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HOW can a nation that is witnessing a huge spike in Covid-19 cases and deaths, a declining economy and a poor health service delivery system that has witnessed the re-emergence medieval diseases such as cholera, have its own government declaring war on its own people?
As more and more people are contracting Covid-19 and losing their lives to the infection, a situation that has increased awareness to the dangers of meeting in large numbers, another big question is how can the the opposition and civil society call for a demo?
The country’s impoverished citizens and the Diaspora community of Zimbabweans that fled the country for greener pastures elsewhere are seeking answers to the above two questions.
The opposition are saying their crime zeroes in on calling for a demonstration against the unbridled corruption by the government officials.
Such high-level graft that has been confirmed by the firing of the Minister of Health for a scam involving US$60 million of Covid-19 funds should instead have led the government to go on an all-out war against graft by its officials, not against its citizens.
That such a demonstration against sleaze has been declared by the State as a brazen attempt by the opposition MDC Alliance to illegally remove the government from power appears to confirm the long-held view that the State has been captured by a cartel that it looting the country’s resources with abandon.
Such a conclusion can’t be deemed to be too harsh as the government appears to have somewhat also concluded that a demo to deal with corruption is synonymous with a fight to remove the government.
On a day that coincided with the burial of the one of the most decorated national liberation hero Rtd. Air Chief Marshall Perrance Shiri due to Covid-19, soldiers were deployed around the country by the government to quash the anti-corruption demos.
Sadly, this was at a time when a curfew that was last imposed on blacks in the country by the racist Smith regime had now 40 years later been imposed on the same black people through the Emmerson Mnangagwa Zanu PF-led government under the pretext of fighting the Covid-19 virus.
All this is happening when little is being offered by the government to improve the lot of citizens in the community.
All the people are getting is political banter and the liberation war mantra yet they are yearning for the economic development mantra.
