The Sunday News
Charles Dube
JOSEPH Takundwa leaves the Nharira area in a huff. He has been used by Nyati to kill freedom fighters by giving them poisoned clothes. In fact Nyati tells us that Takundwa worked as one of his informers during the war. He had code named him “the nervous one”. Nyati and Joseph Takundwa meet again when the war of liberation is over.
We learn that Nyati was a highly placed information officer in the notorious Selous Scout battalion. Story had it that Nyati was in fact a former freedom fighter who had betrayed his comrades after being offered large sums of money by Rhodesian authorities. Now he was responsible for collecting information from operational areas in the Midlands Province. He was also in charge of the recruitment and payment of informers. This is the reason why Joseph Takundwa visits him to be enlisted in his services.
Nyati is very cunning. At independence when his masters have been defeated, Nyati joins the independence trail. He declares:
“I am the chameleon with the fangs of a cobra. I have successfully shed off my past and put on the colours of the new rainbow!” Today we hear his story of how he did it. He says at independence he had already accumulated a substantial amount of wealth through his activities during the war. He immediately bought his way into the party.
He would also seize every opportunity to sing praises about the consistency and infallibility of the leader. He says he once publicly equated the leader to the second Christ. This was a master stroke! He also made sure that such praise songs would reach the ears of those that matter. This paid dividends as he says that within a short period of time, the party and his name, Nyati, had become one, both in body and in spirit.
There was nothing about party policy and ideology that he did not know. Overnight, he had become the guru of the theory and practice of scientific socialism based on the theories of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. He became the embodiment of the spirit of socialist transformation: “Down with Capitalism! Down with Exploiters! Abasha Imperialism!” Nyati says such slogans became his political trademark.
Nyati’s efforts did not go unnoticed. He was appointed executive director of a very important government department that dealt with social services and social transformation. He immediately formed a number of companies. He dares people to call them “briefcase companies” or whatever he does not care. His companies supplied his department with all the goods and services he needed. He says that is what he calls making hay while the sun shines.
He says: “It only takes a fool to fail to grab a chance that presents itself in such broad daylight.” Within a year he had become a multimillionaire. The 1982 drought presented to him a unique opportunity which he grabbed with both hands. Together with his friend and home boy Solomon Taneni whom he had helped with the tender to supply grain to drought stricken areas of the country, he worked out a foolproof method of overcharging the government. He was able to harvest a profit of about five million dollars from the drought.
Talk of reaping where one has not sown. Nyati betrayed the liberation struggle but he is enjoying the benefits thereof though tainting those benefits with corruption. He makes this clear when he says he worked with his home boy, he had helped with the tender to supply grain to drought stricken areas. All this smacks of nepotism. Nyati betrayed the struggle but is enjoying the fruits of independence. He is feeding on the blood of the freedom fighters he helped the enemy kill.
Nyati, the traitor of the liberation struggle shows that he has accumulated wealth within a short space of time. He says by the end of 1984 he was already thinking of retiring from government so as to go into full-fledged business. That was the time when a friend of his, a top government official introduced him to the “Sisida” car racket scheme. The Sisida, the new car from Japan, had suddenly become the car of the moment.
Overnight, the Sisida had become the national symbol of wealth and status. However, since the car’s demand outstripped its supply, it could only be got by those who had contacts in very high places. Nyati immediately seized that chance. Through the many top government officials that he was acquainted with, he was able to obtain dozens of Sisida cars which he sold at ten times the buying price. This is corruption at its worst.
Within a short space, Nyati was doing a lot more business than all the car dealers in Harare put together. All he had to do to sustain that venture was to make sure that the top government officials would always get their slice of the cake that is paying bribes. He denigrates journalists saying by the time the little nosy journalists discovered the racket, he was already home and dry. No one could touch him. He resigned from the government position and immediately registered his own multimillion dollar “Eagle’s Eye” investment company.
All the mud-slinging of the famous “cargate” scandal left him unscathed. In some rhetoric he goes: “who could prove that I had exerted any form of influence on any top government official? What’s so illegal about making money for oneself anyway?”
What Nyati forgets is that all is illegal as long as one uses corruption to acquire it. Nyati refers to exposure of corruption as jealousy! Petty jealousy. There is nothing else in the so-called scandal except jealousy.
Nyati goes viral in an attempt to dismiss accusations that might be levelled against him. He says: “Poor little journalists who have just learnt how to read and write go about trying to create mountains out of nothing. The problem with poor people is that they cannot stand the sight of someone not as poor as they are. Place the same little journalists who like to write about so called corruption into the same position and see if they won’t grab the chance, unless they are foolish of course.
“Instead of writing about real criminals and murderers who are busy killing people out there, they waste their time writing false stories about honest people trying to eke out a living for themselves.” He says at times he thinks that the new government of theirs is too soft. If it were him, he would simply ban the newspaper and banish the little nosy reporter! He calls this treason. High treason! He asks how such a little journalist is allowed to go scot-free after writing such sensational lies about Cabinet ministers. Nyati is guilty of corruption hence sensitive to criticism.
There is more to be revealed by Nyati concerning traitors of the liberation struggle who switched sides at independence and acted as champions of the struggle.
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