Gift Horse, Meet Car Dealer: Enzo Ishall Sells His Chivayo Mercedes for US$60,000

HARARE - The car was free. The fuel, the tyres, the insurance and the service plan were not.

Zimdancehall star Enzo Ishall has sold the luxury Mercedes-Benz he received from the businessman Wicknell Chivayo, and he did not get anything like its sticker price. Chivayo told the Denny J Show that he had bought the vehicle for about US$145,000, only to receive a call from a car dealer. “One car dealer called me and said, look, Enzo is selling the car you bought him. He wants US$60,000,” Chivayo said, according to Nehanda Radio.

ZimEye identified the vehicle as a Mercedes-Benz GLE400 and put Chivayo’s original outlay at about US$130,000, a figure Nehanda Radio said had also appeared in earlier reports. On either number, the car lost more than half its value between the showroom and the second-hand market.

“Half the price”

Chivayo said he had no objection to Enzo selling something that had become his property, but he sounded disappointed. According to the businessman, the musician found the vehicle expensive to maintain and needed money.

“People are calling me, you’re buying too many people cars. As soon as I get them they go and sell them at half the price,” he said.

Enzo, Chivayo suggested, could have come to him directly if keeping the car had become a burden, and he might even have considered helping him acquire a house instead, Pindula News reported. He also said Enzo was not the first beneficiary to want to cash in. Jah Prayzah had approached him about selling a car to raise money for a studio, Chivayo said, and he had no objection then because the musician was getting a reasonable price and putting the money into another productive asset.

The economics of a gift

Social media did the arithmetic quickly. “Luxury cars aren’t gifts, they are bills,” the commentator Tadiwa Chipato wrote, in a line Nehanda Radio quoted. Another commentator, Nigel Makiyi, thought Enzo had sold too cheaply. “Even if it was a gift, you can’t sell it for a price that is as low as US$60,000,” he said.

ZimEye made the same point at greater length, noting that a recipient “can be wealthy enough to receive a luxury vehicle and still not be wealthy enough to comfortably operate one.”

That is not a small consideration in a country where, ZimEye noted, the energy regulator lists petrol at US$1.93 a litre and diesel at US$1.87.

Chivayo’s gifts have gone to a long list of public figures, among them Jah Prayzah, Alick Macheso, Killer T, Mai Charamba, the former Warriors captain Peter Ndlovu and the broadcaster Reuben Barwe, according to Nehanda Radio. Ndlovu reportedly received a BMW X6M valued at about US$144,000. Jah Prayzah reportedly received a Mercedes-Benz S500 worth about US$180,000 and later a 2025 Range Rover Autobiography with US$150,000 in cash.

The view from the newsstand

One of the cartoons here imagines a street newspaper stand where every placard announces another celebrity selling another gifted car, and a vendor wonders whether they have “finally discovered the difference between receiving a car and affording a car.” The placards are the artist’s invention, not a list of real sales.

A second cartoon, drawn as the Lake Kariba ferry disaster unfolded, asks why the content creators who received cars have gone quiet about Kariba, and suggests the vehicles came with a “speak-no-evil” warranty. That, too, is satire. But a similar comparison was made in earnest by an opposition politician. Jacob Ngarivhume of Transform Zimbabwe called the government’s US$100 assistance to those affected by the disaster “a joke and an insult to grieving families” when set “against the millions being paid out to socialites, pastors and other well-connected individuals,” CAJ News reported.

After the cameras

For the man who gave the car, the sale was an irritation. For the man who sold it, it may simply have been sense: US$60,000 in cash can pay for a great deal that a parked Mercedes cannot.

The episode does, however, puncture a little of the theatre around Zimbabwe’s most famous gift-giver. A handover is filmed. A resale is not. And between the two lies the bill that nobody posts online.