How Sir Wicknell turned a media house’s ethics code into a bargain-hunter’s paradise
by BERNARD CHIKETO
TO THE untrained eye, Zimpapers’ media-ethics rulebook is a stout, humourless document. It frowns upon journalists accepting gifts worth more than US$100, a sum presumably calculated to allow for a modest lunch but not, say, a brand-new SUV.
Sir Wicknell Chivhayo, a businessman whose approach to generosity has all the subtlety of a gold-plated bulldozer, has now demonstrated that even the most fastidious gift policy is no match for a man with a car dealership on speed-dial and a property portfolio that seems to defy the laws of economics.
The saga began, as such things do in Harare’s gold-plated circles, with an envelope.
During an appearance at Capitalk FM, Sir Wicknell dispensed US$1,000 apiece to the 30 staff on duty—a “lunch” token, he explained.
He also promised two employees a vehicle each – a 2025 Toyota Fortuner GD6 for the presenter Phathisani Sibanda, and a Toyota Aqua for a female colleague.
The general manager, Comfort Mbofana, reportedly gave a breezy “yes, with pleasure” to the whole affair.
Policy made for Sir Wicknell
Trouble stirred when Zimpapers’ compliance machinery cranked into life.
A policy introduced last year—ironically, after Sir Wicknell had gifted Phathisani his current Aqua—caps acceptable gifts at US$100.
Management told staff to return all but a sliver of the cash, and presented Phathisani with an ultimatum so stark it could have been scripted by Sophocles – an ancient Greek tragedian: decline the Fortuner or resign. In an instant, an act of magnanimous showmanship had been recast as a career-ending entrapment.
At this point, a lesser benefactor might have sulked, or fired off a peevish statement, or simply bought a smaller radio station out of spite.
Sir Wicknell instead unveiled a loophole so elegant it deserves to be framed and hung in a tax-law lecture hall.
Cars for a song
In a statement dripping with feigned innocence, he announced that a certain “Madzibaba Chipaga” of Enterprise Car Sales—a familiar name in the Chivhayo gift-distribution network—was now selling a brand-new Fortuner GD6 for precisely US100 and a Toyota Aqua for a cool US50.
“There is no law,” he observed with the air of a man who has consulted several, “preventing someone from selling their property at any price of their choice.”
The two journalists, he suggested, could simply buy the vehicles. No gift, no ethical breach—just the bargain of the century struck between consenting adults.
The arithmetic is irresistible.
A journalist may not accept a car worth US$80,000, but may purchase it for the price of a decent pair of shoes. The compliance box remains triumphantly ticked, and the Fortuner gleams in the driveway, legally metamorphosed from inducement into private transaction.
It is the sort of reasoning that makes one wonder whether the Zimbabwean dollar’s chronic volatility has finally infected the very concept of value itself.
The drama of purchase
Lest anyone doubt the sincerity of this commercial arrangement, Sir Wicknell orchestrated a piece of street theatre worthy of the absurdist tradition.
In a video posted to his social-media channels, Phathisani and his female colleague dutifully presented themselves at the dealership to “buy” their vehicles.
The lady was accompanied by her husband, who gallantly “bought” the car on her behalf—a touching display of marital solidarity in the face of a 99.9% discount.
Phathisani, meanwhile, arrived with his “son” and, with a flourish that would have impressed a music-hall conjurer, produced a single US$100 note. This, he declared, was the entirety of his savings from a GoFundMe campaign—the crowdfunding equivalent of finding a Picasso at a jumble sale.
The entire scene was captured and shared with the world, a reality-television pilot for an age that has abandoned the distinction between generosity and farce.
Adding insult to injury: the US$80 mansion
Sir Wicknell did not stop at discount automobiles.
In a further act of surreal magnanimity, he has alighted upon a property owner in Waterfalls, Harare, who is—according to Sir Wicknell’s breathless dispatches—selling a house valued at US150,000 for just US80. (Yes, eighty United States dollars: roughly the price of a family dinner, or a modest weekly shop, or precisely 53% of what a Zimpapers journalist is allowed to accept as a gift.)
He has since dispatched a congratulatory message to Phathisani, urging him to “contact me as soon as you get your salary and have the US$80 cash” so that the property transaction can be consummated.
Sir Wicknell added, with the baffled sincerity of a man who has never haggled at a market, that he had asked the seller why the price was so low but “could not get a satisfactory answer.”
One can only imagine the questions that went unanswered. Is the house constructed entirely of gingerbread?
Does it exist in a parallel dimension where property taxes are paid in riddles?
Or has Sir Wicknell simply discovered a new law of physics—one in which value is not an intrinsic property of an asset but merely a suggestion, like the speed limit on a Bulawayo highway?
The mystery lingers, as insoluble as it is irrelevant to the broader spectacle.
The circular economics of refusal
Meanwhile, the US27,000 that the 30 staff members were compelled to return – being US900 apiece above their US100 allowance—will, Sir Wicknell announced, be collected by his lawyer from management.
The cash, once a gift, has now become a refund.
The circularity is dizzying: he gave, they tried to accept, the company refused, and now he will reclaim the rejected pile as if it had never left his pocket.
The entire episode resembles a reverse bank heist, except everyone involved is brandishing policy documents instead of balaclavas.
A universal gifting spree
To understand the boldness of this latest gambit, one must appreciate the sheer breadth of Sr Wicknell’s giving.
His largesse has touched virtually every stratum of Zimbabwean life, from government ministers to musicians, from ruling-party apparatchiks to opposition politicians—the latter a detail that adds a thin veneer of bipartisanship to an otherwise partisan enterprise.
He has gifted cars to gospel singers like Mambo Dhuterere, to Zimdancehall artists like Shinsoman (who received a Mercedes-Benz C-Class and US10,000 for ‘pocketmoney’ as well as 50,000 in cash, a combination that suggests either deep piety or a very persuasive sermon. By Sir Wicknell’s own accounting, he has distributed over US$15 million in cars and cash since January 2024—a sum that would make a medium-sized charity blush.
The ethical conundrum
Zimpapers, for its part, has not buckled. The board’s stance—that accepting expensive gifts from prominent figures could create “perceptions of compromised editorial independence”—is unimpeachable in principle.
The irony that this stern defence of state-media credibility emanates from an organisation long accused of being a mouthpiece for the ruling party is lost on precisely no one.
Still, in a country where institutional legitimacy is a perishable good, the board may have calculated that the only thing worse than being seen as a government stooge is being seen as a stooge who can be rented by the highest bidder for US$101 or an Aqua.
For Phathisani, the ultimatum had placed him in the unenviable position of choosing between a shiny diesel workhorse and a permanent contract he only secured earlier this year.
Sir Wicknell’s fictional fire sale offers an escape hatch, but only if Zimpapers agrees to suspend its collective disbelief and accept that a Fortuner and plush house really can change hands for less than a restaurant meal at an upmarket Harare Hotel.
So far, the board appears unwilling to play along with this theatrical display of regulatory compliance.
The parable of the US$100 Fortuner
The affair serves as a parable about the limits of rule-making in a society where wealth and wit frequently outpace the law.
The gift cap was designed to prevent influence from seeping into newsrooms through brown envelopes.
Its author almost certainly did not anticipate a scenario in which a nusinessman-cum-philanthropist would respond by opening a pop-up car dealership with prices set at post-hyperinflation levels, then follow up with a real-estate listing that treats property valuation as a branch of improvisational comedy.
Sir Wicknell, for his part, remains serenely unrepentant. “May we never reach a stage where expressing gratitude to hardworking Zimbabweans is treated as if it is a crime,” he declared.
The statement was as sincere as a US$100 Fortuner, and twice as clever.
In a country where the gap between the official and the actual is often the only space in which most people can operate, Sir Wicknell has not merely exploited that gap—he has furnished it with leather seats, alloy wheels and a panoramic sunroof.
The compliance officers may fume, the ethicists may write stern editorials, but somewhere in Harare, a radio presenter is quietly raising US80 to buy a house.
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