Politicians in Zimbabwe take bait on “rock” fuel
HARARE, Zimbabwe - President Robert Mugabe has said ministers at a Cabinet meeting he chaired agreed to pay two head of cattle and three buffaloes to a woman who claimed she could produce gasoline out of rocks, the official media reported Friday. Mugabe later ordered the woman’s arrest on fraud charges.
The Herald newspaper, a government mouthpiece, reported the woman claiming to be a tribal healer, known in the West as a witch doctor, also took large sums of money from the nation’s highest ranking politicians, promising in return to use spells to produce diesel fuel from rocks.
Instead of invoking spirits, the woman bought diesel and piped it into the rocks, the newspaper reported.
“We are not going to be too hard on her. We just want the truth and to know who put her up to such things,” the state media quoted Mugabe as saying at the commissioning of a biofuel plant Thursday in the nation stricken by the world’s highest official inflation and chronic fuel shortages.