1. Stripped of the Ministers’ waffle, the Government of Zimbabwe has basically introduced a subsidised shopping facility for members of the military, funded ironically, by other civil servants who must pay a 2.5% tax on their wages under the guise of a mutual savings fund. 
2. Two weeks ago I wrote in the #BSR how history was repeating itself. A decade ago, the then RBZ Governor Gideon Gono introduced BACOSSI shops where subsidised goods were sold to all. Now Mthuli Ncube has his Garrison shops except that they’re restricted to soldiers
3. The sole reason for this Garrison shops facility is to pacify soldiers who are feeling the terrible heat of a collapsed economy. The regime wants to buy allegiance by creating a special cushion for soldiers, arguably a move to pre-empt a coup. But it’s cheap & unsustainable.
4. The question is whether the rest of the civil servants will accept carrying the cost of financing a special facility for the soldiers. And more importantly, whether the soldiers themselves are so cheap as to be brazenly bought in this manner.
5. It’s a classic Orwellian Animal Farm scenario, where some animals are selected and treated as more equal than others. Unfortunately there are also many Boxers on Animal Farm. For them, “Napoleon is always right” and “we must work harder”.
