THERE was an urgent need to appoint a business strategist as chief executive at Air Zimbabwe to usher in a new business model and depoliticise its workforce from its current combative and confrontational approach, the Herald reported analysts as saying on Monday.

We also heard from “aviation and tourism expert” Karikoga Kaseke who said it was “abnormal for everyone to afford an air ticket from Air Zimbabwe”.

“Flying should be expensive,” Kaseke declared. “It is not for every Jack and Jill. It is for the filthy rich. We should not subsidise the rich?”

The analysts criticised pilots “who have of late tended to talk too much outside professional parameters”.

This is all very interesting. Does depoliticisation include the company chairman who publishes articles in the state media supporting Zanu PF? We hope so. And are Jack and Jill related to Tom, Dick and Harry? No wonder the airline is in difficulty with all these characters around!

But we are not sure about Kaseke’s views on fare structures. We would have thought competition required an economic business model. While it is true Air Zimbabwe needs a new chief executive who is a strategist and who can seriously depoliticise the workforce, it also needs a chief executive who can tell ministers where to go when they attempt to micro-manage the airline over the phone.

How many readers, we wonder, recall Transport minister Herbert Ushewokunze designing new livery for the airline on the hoof?

When a new CEO is appointed, his first task should be to visit Nairobi and see how Kenya Airways functions in tandem with its technical partner KLM.

Kenya Airways has in recent years expanded from a small regional player, emerging from the ashes of East African Airways, to become one of the continent’s major airlines.

It has made Jomo Kenyatta Airport a regional hub with tentacles reaching out to West Africa and the United States and to the Gulf states and Far East. It is one of the few airlines continuing to offer a link to Harare.

The Herald’s otherwise thoughtful article was rather spoilt by a Zimbabwean student at Singapore Aviation College who said Air Zimbabwe was a victim of sanctions.

So long as the airline shares the government’s delusional approach to reform, it will have difficulty putting things right. Singapore Airlines, by the way, provides a good example of how a small airline with strategic direction and tight management can become a world player with a reputation for comfort.

CZI president Joseph Kanyekanye has regularly denounced sanctions, attributing to them the country’s dismal economic performance. He has even recently decided that sanctions are responsible for the collapse of industries in Bulawayo.

Nowhere has he talked about the sanctions imposed upon companies that are required to hand over 51% of their hard-earned assets, mining firms that have seen their claims withdrawn and in one case handed over to Chinese operators, and independent broadcasters that are prevented from pursuing their right to disseminate news and views.

Kanyekanye has chosen the easy route by blaming the country’s predicament upon sanctions. But it is also the dishonest route and CZI does the nation no service by repeating the mantras of the former ruling party which have done so much to damage the country’s infrastructure and sink its once vibrant industries.

Let’s hear some honest comment from the CZI. It needs to stop pretending the problem lies elsewhere. The “incalculable harm” Kanyekanye speaks of is right on his doorstep. And we know who put it there.

One of those culprits was in Bulawayo last week where, we are told, he helped to remove misconceptions some people had on the indigenisation programme.

ZNCC past president Obert Sibanda applauded Indigenisation minister Saviour Kasukuwere for coming to see for himself the state of affairs in the city and “demystifying the misconceptions some people had”. Others were equally enthusiastic congratulating the minister for simply visiting Bulawayo.

Charles Chiponda of the Zanu PF provincial indigenisation committee said after Kasukuwere’s address: “We now feel motivated to move forward and grab the opportunities that come our way.”

“Grabbing” is obviously the operative word here!

The obsequious character of the Bulawayo business community who fell over themselves to congratulate the minister just for visiting their city did not augur well for recovery.

Water supplies for instance appear to have been raised only in passing. But how long has government been urged to do something about the Zambezi-Matabeleland pipeline?

Kasukuwere should not pose as Bulawayo’s “Saviour” unless he is prepared to do something about the water crisis. Seizing companies in a desert is a pointless exercise.

Those elements in the former ruling party who like to claim Zimbabwe is a democratic state should note that Deputy Minister for Youth, Indigenisation, and Empowerment Tongai Matutu is being charged in court for insulting President Mugabe in a speech delivered in 2005.

Recently SK Moyo tried to convince a visiting head of delegation of a group of German MPs that Zimbabwe was not targeting MDC officials but simply enforcing the law.

MDC-T spokesperson Douglas Mwonzora, quoted in the Mail, said the charges were unreasonable.

“The law relating to the president’s insult has no place in a democratic society for Mugabe is our political opponent,” he said. “He is our opponent and our members are bound to criticise him.”

Putting the Matutu case aside, there are a range of laws that the government uses as weapons in silencing inconvenient voices. The Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act is one such weapon.

But there is a wider issue here. If the country is facing an election, members of parties opposed to Zanu PF must be free to criticise the president who is, after all, a key player in any electoral contest. We cannot have a situation where the president denounces his critics in vitriolic terms and then hides behind what are called “insult laws” when they respond.

That is so one-sided and manifestly unfair that it needs challenging in the Supreme Court.

Rugare Gumbo should be tackled on why his party feels it needs such instruments of repression in an election where the president is a candidate. Can’t it get by without them?

Reason Wafawarova, whose much advertised patriotism does not extend to living in Zimbabwe, was last week taking up the cudgels on behalf of a gang of state journalists who have been the subjects of sanctions orders as a result of what the EU ambassador to Zimbabwe said was “the role they played presenting news in a specific period that was considered as inciting hate and violence”.

Wafawarova proceeded to recount his own experience as a victim of Western imperialism while living in Australia. He was, he says, hounded by rabid MDC-T activists who tried to get him deported. He was in the end “saved by the power of the law”, he said, after an expensive process.

He then uses the safety of his Australian homestead to attack journalists such as Basildon Peta, Joseph Winter and Andrew Meldrum who have never said a word against him.

“Andrew Meldrum was deported from Zimbabwe for suspicions of espionage and also alleged fabrication of news reports,” he says.

It is extraordinary that Wafawarova, complaining bitterly about defamatory attacks upon himself, feels free to make these comments about others. Meldrum was in fact acquitted of the state’s charges and then illegally deported.

“By the time Meldrum was deported he had long crossed the line between journalism and political activism,” Wafawarova claims. Needless to say, he doesn’t supply a scrap of evidence to support this claim.

“To many respected journalists in Zimbabwe Meldrum had become a disgrace,” he contends.

Exactly who were these “respected journalists”? Wafawarova doesn’t say.

What we can safely suppose is that they are related to the same gang currently bleating about being the victims of sanctions. They haven’t worked it out yet that if they continue to heap invective upon journalists like Peta and Meldrum, who have spent their careers working for freedom of expression and democratic change, the EU and US won’t find it justifiable to lift those sanctions just yet.

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