Surely nobody is this gullible.... On the other hand.

In desperate straits people will clutch at straws (and sometimes even mix their metaphors). We see this all the time. With Zimbabwe in its current parlous state it is perhaps no surprise that people will believe the utterly incredible. When medium Nomatter Tagarira claimed that she could produce refined diesel out of a rock just by striking it with her staff, members of the Zimbabwean government thought they might have the solution to the country’s fuel crisis.

After witnessing her miraculous gift they gave her five billion Zimbabwean dollars in cash (worth £1.7 million at the start of the year but probably now worth £15.75 and falling) in return for the fuel. Ms Tagarira was also given a farm food and an armed guard on the rock. One year on and officials realised they had been duped. Ms Tagarira is now in custody, awaiting trial on charges of fraud or, alternatively, of being “a criminal nuisance”. Details from court papers apparently reveal that Ms Tagarira convinced Cabinet ministers, ruling party heavy-weights and top army and police officers that by striking the rock with her staff she could produce enough fuel to supply the country for 100 years.

Ms Tagarira had discovered a large bowser of diesel last year, suspected to have been abandoned during the country’s civil war in the 1970s. She laid pipes from the bowser to a point at the bottom of the hill. Whenever she assembled an audience, she would strike a rock and an assistant at the top of the hill would open the tap and fuel would pour out. The bowser eventually ran dry but that didn’t stop Ms Tagarira. Who would buy diesel from lorry drivers and keep it in the pipe on the pretext it was coming from a rock,” court report said.

One anonymous lawyer commented “It is not the woman who ought to be arrested; it is the idiots who authorised this criminal waste of public money,”

It looks like the ones born every minute in Zimbabwe got to run the country