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NewsDay

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Do pensioners have to suffer in silence?

Columnists
It takes something dreadful — nay, horrendous — to break down an old man. It happens when you are completely stripped of pride, dignity and hope.

It takes something dreadful — nay, horrendous — to break down an old man. It happens when you are completely stripped of pride, dignity and hope.

By Conway Tutani

The image of Greek pensioner Giorgos Chatzifotiadis sitting outside a bank openly crying in despair with his savings book and identity card on the floor some two months ago, illustrates how ordinary Greeks are suffering under the country’s debt crisis. Imagine that you are 77 years old and you have to undergo that?

Chatzifotiadis said he had broken down because he “cannot stand to see my country in this distress. That’s why I feel so beaten, more than for my own personal problems.”

Recounting how he had gone from bank to bank in a futile attempt to collect his wife’s pension, Chatzifotiadis said when he was told at the fourth “that I could not get the money, I just collapsed”.

Similarly, Zimbabwean pensioners are suffering immensely under the liquidity crunch. They are normally paid on the very last day of the month at the earliest. But many times the date is postponed at the very last minute and those pensioners from outside Harare end up being stranded for days without money for food. Imagine being the last paid and the least paid? As it is, government pensioners’ July pay date had been twice postponed to this week — well into August.

One of my friends — a proud and dignified war veteran — has not been spared in this continuous delay in payment. He is angry and disappointed, why not? He has financial obligations to meet at the family and other levels. Do they need another Chenjerai Hunzvi, the late war veterans’ leader, to shake them up so that they quickly produce the money as happened in 1997?

As if that is not dire and desperate enough, the regime is still taking advantage of the peaceful nature of Zimbabweans. People have been as patient as possible. But instead of the regime making moves to win the trust of the people, they are busy — if not contemptuously — losing it. Look at the Grain Marketing Board fiasco. Government only produced $15 million this week — a year later — far short of the $49 million owed to mostly poor peasant farmers — a considerable number of them pensioners — who delivered their maize to the GMB.

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Again this week, Higher and Tertiary Education minister Jonathan Moyo had this to say: “How can we focus on the economy when the skulls of Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi are displayed in a British museum? These barbarians have been displaying the skulls of our First Chimurenga heroes and heroines in their libraries!”

Barbaric indeed in this day and age to display human heads as trophies. The sickening, evil depravity of it all equals that of the so-called Islamic State in mainly Iraq and Syria, and Boko Haram in Nigeria who have redefined wickedness by chopping off the heads of their hostages and filming the gory, sadistic deeds for the whole wide world to see.

But ignoring the economy when so many people are suffering, including those who fought for this country, is barely short of barbarism. If anything, Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi could be turning in their graves over this coldness and dereliction of duty by the government.

It’s scandalous that so many old age pensioners in Zimbabwe are living in poverty and unable to afford decent food. Many pensioners live on very low, fixed incomes and have been walking a tightrope in recent years as food and utility bills have shot up.

But when it comes to looking after themselves, the politicians are second to none. For instance, a former President and former deputies will still get salaries and increases equivalent to those of the current President and deputies until their dying day.

I just want to know one thing: What has happened to all the money that was supposed to be raised from the Marange diamonds to reboot the economy? There is no chance of decent pensions here as long as corruption at the very top is unchecked and money from resources such as diamonds, which is supposed to be put into the Sovereign Wealth Fund, disappears into the very deep pockets of the political elite.

Without inclusive politics, you can’t have inclusive economics. That is the sorry tale of Zimbabwe today.

But there is one thing they cannot take away from pensioners — and that is the vote. In Germany, the two main political parties compete to win over the bloc of older voters that has become one of the biggest and most powerful segments of the population and,thus, plays a major role in deciding the electoral outcome. I know we are a long way from the political heights reached by the Germans, but pensioners, as a bloc among many like the used and discarded vendors and those desperate home-seekers whose houses are being demolished because the government let political crooks swindle them, can change this country by helping to get rid of the political elites and put in their place those who really care about the people.

This is the time to have bottom-up politics, not the top-down politics which has seen the regime trampling on people’s rights and suppressing their voice, taking advantage of the peaceful nature of Zimbabweans.

It’s not a call to arms, but a call to action.

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