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Bunga-bunga solution
Of course if you consider that he is a minister from the bunga-bunga party, this is not at all sur­prising. With such a noisy background of serial orgies, you definitely need lots of soundproofing material, don’t you? And of course Berlusconi’s Italy is just the perfect place for hunting for the technology which is appropriate. Well done Minis­ter and, hey, see you in March!

Kaylite, or brick and mortar?
Quite seriously, the Minister reflects a character­istic pressure presently faced by the MDC-T lead­ership: that of rounding up any tangible results for show as proof of inclusive years well spent to be worth the voter’s while.
Or in the absence of that, pilfering anything from anywhere or anyone that would confer value and respectability in the eyes of the voter. Or when both can’t, finding sonorous promises with which to fill this troublesome four-year void.

Hence the sound proofing genius we hear from the honourable minister, kikikkiki! He hungers for quick hits, something well nigh impossible for a sector of such concrete, brick and mortar. You have to have been working slowly, steadily — brick by brick. No overnight wonders from kaylite!
However one may want to sound or prove, there are no shortcuts, especially when the race is against inexorable time that ticks and tocks. Small boyz in the dusty bowels of Kuwadzana are assured on one thing at least: abundant skating boards for a happy hour or less while kaylite boards last!
If we can’t have houses, we might as well have fun for our children. Cry the beloved cities.

Ripping the poor
Did anyone watch Oscar Pambuka’s piece on Matapi? It was on ZBC-TV, and for me a must-watch. It gave a human illustration of why the MDC-T is set to lose the forthcoming elections as already predicted by its own opinion surveys.
Apart from the fetid living conditions to which the denizens of that slimy world are condemned, the programme put the Mutsekwa serious modest proposal in perspective. In Matapi people are liv­ing behind cardboard boxes, in small cubicles, converging on blocked pit toilets when nature necessitates. That I could live with.

They pay anything between US$80 to US$100 a month, money which is going to council and coun­cillors, all on the promise of improved living quar­ters yet to come, living quarters that will never come. That I find very difficult to live with.

Why rob the poor and homeless? Admittedly cardboard boxes are a little thinner than kaylite, which is why the remarkable Minister’s Italian find amounts to a far-reaching improvement for our homeless poor, indeed amount to a resounding show of sonorous MDC-T compassion which the evil public media have been trying too hard to soundproof through propaganda!

Moving from cardboard boxed walls to kaylite, what an enormous stride for our compassionate MDC-T! I make this point just in case some of my readers might just think Mutsekwa is kidding. Or speaking out of MDC-T turn. He is dead serious, and quite in tune with his party’s construction vision, a glimpse of which is in the showrooms of Matapi.

This party is dead serious
Last week I called MDC-T a repairs party. I may have been wrong. These guys are in too much of a hurry. They no longer find bobjans, hammers and bolts that sexy. They prefer repair-free kaylite.
This earth my brother! And all that maudlin sentimentality on Murambatsvina! One would have expected the party which now controls all urban councils to have done more, better than Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle homes and settlements.

No, they are at play, serial play. They won’t be bothered. Does not the Bible say the poor shall always be with us? Why fail the scriptures? Which really drives home a key element of the politics of this anti-people party: to court misery (as in sanc­tions); or to highlight it (as with Murambatsvina), but without doing anything about it when the opportunity is availed. As with the poor, what would happen to their campaign if we do not have Matapi? Or the 1 250 000 on housing waiting list?

Enter Mangoma and his meters
I had the chuckle of the heart when I read a piece relating to Honourable Mangoma, another MDC-T minister who seems to be in the habit of making himself invite-able to Police Camps each time he needs to douse deserved bungling unpopularity.

You have very serious Chinese investors who wish to deal with our power deficit over which Mangoma has been dancing the civet cat way with no solution ever in sight. I have never understood the workings of his gargantuan accounting mind.
You have defaulting clients on a hard-to-store commodity we call electricity. Your response is to cut the defaulters off! The owed monies do not come; the un-stowable electricity is not saved or stockpiled, with defaulters righteously feeling pun­ished and therefore sufficiently atoned for!
And all those measures do nothing to external bills, does nothing to megawatts already commit­ted to Zimbabwe by power surplus units, princi­pally Mozambique. But that is not my point.

When a sole bidder loses to those yet to be born
You have the Chinese investor — SinoHydro — who is interested in power projects, including the much-delayed, much begging Kariba South.
Tender processes are initiated. There is only one taker, SinoHydro. This only-bidder then fails, in fact is failed on the recommendations of the Zim­babwe Power Company, itself a subsidiary of Zesa Holdings which falls under Minister Mangoma.

On the recommendations of ZPC, the State Pro­curement Board turns down SinoHydro, citing the flimsy excuses given it by Mangoma’s company.
Meanwhile, SinoHydro signed an MOU with the Ministry of Finance under another MDC-T hon­ourable, one Tendai Biti, which seemed to invali­date any tendering. Still the company submits itself to tender, unduly. As events would have it, it is the only bidder in a country sorely short of power.

Which turns down the bid!
Proudly so, proudly Zimbabwean, short of power! Politely, the Chinese company queries the decision of the State Procurement Board on all grounds. In the meantime, there is consternation in Government on this rather baffling turn of events. The sole bidder has lost to who?
The beautiful ones yet to be born? Mangoma goes public, blaming it all on ZPC, his company!
Much like a dog blaming its tail for barking.
Welcome to maChinja!

The girl who knocks me out
It has been a week of surprising absurdities, I tell you! Madame Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga.
That girl knocks me to a thousand delights I tell you! Girl, I have time for you! You might not like her politics, more odiously the acronym under which those politics sail, on which those politics are fastened. But give it to her, she has her heart in the right place. And her mind too.

She is still capable of being outraged, itself a very important faculty when you work in the public sector where so much is happening. It is very easy easy to get inured or habituated to that which is so wrong. She does not hesitate to scratch in public, whenever, wherever, the itch feels and catches her.
And this time the itch felt pangonyangara, felt on the unseemly, in broad daylight, and where there are people too! But like me, she comes from that school of thought which says you don’t churn, let alone burn, your bowels because you happen to be a polite company, because you happen to sit next to an urbane white man.

You fart, period, and leave those around to deal with the odoriferous consequences. After all, a fart is a profound belch which starts from deep in, the healthy body’s way of cleansing or ridding itself of unwanted airs. When was it a crime? What is the charge? Discharging? Disturbing?

They, who have new tastes
Let’s hear her fart: “People, who yesterday did not know the difference between Green Valley (cheap wine) and champagne, now boast that they do not drink wine which costs less than US$500 a bottle. They play golf, not only golf but even have the attire for it. They cannot carry their own hand­bags or open their car doors, let alone drive.

They cannot push a trolley when buying gro­ceries and they only put on designer suits, dresses, shoes and sunglasses and yet will continue to label others elitist.” Who are these “they”, Honourable Minister? Who are you railing against?

Import substitution the Rhodesian way
Before she answers let me tickle her sides a bit. Miffed by UDI, the British Labour Government decided on an anti-UDI campaign through which the “Royal Air Force” would drop barbs of laugh­ter, in place of bombs, against own kith and kin.
UDI, forever inventive, went on an import-sub­stitution campaign, which is how it left us this whole wholesome legacy of parastatals and State enterprises in strategic sectors of our economy.

But Ian Smith was clever enough to know that even the “smalls” of the white way of life mattered to the overall sustenance of white morale and belief in the rebel colony. Apart from illicit sex, Rhode­sians loved their wine for sundowners.
After all their sense of sex always followed on besotted bodies. Illicit sex, especially with starved wives of men on military call-up duties, was Rhodesia’s ultimate supplication to Bacchus, the god of wine and giver of ecstasy.

Major Mutsekwa knows what I am talking about. So in his import-substitution plan, Ian Smith was concerned enough not to exclude alter­native wines, themselves vital fluids for bacchanal Rhodesia’s libation.

As part of pressure against the UDI treachery, Europe, led by Britain, had placed an embargo on Rhodesia, putting an abrupt stop to those exotic wines with which Rhodesians used to roast their own browned livers. Honourable Minister, that is how what we now call AFDIS came to be born, indeed how a whole generation of wines, including Green Valley which “ they” now scoff at, came to be invented.

Genuinely thirsty with a white heart
I say the Royal Airforce dropped barbs. Well, not quite it, not so directly. The smarting British Labour Government hired a phalanx of belligerent British, pro-Labour journalists who were occa­sionally despatched on the steam of the same Gov­ernment simply to harass official Rhodesia, and to pooh-pooh its attempts at getting the better of UN-backed sanctions through import substitution, sanctions which Wilson had begged for at the UN.

One such journalist was flown in, and did a few disparaging dispatches before he was eventually bundled out by van der Byl’s officious minions.
Among this reporter’s hostile pieces stood one that was most memorable, most remarkable. By way of subject matter, it shunned the world of high society, to patronise the lowly one of Rhodesian pubs and joints where a whole new generation of made-in-Rhodesia wines would be found and joyfully gulped to while away care, gulped as if tomorrow belonged to the Patriotic Front, then fighting in the bush! Like a real connois­seur, this bloody hack tested Rhodesian wines, one after another, initially with a tongue and heart well and generously disposed. He was genuinely thirsty.

After all he was white. After all he had been away from home for quite a while. And home was London, Fleet Street to be specific, where drink racks confirmed this great city’s claim to cosmopoli­tanism.

Now, this was Salisbury: so far away from London, in the heart of an African bush, at war, under sanctions, searingly hot. One needed to nib­ble at its margins with a generous white heart!
And the rule was anything goes, itself a great attribute in the field of journalism where a little discom­fort often buys great fame!

A drink and then bilharzia
He moved from bottle to bottle, this our great British hack. He tilted his head sip after sip, marched on and past label after label, hardly minding the common ancestry of these burning waters which pretended to be different, to be unre­lated. Of course as the evening wore on, and as night followed, he became less and less noticing, worrying more about keeping his tongue and big belly burn­ing, than about outlandish issues of “good wine” or some such adjective tied to this watery facet of the gastronomic sector. Some kind of game, some kind of addiction.

Then the world stood by, ready to read from this favoured by-line. What the world read a few days after, had the gripping immediacy of investiga­tive, participatory journalism, the immedi­acy of a personal testimony from one who bore scars of a night-long orgy at the Ambassador, then the only multiracial hotel and hole.
I will not bother the Minister with the boisterous body of the piece. I will spare her the main meal, to give her just its desert, just its conclusion: “Rhodesian wines, they say, are the only ones in the world which one takes, only to suffer bilharzia soon after”!

Hau Bakithi
Who are “they”, Comrade Minister? Another round fart: “At regional meet­ings, they have acquired the tastes of mussels and prawns and yet they still claim to be a mass movement; people cannot get in lifts until these gods and goddesses have had a whole lift to themselves and yet people still call them the people lead­ership.”
Hau bakithi, who are these gods and goddesses who live off mussels and prawns as if Zimbabwe has a sea shore line?

Another spurt: “There are some people who pretend to be something else when they are out there when some of us know what their positions were during the negotiations . . . Part of me just wish I had secretly recorded all these events, it hurts when liars, pretenders, unprinci­pled people are the ones that claim to be the heroes and heroines of this struggle when in private, away from the public eyes, they push for agendas that are in direct contra­diction to those they claim to stand for.”

The Minister ends on a pre-emptive note: “I am no angel but I cannot believe that Zimbabweans do not find these contradictions nauseating.”

Too serious to sweep under
I think I have kept both the Minister and the gentle reader suspended for too long. I need to rest them. What I have quoted above are excerpts from the Min­ister’s post on twitter, through which she expressed outrage and disgust at his fel­low MDC ministers’ newfound  love for the finer things, finer tastes, of life.
But also outrage at the tall tales they retail to you and me as a people’s leadership who will sleep on empty bellies for our sake!

Through sheer coincidence, I touched on the same matter only last week, to the chagrin of some of my readers who may be aligned or sympathetic to the MDC formations. I grant them that space.
After all, they are my readers and are thus assured of unconditional respect.

I used the rather coarse analogy of a fart that visits you in polite company. I meant it. You don’t need to stretch your imagination to see how important it is for Priscilla to close ranks with her colleagues in MDC-T, for the sake of turning the tables against Zanu (PF).
There is a requirement, nay, an expectation of solidar­ity, and I can’t imagine anyone else feeling its tag keener than Priscilla.
Yet she feels so strongly about the subject as to break ranks, as to indulge an outburst she well knows shall be used in this most devastating way by Manheru who can never let an opportunity pass by, without pelting the British monster. A lot more must be at stake. I have tried to put my little finger on it.
All the same I find the minister bold and honest, bold enough to show the stench on her armpit.

After Mugabe defeat, so what?
Maybe I need to turn to Priscilla’s boss for some clue. I am referring to Welsh­man Ncube. He was also in the news this week, attacking both Mugabe and Tsvangirai.

I sometimes wonder whether it is a blessing to have such obvious and even static enemies, or a curse that you have two enemies at any one time, thereby carrying the burden of proving to the world that you hate them in equal measure!
You always have to balance your hate, and Ncube bears the strains of ensuring such a Herculean balance. This week he predicted the defeat of Presi­dent Mugabe, adding no dictatorship lasts forever.

Maybe he is giving a hint at why President Mugabe has lasted seemingly forever: he allows his opponents enough space to abuse him, to predict even, his own downfall.

He is that gener­ous and people like Ncube can say those hard words, but without having to change bedrooms every fearful night.
To balance barbs for his two enemies, he turns to Tsvangirai and had this to say: “I am not convinced that if we replace Mugabe, we will have an alter­native that behaves differently from Mugabe. Why then should I join hands with such people to remove Mugabe? If you see a polit­ical party creating its own youth militia that beats up its own members then you want me to believe that when in power you will behave differently from Zanu (PF)?”

When Welshman opts out
Gentle reader, you notice immediately that I am like the proverbial rabbit that runs towards a thrashing party, katsuro katizira panhimbe! Far from succour, I get greater peril.

Far from giving me a clue to Priscilla’s mind, Welshman is fur­ther entangling the skein.
If Mugabe is sure to fall in the next election, and Welshman cannot be convinced to join in the campaign to bring this about, so will Mugabe fall?

By whose hand?
Is he then predicting Mugabe’s downfall at the hands of the rival MDC-T, towards whose victory he will not add a hand?
And if he won’t add his hand, and still sees the MDC-T winning — with all its violence which he so detests — that means the real message is that he and Mugabe stand together in shared defeat?

And what is he telling his voters?
That they should not support Tsvangirai?
And even that withdrawal of support from his own mem­bers will not alter the course of electoral history?

What is he telling us?
That he himself either stands no chance to be the President of this country?
Or that he will not offer himself for Presidential elections?

As did Mutambara?
Or maybe he does not care to draw conclusions implied by his messages?
Real imponder­ables.

Fearful governors?
But there is an important clue connecting the two Ministers, the two leading figures in MDC-N. They are profoundly unhappy with the hazardous turn Zim­babwe’s dissenting politics have taken.

It is a crashing indictment on the opposi­tional self, a distasteful realisation that the twin evils of venal­ity and thuggery have overtaken politics that pretended to be better, that pretended to seek the renewal of the national body-politic.
A disturbed acknowledgement that Zanu (PF) bears no alternatives, indeed a deep fear that things might get worse under an alternative MDC-T leadership.
And these profound misgivings are coming from a significant section of the MDC formations.
They are confessing to their own collective unfitness to gov­ern, let alone to rule.
Two weeks ago showed another dimension I had not budgeted for.

The President was about to leave for the US, for the UN.
A decision had been taken to proceed with the Second All-Stakeholders’ Conference, with dates 26, 27 and 28 September set down for it.
“No, Cde Pres­ident, we cannot have it when you are out of the country. Hatin­gaigone. Inotoda imimi muripo!”
Two grown-up men, one of whom once yelled “Mugabe I say go pisifuri . . . ” now so fearful, not even to run the country, merely to run a conference?
A deep recognition that a post-Mugabe Zim­babwe might never be governable by them, let alone without Mugabe and his Zanu (PF).

Dreading their own victory
This deep anxiety by those the West think can ever take over from Zanu (PF), comes in two forms.  One form, in its most sophisticated mode, is unconsciously illustrated by Mthulisi Mathuthu. His postulate is that we face an election of no choice. Its blatant variant posits a second GNU, and you notice MDC-T officials have been pushing this line. I suppose this is also one possible conclusion Welsh­man Ncube’s Mugabe-will-be-defeated-but-I-don’t-like-Tsvangirai-ascendency quandary takes one to.

If you consider that in 1999 and even up to mid-2000 the view was one of treating the MDC formations as an alternative to Zanu (PF), then you can see who has lost.

Then also you have a real grasp of the sea-change that has overtaken Zimbabwean politics over the years, a sea-change that has been taking place imperceptibly, at glacial pace, and yet is so profound and far-reaching.

The discounting of MDC formations as alternatives to Zanu (PF) — or its bold correlative — a plea for more time through a prolonged GNU as presently constituted, or a second GNU, traces the precipitous decline of the MDC forma­tions in the public estimate, indeed backhandedly acknowledges the revival of Zanu (PF), at the very least as a stabiliser under another GNU arrangement, or at the very most — and we have the Freedom House survey to tell us so — as a restored sole governor and ruler of this country after a brief bout of voter dis­favour.

Just the fact of doubting MDC’s fitness to take over, may be all that Zanu (PF) needed, needs, to prevail.
And that the doubt starts from within the leader­ship of the formations themselves, shows its sheer, staggering depth.
That doubt can only be worse in the general membership. It is not unusual to hear senior MDC-T officials saying they would vote for Mugabe in a secret Presidential bal­lot.

And that this gnawing doubt eats into the formations’ men and women of conscience and intellect, clearly shows how the formations are now bereft of forces upon which to rely for social hegemony. All its intellectuals, whether within its leadership ranks or columns of supporters, have sloughed off like an unhappy rind.
No one wins elections when plagued by such inner doubts. This inner doubt, I daresay, is one factor behind the unravelling constitution-making exercise. Thank God, they need not harbour any such fears.

Demolishing for no one?
I end this piece with another revealing imponderable, but one illustrating the destructive mode which MDC-T’s failing, falling command has triggered for itself.
It comes from Minister Biti, himself MDC-T’s supposed Secretary Gen­eral.
He did a piece titled “Zanu (PF): Constitution without Constitutionalism”.
It seeks to demolish Zanu (PF) and its proposed changes to the COPAC draft. Whether it succeeds in doing so is well measured by the mere fact that it makes not a single reference to those changes.

Equally, the piece makes no reference to the MDC-T as the constitutional alternative.
Not even to Morgan Tsvangirai as a countermand to the many references to Mugabe which litter the piece like maize kernels along the high road to the village grinding mill. If the goal was to repudi­ate Mugabe, the result did not instate Tsvangirai.
And you ask yourself for whom was Mugabe being demolished?

Recalling legend of the seas
But there is this very brooding portion cleverly worded ostensibly as an anti-Mugabe jibe.
Referring to Africa’s constitutionally unmitigated arbitrary, dictato­rial rule, Biti writes: “It is a law of the jungle. I am not a moviegoer, but recently I have been most impressed by Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. These movies capture a period where high seas where (sic) rife with lawlessness, aggrandisement and greed. Zanu PF and its captain Robert Mugabe would have found themselves in good company in the high seas amongst its legendary citizens — Captain Barbossa and Davy Jones, the mighty Long John Silver.” Potentially a nice analogy, if only it did not assume reader familiarity with the movie in question.

Like the minister, a good many of us are no movie-goers. Even if we were, there is no guarantee that his type of movies are ours.
Yet we have all read the story of a politician who found himself aboard “Legend of the Seas”, in what initially were happy, romantic cir­cumstances.
Until hubris stalked him, tripped him and tore his dirty life apart.
There is a lot in the piece excerpted from Minister Biti to play on our mental powers of recall: pirates, high seas, greed, good company, legendary citizens. Gentle reader, metaphors work through tight mental associations. Now, who does this boat imagery recall in your mind? Veduwee munondipedza kani.

Icho!

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