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Made must stop this monkey business
By
Mavis
Makuni
SHOULD this man be taken seriously?
That is the question exasperated Zimbabweans must be asking following the ridiculous attempt by Agriculture Minister Joseph Made to pass the buck on to a monkey for the collapse of the agricultural sector and his failure for the umpteenth time to plan ahead for the next planting season.
Made, whose ineptitude and lacklustre performance have been legendary since he was appointed to the "War Cabinet" in 2001, is reported to have told parliament recently that his ministry had finally established why it has once again failed to ensure that inputs such as fertiliser are availed to farmers in time for the looming planting season. "Our investigations have shown that a monkey caused damage to a transformer, thereby sabotaging our preparations for the coming season.
"If it were not for that monkey, the situation was not going to be as bad", Made sheepishly told fellow legislators. In any other legislative assembly, Made's statement would have been greeted with incredulity and howls of derisive laughter. But, in Zimbabwe, spinning tall tales to deceive the people in a bid to explain away all that has gone wrong as a result of inefficiency, greed and corruption in the public sector is now the rule rather than the exception.
As a result, our ineffectual parliament, which has been reduced to an unquestioning rubber-stamper, is quite happy to accept such gibberish without taking the minister to task. In this case, it is clear that it is Made, rather than the hapless primate, who is playing monkey business by not taking the nation's food security seriously.
Made has never got anything right since taking over stewardship of the Agriculture Ministry. He has had to find a scapegoat to blame for his shortcomings every season, a permanent and convenient one over the last six years being the drought. Remember the year Made raised false hopes throughout the land by predicting a bumper maize harvest. It later turned out that the "scientific" method he had used to make these confident projections was limited to a joy ride in a helicopter during which the bespectacled minister peered down on the landscape below. When his projections proved to be wide off the mark and maize imports were needed to make up for the deficit, Made was unfazed.
He blamed the pilot of the helicopter in which he had undertaken his cloud-cuckoo-land crop survey for having flown too high, making it impossible for him to distinguish between maize and lush green grass from those dizzy heights. But Made realised this only in retrospect when Zimbabwe recorded another grain deficit and sections of the population faced food shortages.
Is it any wonder that things have fallen apart in almost every department of life in this country when we have such inept ministers? Not long ago when it became clear that this year's winter wheat crop was another unqualified flop, a different scapegoat was chosen. The blame for the poor yields, which have resulted in widespread shortages of bread, was laid squarely on the tiny shoulders of the quelea bird.
Now it might be useful to ask what methodology Made used to "investigate" the damage to a transformer caused by this lone monkey at Sable Chemicals in the Midlands which supposedly derailed his ministry's plans for this agricultural season. We may never know the truth of course, as Made told what we can only assume was a hushed Parliament that the mischievous monkey had been electrocuted and thus had taken its dark secrets with it to the grave!
Has this minister, who heads such a strategic ministry, ever heard of strategic and contingency planning? It does not inspire confidence at all that his ministry had to be jolted into action by a monkey to scramble this late in the hour to import fertiliser.
Made and other ministers in government never seem to learn from past mistakes and that is why the same bungling and ineptitude is repeated over and over again. With impunity. Unlike some leaders such as Reserve Bank Governor, Gideon Gono, whose motto is "failure is not an option" those in government are completely relaxed about their failure to deliver.
The only concern they seem to have is how to come up with a story, no matter how implausible, to exonerate themselves and justify their continued employment at the long-suffering taxpayers' expense. Made is poised to preside over yet another disastrous agricultural season as he has done over the last six years.
Made's boss, President Robert Mugabe, has in the past expressed disappointment with his performance. In recent weeks, a parliamentary committee has also expressed reservations about Made's leadership of this strategic ministry. The question is, what is the man's survival secret when he appears to make no effort to pull up his socks despite having his knuckles rapped regularly by his colleagues and the media?
The only progress
Made appears to have made is moving away from blaming homo sapiens as
represented by Tony Blair, George Bush, prophets of doom, enemies of
the state, agents of foreign interests etc for the collapse of the agricultural
sector under his stewardship, to attributing the development to the
animal kingdom! In any other sector, he would be considered a complete
failure and would be relieved of his duties.
Makuni is a columnist for the Financial Gazette newspaper
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