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illustrious career as a lecturer in the noble profession, as a director of information and indeed as a media practitioner.
Like or hate Chakaodza, he never made secret his upbringing to a mother who brewed kachasu and managed to send all her children through school.
Chakaodza was a villager, proud of his background and hard worker, whether in the right direction or in the wrong direction, depending on how you viewed him. If he picked a direction, he would go and go and go for it.

His views were his own. That was him!
Each time this villager, who was born a spitting distance away, talked to Chakaodza about home, the story would end up with the talk about kachasu school fees.
Even when he became Editor of The Herald, he would make it a point that his mother laboured a lot, brewing kachasu.
About three years ago, this villager bumped into Chakaodza at Westgate in Harare and he had just come out of theatre after an operation on bowel cancer.

He quickly lifted his T-shirt to show this villager the stitches that went across his abdomen.
Suffice to say, this village had not seen him for many years, since he left The Herald.
He looked frail and pale but he talked with vigour.

His usual stuttering, a comical laugh and constant attention to the position of his spectacles, was strikingly visible. He said he was following events in the tourism industry with kin interest and hoped to establish a magazine.
I was again to meet Chakaodza at the botched up Zimbabwe Union of Journalists elections at a mineshaft in Bulawayo. It was a disgraceful occasion for the journalism fraternity and he presided over the election, which became a sham and farce. He had been invited by Mathew Takaona, the outgoing ZUJ president and had been fully briefed about the desired results.

Chakaodza stuck to his given mandate, tactically pushing the agenda of his master with amazing dexterity. It was not his fault, he had a mandate.
This villager, who was a presidential hopeful in that election, was barred from the process and when he remonstrated, Chakaodza, never interfered.
This villager was not allowed even to vote for himself and was closed outside the “shaft” were the elections were held, yet people were told to vote between the villager and someone who was inside.
They called it ultra democracy.

Chakaodza told this villager over an aftermath tea break, that the union had gone to the dogs and that the election process was already manipulated and his advice was “My . . . my . . . my brother . . . My, my brother . . . Let sleeping dogs lie. There is always next time.”
The point is Chakaodza participated in many ZUJ functions under Takaona and that he saw the union plunge into the abyss that it currently is. He had promised to write a book on journalism and how ZUJ was a factor in the negative and in the positive. Unfortunately, he goes with his knowledge on how ZUJ destroyed itself from inside.

It’s unfortunate that Chakaodza has gone with many ZUJ stories because he was always available for ZUJ, either for the right or wrong reasons.
Even when Takaona took over from Kindness Paradza, after fistfights and brawls with police in the Midlands, Chakaodza was there.
Even as his health deteriorated last year, Chakaodza participated in many workshops, at times a day or two after attending chemotherapy. Such was his will power.

This villager never really agreed with some of the ideas Chakaodza propagated in his various writings, but still saw a determined journalist.
To date, ZUJ is now just a name, never an institution for journalists. Every journalist worth his salt will agree that it has largely become a union of condolences and solidarity messages.
Condolences to the deceased’s families and solidarity messages for those arrested, nothing more, nothing less! This is far away from the union this villager and others laboured for, boarding buses to as afar away as

Gwanda and Lupane to put in place union structures.
It is no longer the union, accountable to its membership. This villager is worried that the union has lost its focus. For instance what is the union’s input to the funeral expenses of Bornwell Chakaodza, Makuwerere Bwititi and Freedom Moyo? All these guys worked day and night for the success of the union. All they have done is send condolence messages.

Back in the village, the village soothsayer, the ageless fountain of wisdom and knowledge contents that there is a problem when you try to milk the cow you never feed.
Every month, we pay membership fees to sustain the sending of condolence and solidarity messages. What is the benefit of the living and the sick? What is the benefit to those who have not been arrested? What programmes have been undertaken by ZUJ in the past two years, a year could be too short?

Who knows where the ZUJ president is? Is he not a visiting president? The soothsayer says the president who stays in yonder Bulawayo has never set foot to the head office.
At least the old ZUJ paid school fees for the deceased’s children, bought food for deserted families, funded burials of the members. It had thriving housing schemes. Cry our beloved union!
Going forward we should be ashamed of giving malicious graveside speeches upon the death of our members, attacking employers, yet the union itself has not done anything better. A union should identify with its membership. A union is not a talk shop. It is practical and takes tangible action.

Not that Takaona was the best president we could have and neither would this villager be the best, but surely the union needs to be doing something tangible. The later day ZUJ is a circus, no one really knows what they are doing and where they are leading us to.

They must prove this villager wrong by telling the nation or the fraternity what they have done for Freedom Moyo.
It is akin to giving a button stick to a clown who abandons the track and runs into the mountain. This villager does not wish to follow into the mountain, grab the button stick and continue the race.

It will be an impish attempt to paint the air. May all journalists who passed on rest in eternal peace. One by one, we shall all abandon the pen and the microphone to follow them into another life. Hopefully there will still be the pen and the microphone, there.