Mugabe’s US $121 million campaign

The Zimbabwean government could spend about US $121.6 million in the next four months to revamp social services and launch housing projects countrywide, the ‘Financial Gazette’ reported on Thursday. It said that the government also planned to fund self-help projects in rural areas.

Senior government sources were quoted as saying that the money for the new projects would come from the US $322 million supplementary budget debated and passed by Parliament on Wednesday. The money would come from a vote of credit, which was set to get US $75 million under the supplementary budget to fund projects already in progress or waiting to be implemented. An extra US $47 million in the supplementary budget would be used for drought relief and to assist flood-affected areas, mainly in rural Zimbabwe where the ruling ZANU-PF still has support, the report said.

The sources claimed that the extra money was aimed at boosting President Robert Mugabe’s re-election chances in what was shaping up to be his biggest political battle ever in a presidential poll that must be held by April. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s only president since independence from Britain in 1980, faces a stiff challenge from Morgan Tsvangirai, the head of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the report said. “We have issues which we need to address before the presidential election and the supplementary budget will go a long way towards fulfilling some of the inadequacies,” one top government official was quoted as saying.

The official, like others who spoke to the ‘Financial Gazette’, preferred to remain anonymous allegedly for fear of victimisation. The officials were involved in plotting Mugabe’s re-election, the newspaper said. Some of them said that under Mugabe’s eleventh-hour charge, the government would award its bloated public service of more than 165,000 a salary increase in the face of runaway inflation. It would also allocate housing stands and plots to low-and-middle income earners in most urban areas from land acquired under the so-called fast-track resettlement programme, declared illegal by the Supreme Court.