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Blessing Musariri Shelling the Nuts

In my opinion, any Zimbabwean who is not a legitimate producer of goods and or services that have a traceable history has no business being a millionaire.

A friend from the Caribbean once said to me, “Here we run from rain but towards bullets.” We had good laugh about how his people loved drama.

I went from thinking about that to thinking, over here a bullet doesn’t necessarily make a sound, we know when someone has fired a bullet in the air and we certainly don’t run towards it to see “What a gwaan?” Here, we scramble for cover.

The first shot was the lowering of withdrawal limits from ATM machines.

When this first happened, I thought, “Hmmm. Curious. I wonder what is happening.” Then the limit got even lower still and I thought, “Okay, this is of some concern and then suddenly there were queues outside the banks and the stories started making the rounds.

This is when I thought, “Uh oh, the silencer has been removed and shots are being fired loud and clear, everyone take cover.”

Then we heard the word, “bond” and I thought, “Bond? Definitely not James Bond.”

Here comes 2008 again, how did we circle back to this? I am currently in a suspended state of disbelief. Surely this is not really happening. And then the social media messages start making the rounds; there is going to be a shortage of basic goods in the shops.

I thought, should I go out and hoard stuff? Cooking oil, sugar and all that? Then I thought, no, I’ll now be basically handing over money to the supermarkets that was not destined for them at this present time.

I shall make necessary adjustments, but if it means I end up going without sugar for a while, all the better for my health. I can’t be bothered to do all that again, once was more than enough.

I don’t see the need for this accrual of disasters. It’s completely due to lack of integrity, lack of shared vision and foresight and too much ethical amnesia.

We are well educated people with culture and a sense of decency which we seem to forego these days in favour of thuggery and ostentatious displays of ill-gotten riches.

We are not America, where people can be rich just because they somehow got famous. How can we have people spending millions on luxury goods that have no real place in a setting such as this?

In my opinion, any Zimbabwean who is not a legitimate producer of goods and or services that have a traceable history has no business being a millionaire.

Every one here could have a decent life if things were done right and justly. Then the wealthy would still be wealthy but with some sense of authenticity about it. There is a difference between being wealthy and being rich.

Wealth is usually accrued over a number of years and built on some kind of foundation and work ethic.

Being rich, especially here has the association of a lack of permanence, an untraceable history and elements of carpet bagging.

We started off as a country with immense potential and then somewhere along the line, politics got in the way of progress.

There are many influences that interfered with our nation’s progress, but what will bring us to our knees every single time is our own lack of self-discipline and the complete lack of integrity that seems to be the order of the day when it comes to public office and public funds.

I have three words I want to say at this juncture, but before I do that, I want to tell a little story.

A few years ago, I bought my nephews this wire spiral toy called a Slinky (well it was a version of a Slinky).

Now, the younger of the two boys kept getting the coils twisted about the wrong way, which completely interfered with how the toy worked.

Every time this happened he would come to me and say, “Aunty please fix my toy,” and I would untangle it.

After this happened about three times, when he approached me again with tangled spirals, I said, “Hey come on, I don’t want to do this anymore, stop messing it up.”

He tried cajoling and pleading, “One last time aunty, please. Please.”

I was unmoved. I was sick of unravelling the thing. Finally he gave up all semblance of appealing to my sentiment and threw the toy in front of me.

“Just fix it,” he commanded and walked away. I was left mouth agape at his audacity.

He didn’t want to hear anything more about anything and he wasn’t going to try the nicely-nicely approach anymore.

All he wanted was for his toy to be fixed. These are the three words I am here to say today. Just fix it!

Okay fine, we’re here, there’s nothing we can do about how we got here right now and we don’t want to talk about it ad nauseaum.

What we want is our money and we want it in the form we put it in the banks.

We want to be able to pay school fees for our children without being told that currently education is not a priority area for disbursement of your own funds, which you put trustingly in your bank account.

We want to be able to swipe our cards and pay for things without worrying about curtailed functions.

We want to be free to do other things in a day that make us money without worrying about where to keep it safe and how we’re going to get it out of where we put it.

We don’t want to mourn our savings and pensions again.

We don’t want to die en route to border countries to buy cooking oil and bread-makers.

We don’t want to be called Makwerekere and “You Zimbabweans” while we pile our cars and buses with things we should be able to get in our own country.

We don’t want to shop for money on black markets.

We don’t want to hold up supermarket walls waiting for customers to buy goods in cash so that we can have cash back.

We don’t want to wake up early and stand in queues holding onto a sliver of hope.

We don’t want to take time off work to go and organise telegraphic transfers in the banks.

We don’t want to pay premiums to break our money free.

We don’t want replacement money that will be auctioned for thousands of pounds as souvenirs in the future.

We don’t want to have to explain to people at functions abroad, “What is happening in Zimbabwe.”

We don’t want to bear people’s expressions of sympathy and their dissections of our country.

We don’t want to hang our heads in the face of citizens with more responsible office bearers and make excuses and give history lessons that no longer hold water.

We are no longer wailing and moaning about how we got to this place, what we are saying is, just fix it. Just fix it and don’t bring us back to this point again.

We don’t want this to be the bullet that brings us all down, let this be the bullet that we dodged.