You couldn’t make it up

Dateline Harare Zimbabwe

In his own social media posts, Wicknell Chivayo is dishing out US $100 bills at the Victoria Falls airport when he overlooks one woman’s outstretched hand and moves on. Later, he apologises for embarrassing her in front of her friends and workmates and sends her $5,000.

The tubby 42-year-old Chivayo, self-proclaimed ‘Sir Wicknell,’  is a once convicted fraudster now a millionaire who gives away millions of bucks in top-of-the-range cars and other extravagances to favoured figures in politics, sport and music.

Among  beneficiaries have been popular musicians Jah Prayzah, who got a $180,000 S500 Mercedes, and Alick Macheso, another Merc worth $140,000. Both were questioned by detectives investigating Chivayo’s largesse and suspected money laundering. He insists local music royalties are pathetic and don’t give stars their just deserts.

As the general population writhes under the burden of extreme poverty he makes no bones about the gifts being rewards for the recipients not stepping out of line with the government and the ruling ZANU PF party.

The state media praises him as  a generous philanthropist, a benefactor of the arts, diverse communities and his church. He handed out bundles of money in Victoria Falls on his way to the expensive and magnificently luxurious Matetsi Private Game Reserve where he, his new fiancé and bodyguards are said to have dropped a cool $60,000. (Pictured: Award winning Matetsi, a wildlife sanctuary.)

Kuda Tagwirei, the kingpin of monolithic ruling party businesses, says people criticise Chivayo out of jealousy because they don’t know how he made his money. This endorsement surely implies that those in the corridors of power don’t know either, or don’t care.

The larger-than-life Chivayo is known as a “tenderpreneur” for his skill in pulling off deals to win lucrative and undeserved government contracts.

He received a US $7 million advance to build a solar farm in the southwest of the country that never got built. When deadlines weren’t met, the state power utility sued Chivayo and lost. The utility had to pay him a settlement of another US $ 22 million.

Then came claims Chivayo pocketed some US $ 30 million in proceeds from a contract to supply voting materials and logistics to the state electoral commission for the last chaotic national poll in 2023.

Chivayo owns Rolls Royce cars and a private jet, he collects expensive pairs of shoes and fashion-label clothing. He is photographed alongside President Mnangagwa and powerful regional figures. ( Among dignitaries bidding farewell to visiting Kenya President Ruto.)

The jaunty, boastful Chivayo started out as a wages clerk for a bus company at the age of 15 but soon moved to a Harare flea market to become a money changer, according to Wikipedia.

Not that other world millionaires haven’t done much the same as him, by fair means or foul, but in  dystopian Zimbabwe it certainly stretches the mind a bit too far.

Below: With Ruto and Mnangagwa, and the trappings of luxury that don’t seem to irk his fellow human beings.