how colonial leader Ian Smith, whom we were liberated from, was the embodiment of oppression and repression. But now we can celebrate because not only were we liberated from Smith’s shackles, but Smith himself is safely dead.

We are now free. We are free to watch those who liberated us exercise their sovereign right by plundering the country’s resources. We are now free to find pleasure in poverty while vicariously enjoying the plunderers’ wealth by watching them go on expensive shopping trips.

We are now free to drink contaminated water. We are now free to get beaten up for holding diverging views during election periods. We must not complain. We must recall that while those who liberated us sacrificed their own sons and daughters in the struggle, the rest of us were on holiday.

Who else can stand up and say: “I lost a son or daughter in the liberation struggle”?

Everyone else only joined them at independence. So it is their inalienable right to plunder the country’s resources and devise schemes to take away the little that we have. We now have the freedom of watching people of dubious morality accorded heroes’ status.

We should be happy to smell the stench of freedom coming from flowing sewage and uncollected garbage in our areas. We are now free to experience power outages, company closures and poverty.

We should be grateful for typhoid and cholera outbreaks engendered by poor or non-existent service delivery for these remind us that those responsible for service delivery are too busy pocketing our monies to notice.

We should not query the integrity of those who rule us. They are not answerable to us.

As long as they can sign-off “Obedient Daughter” or something to that effect in their correspondence to the high office, then we are assured of their impeccable integrity.

Who are we to judge them?

We are lucky. Very lucky for now — as a liberated people — we can be jailed for criticising the high office.

We can now safely watch while our fathers and mothers go home without salaries while the politically connected take away thousands.

Why should we complain? Those are the gains of our liberation. We now have the freedom to be poor in the midst of plenty. We should all have the freedom to understand that there are no more national resources. Resources are for the few who liberated us to do as they please.

We should not be sinful, for instance, to query the misappropriation of revenue such as money from diamond sales or tollgate fees.

We should agree that freedom is in the air and be grateful to those who brought it upon us without our help.

We should not be thankless children who question the ways that make us enjoy the freedom of being poor.

We must be happy that at least those who liberated us can find ways of violating Section 302 of the Constitution to rob the national purse. They keep what they collect, forget about the Consolidated Revenue Fund.

We should understand freedom means that money from the Consolidated Revenue Fund should be abused by the fat cats for their benefit since the public sector is there to serve their interests.

We should be grateful that those who plunder resources can now be rotated from one public office or public institution to another to ensure equitable plundering.

Only the poor and political enemies have the freedom to be jailed for petty crimes.

We are lucky that those who gave us freedom love the poor so much that they want to create many of them.

By the end of the year — judging by the way our freedom is taking us — we will have more poor people than the grains of sand on the banks of Save River.

Aren’t we lucky that we are free?

We now have the freedom to exercise our greed to the detriment of our economy.

Isn’t it a good feeling that those with impunity can indulge in all forms of corruption without the fear of being punished? Freedom is in the air, let’s enjoy it. Let’s support our liberators so that they live well off our national resources.

They deserve it.

After all they single-handedly liberated this country as it were and successfully turned it from a Republic into a Private Limited entity.