Wicknell, don’t ridicule the poor as your own wealth is fleeting and will vanish when power shifts

The spectacle of wealth in Zimbabwe has long been a jarring theater of the absurd but few performances are as grotesque as the recent outbursts by Wicknell Chivayo.

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When a man uses a tragic road accident as a stage to perform a public relations stunt and then proceeds to mock the economic status of those who question his methods he reveals a profound insecurity.

This recent ridiculing of Zimbabweans as poor and insignificant because they dared to critique the optics of his donation to Ronald Mujuru—who recently lost his wife and five children in a horrible car accident—is not just an act of arrogance.

It is the desperate defensive mechanism of a man whose entire financial existence is a house of cards built on the shifting sands of political patronage.

The irony is thick enough to choke.

Chivayo’s latest social media tirade where he dismissed critics as people who have never held fifty thousand dollars in cash is a testament to the vacuous nature of his supposed success.

To mock the poor from a position of wealth that was not earned through innovation or the rigors of the free market is the height of delusion.

There is a fundamental difference between a businessman and a beneficiary of political proximity.

Chivayo’s fortune is not a product of industrial prowess or technological advancement but rather a fragile tether to the incumbency of power.

If the person in power whose survival serves as the anchor for his wealth were to leave office tomorrow Chivayo would likely find himself sharing the very poverty he so gleefully ridicules today.

Real wealth does not shout.

It does not feel the need to belittle others to validate its own existence.

Consider the example of Strive Masiyiwa.

Here is a man whose fortune was built through a grueling battle against the state itself to establish a telecommunications empire that has transformed the continent.

Masiyiwa does not go around dishing out cars and bundles of cash in exchange for social media praise.

His philanthropic efforts through the Higher Life Foundation focus on systemic change such as education and health.

He invests in the human capital of the nation because he understands that real prosperity is measured by the elevation of the collective rather than the ostentatiousness of the individual.

Masiyiwa’s silence and dignity are a stark contrast to Chivayo’s noisy and juvenile flaunting of resources.

The source of this noise is easily identified when one looks at the opaque and questionable means through which Chivayo has acquired his riches.

We must ask how a man becomes a self-proclaimed billionaire while being at the center of scandals that drain the national purse.

The unexplained R800 million linked to the South African company Ren-Form CC and the infamous five million dollars for the non-existent Gwanda Solar Project are not badges of honor.

They are indictments of a system that rewards loyalty over competence.

When wealth is acquired through these means it is not a sign of success but a sign of a parasitic relationship with the state.

This is why Chivayo and his ilk are so vocal in their support for constitutional amendments to extend term limits.

Their advocacy for a 2030 extension is not born out of a love for the nation but out of a visceral fear of their own impending financial irrelevance.

They know that without their political protector they are nothing.

By calling ordinary Zimbabweans poor Chivayo is essentially mocking the victims of the very economic mismanagement that his opaque deals help facilitate.

Every dollar lost to a fraudulent solar project or an overpriced tender is a dollar taken from the hospitals that lack basic medication and the schools that lack textbooks.

To then turn around and sneer at the people struggling in that environment is a level of cruelty that borders on the psychopathic.

He is like a man who steals the wheels from a neighbor’s car and then mocks them for being too poor to drive.

The social media influencer Ethias was perfectly right to question the cultural appropriateness of how the donation to Ronald Mujuru was handled.

In Zimbabwean culture grief is not a commodity and comfort should not be a performance.

Suggesting that a donation should be delivered in person to the bereaved family rather than making the grieving man come to collect it is a matter of basic human decency and cultural etiquette.

Chivayo’s response which focused entirely on the net worth of the critic proved that he understands the price of everything but the value of nothing.

He believes that money buys him the right to be beyond reproach and that poverty strips a person of their right to an opinion.

Zimbabweans must reject this narrative that associates proximity to power with genuine success.

We must demand a society where wealth is a reflection of hard work and integrity rather than the ability to navigate the corridors of patronage.

Chivayo’s arrogance is a symptom of a deeper rot where the beneficiaries of corruption feel entitled to spit on the faces of the hardworking citizens who are actually keeping the country afloat.

His wealth is a fleeting shadow.

It lacks the roots of genuine investment and the soul of true philanthropy.

When the political winds change as they inevitably do the noise of his engines and the glitter of his trinkets will fade leaving behind only the cold reality that he was always just as poor in character as those he tried to belittle.

A man who mocks the poor while standing on a pedestal built from their taxes is not a success story.

He is a cautionary tale of what happens when a nation allows the loud and the unprincipled to define the meaning of prosperity.

• Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. To directly receive his articles please join his WhatsApp Channel on: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaqprWCIyPtRnKpkHe08