Charamba must go

Editorial Comment
PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe’s spokesperson, George Charamba, has intimated board members of Premier Service Medical Aid Society (PSMAS) slept on duty when they allowed executives of the entity to loot willy-nilly its coffers.

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe’s spokesperson, George Charamba, has intimated board members of Premier Service Medical Aid Society (PSMAS) slept on duty when they allowed executives of the entity to loot willy-nilly its coffers.

Listeners of Zi FM were on Wednesday night shocked to the core to hear Charamba acknowledging they failed superintending over the PSMAS’s executives who unashamedly awarded themselves mega-salaries in which chief executive officer Cuthbert Dube earned over $230 000 per month, money big enough to pay 700 school teachers in a month.

It does not need a rocket scientist to fathom Mugabe’s right hand-man’s complicity in the shenanigans at PSMAS where he sat on several internal committees. Charamba, and others in the PSMAS board, are classic examples of bad governance in corporate Zimbabwe and should never again be allowed near any boards, including that of a burial society that sits under a tree every Sunday morning.

Not only has Charamba been complicity in the shaddy goings-on at PSMAS, his name has been mentioned at the rot at ZBC where its chief executive earned at least $40 000 a month yet other ordinary workers spent nearly six months without salaries.

Charamba had the temerity to tell listeners of Zi FM that Mugabe was shocked by the obscene salaries at PSMAS and ZBC. Gracious God.

If Charamba is a disciple of good corporate governance he must do the right thing and resign because he has failed the nation.

Otherwise failure to do the honourable thing gives credence to assertions the corruption exposé` are, firstly, a manifestation of intra-party fighting within Zanu PF which has witnessed one faction that controls the public media using such media houses to soil the images of their perceived internal enemies.

Secondly, and to a lesser extent, it might be a ploy by the Zanu PF regime to divert people’s attention from the apparent economic malaise that is creeping back.

Be that as it may, it is our submission Mugabe is well aware of the magnitude of corruption within his acolytes, indeed he has been on the know since independence, not least because he has been presiding over a patronage system which has sustained his stranglehold on power through looting public coffers.

However, being politically astute, Zanu PF has chosen to downplay the fact that the leakages were precipitated by factional politics, rather they have chosen to publicly posture as if those leakages were at the behest of Mugabe`s abhorrence for corruption.