A fight over ‘bream soup’

But according to the village soothsayer, “If you make an old woman taste bream soup, you are likely to find her drowned while attempting to fish from the communal well the next day. (Ukaravidza chembere muto wegwaya inofira mutsime ichiedza kuraura), goes the Shona saying.
Never mind the abuse of the word democracy and the movements that the land of Munhumutapa has witnessed.
Morgan Tsvangirai, Arthur Mutambara, Welshman Ncube and Job Sikhala are all fighting to eat from one plate, says the village soothsayer.
The democracy they preach is a smokescreen behind which they hide their plate, filled with bream soup in the form of donor funds. Unlike President Mugabe, they have all defied their own constitutions in a bid to continue eating. This is a delicacy.
The leadership at the MDC formations is not about serving Zimbabwe and its people; it is all about access to the plate and the bream soup. Vanofirapo, Mutambara will not let Ncube eat from there. This is a fight for soup, Mutambara has tasted it and will not let go, Ncube has smelled the soup and wants to drink it all. Wither the MDC?
The fool who burnt down the house
You know that you are back to the village the moment you see the round, grass-thatched houses that make up homesteads in the African village.
Of course, some among us, having known a digression from this traditionally Southern African style, have tended not forgive this kind of habitat for want of sophistication — as if that is the all and be all of shelter from the wind and rain.
Yet the structures and the style have persisted unto this day, with varying degrees of the two attributes, much for being in our DNA (even the rich oft put up a round kitchen) and being a historical continuum of our architecture.
Thus when you enter the village, these round huts that make the village, punctuated irregularly with odd structures of oblong derivatives stand unassumingly, often spewing smoke from the interior, via the top. Smoke that thinly fogs the air above, while exuding a tender acridity that lulls the African village.
The interiors, where the children and the old sit around small fires whose energy begets African nourishment from the various dishes that make our culinary tradition.
In such a village there lived one fool, my grandfather told me once. 
Then one day he burnt the hut in which years earlier he had let out his first cry to the ululation of the women of the village who had come to witness the miracle of creation.
Ura mapako, hunozvara mbavha nemuroyi!
No one seemed to know who had done the evil of setting afire the hut.
After so much intrigue, disbelief and mystery, it was only later on that the cause of the fire was established as having come from the foolish son.
“The wasps are all dead now,” he was heard saying with foolish satisfaction. All for the wasps!
Does that not ring a bell about the burning of the houses in Mbare? This villager wonders why should the MDC formations campaign for the continuation of sanctions? Is this not tantamount to burning the house that President Mugabe and all the gallant brothers and sisters built for us, under what we euphemistically call independence. That is Zimbabwe!
A calling, a higher calling or an eating place?
I shall come back to this village idiot later.
Having witnessed the events of the past few days in our politics I am compelled to comment on the on-going tale, or is it saga or soap opera, of the two professors that I touched on about a moon ago. The free circus has come to town in a tale of two professors! Who is firing who?
This villager demands to know who wants to eat from whose plate because this has become an eating place not a place to serve Zimbabwe?
Now it has become even intriguing with the one wonted for creating machines or such-like creatures now rejecting the new-found superiority of the other whose vocation in the field of laws has been foreshadowed by his alleged propensity to divide.
Which even the foreigners have also seen, by the way.
Now we hear that the one robotics professor has “fired” his supposed-to-be boss.
What cheek!
Call it pulling a rug from under someone’s feet, in the village we used to call it “chekuseri” while playing the plastic balls.
So the robotics one, ironically hiding behind legal technicalities, says “Handiende!”
And while literally slamming the door on the ambitions of his adversary, he tells us that he has unfinished business in Government. This villager would want to ask, what business Professor?
Now this robotics man, who never blessed us one day with a sample or initiative of his famed field, says he won’t go until he has finished the mission of his calling.
Can anyone tell us please this man of robots has done and initiated in Government that he now sees jeopardised by his leaving office, now or as and when it is due?
And talking about the calling, it would seem he has had a higher calling than the one he received one day in February 2006!
No wonder why he tells us at every opportunity that he is a “principal” and one which created this animal under whose wings the other is.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This has become employment for the two professors and the real fight is about bread. It is about food and whose child does not want to feed? This is an eating place.
Much ado about something
Last week this villager spoke about the city of Harare.
And the villager is turning into a soothsayer himself, having had contact with the wise men from the villages yonder in the land of milk and honey.
I noted that the city, which had lost, and was continuing to lose, its lustre was giving the ratepayers a raw deal — in the same breath as it was giving its so-called directors hefty holiday packages of up to US$10 000 for Christmas and, of course, a New Year.
Part of the raw deal was, of course, giving foreigners control of parking space in our city, which control locals could well do.
Without the drunken marshals, even.
So the prophetic lamentation was followed by mass demonstrations on Monday effecting to locals’ desire to owning the city and to own businesses.
Of course, this noble idea was waylaid by some criminal elements. But was the message not clear enough?
Seeing the foreign company’s staff scampering for safety — instances when the messenger is shot are not unheard of — was enough testimony of the clarity of the word and deed.
Our advice to Mahachi and company is to expedite the conscription of local talent in this regard not as the poor famished souls that man and woman our streets but as rightful owners of the 60 percent stake going out. Easipark . . . Easipark . . . Easipark!
And can we predict that the people, being increasingly frustrated by some privileged few who are able to pay rentals of a thousand dollars, a three-by-three cubicle or some such ridicule, are likely to show their frustration again? What with goodwill and whose goodwill?
Only time will tell.
The village fool . . .
Pretty soon it will be the time for the European Union to review its widely discredited illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe.
These are the sanctions that were imposed on the country in 2002, against the dictates of the Cotonou Agreement governing European and African and Caribbean states relations and the larger international relations law.
There is no iota of doubt that these sanctions are illegal and immoral and were fast-tracked to see regime change in Zimbabwe, which, thankfully has not occurred. Do the various MDC formations not see this?
Thankfully so, because mambo haagadzwe nevatorwa varume, as one perceptive musician has beautifully put it. The wolfish sanctions have been wrapped in the sheepskins of human and political rights.
Hezvoko! Bwa, bwa. One time!
Now that the sanctions which destroy our economy and hence our social and political well being, are up for review we have seen the usual grandstanding from the village fools again.
Not particularly surprising though as we know that each time there is a gathering of European heads some elements here tend to cry wolf through choreographed acts of violence and pseudo-violence.
We now hear of “safe houses” being created all for the consumption of the Europeans’ agenda to stifle the country through sanctions. Sanctions which will destroy you and me? Sanctions which will salve power to the neo-colonial Europeans and their ally America? But the fools want the revolutionary Zanu-PF wasps to go!
Fool, fool, fool!
Don’t you see that in the grander scheme of imperialism you too will be wasps that need to be wiped off as well? You will be swatted like flies by these European guys.
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