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Judge, magistrate, court office cleaner, someone, anyone, please tell us how we can also kill pedestrians while unlicensed, appeal against sentence and walk free as a bird

Bar Talk With Bra Gee
How do you adjust a us$30 000 expenditure to be accommodated by a us$6 000 budget? What do you cut out?
The small house will be the biggest loser as she will have to vacate the flat in the Avenues and return to the dusty streets and burst sewers of the high density that she crawled out of in 2009 when “Big Daddy” started getting her to chop green-backs.
And she will have to give up on the wheels upgrade to a merc and return to a Vitz before reverting to a Mistubutsu in a very short while as the service and repairs fund has dried up. We expect to see a few of the sisters who had begun to think that they were too good for the usual place return to humbly sit around and hope that some regulars are still in the business of buying intangible goods.

And meanwhile “Big Daddy” will have to explain to “Wifey” what he has been doing with the difference in figures between what he has been claiming to be his income and what he was really getting. Maybe another juicy divorce is on the cards and we will get to hear the fabulous lives of Zimbos who live like Hollywood A Listers although they owe billions or cannot explain how they got so rich.

What about all those kids in foreign institutions? Will they have to come back home and suffer the horror of going to unmentionably primitive institutions like the UZ which has really gone down once they started accepting the children of the poor? Or will “Big Daddy” have to spend some of all that “hard-earned” cash that has been comfortably sitting in some nice little offshore account?

Yes, I was leading up to The Schedule. Bra Gee is reliably informed that a number of named and shamed “jefes” are crying foul at the published figures claiming that they never received so much. The miscreants are claiming that ‘non-financial’ benefits should not be included because they never received the money.

For the uninitiated I will explain the maths to you in simple English. CEO goes on Holiday to Mauritius for three weeks. The air tickets for him and the spouse, and or the small house and the kids as well as the family dog are paid for by the organisation.

The hotel bills and the food and the drinks and the sightseeing and the clubbing and the shopping and the suntan lotion are also all paid for by the poor parastatal whose workers’ salaries are unpaid. Then he does it again in Tahiti and Disneyland. Three such jaunts in a year cost the organisation US$180 000.

Then to that you add the fees paid for his kids at some snotty schools and the unlimited fuel and air time  and entertainment bills which amount to another US$144 000 a year. So now you have a total of US$324 000 of real financial money that the organisation is paying out every year for the comfort of the head honcho and his wife, kids and small house. Which breaks down to undeclared allowances of us$27 000 a month.

And now the “jefe” says his salary was only a measly us$15 000 so anyone who says he was earning us$42 000 is telling untruths and besmirching the “jefe’s” spotless reputation!

Anyway, with all those figures so enticingly laid out we could not help picking out the “Mad Jefe” of the week! It has to be the Gwanda town clerk. The audacity of the fellow is astounding. To milk that small town beyond what his betters in Bulawayo, Gweru, Mutare and Masvingo were pressing ratepayers for and almost matching the superiors of Harare and Chitungwiza in demanding payment for services not rendered. What cheek!

But I suppose that it is better to be a “Jefe” with a pathetic package of only us$6 000 a month instead of a director booted out of City of Harare because your job description has been erased.

Just in case you missed the sarcasm last week, I, Bra Gee said that all ‘prophets’ claiming to create miracle money, miracle life or whatever else are big fat liars. And in no time the ‘Power Prophet’ from Bulawayo  was unmasked by ZESA when they went to the miscreant to demand that he explain how his miracle power recharge cards would connect to the national grid.

If only the shiny and round faced guy had been in intelligent enough to demand the same evidence of miracle bank transfers from those other two liars, instead of foolishly endorsing them! All of them are con artists preying on desperados ardent for signs of miracles instead of taking responsibility for their own destiny. It is like a drinker sitting in a corner of the pub and praying that those propping up the counter will tell the bartender to give him a round. So never say that we did not say it.

Finally, those in the judiciary system, the regulars asked nicely and you did not reply. So now we will be so vulgar as to name names. Why is Dudu Manhenga walking around as free as a bird? When is her appeal going to be heard?

Magistrates, judges, chief justices, lawyers, even office cleaners, someone, anyone in the courts please answer us. We would all like to learn of this wrinkle in the law which allows unlicensed drivers to run over and kill people, get jailed, appeal against sentence and walk.

Is it that we need to sing before we can get such dispensations? Yet our elephantine memory remembers the likes of Paul Matavire and Simon Chimbetu paying their debts to society the good old way of spending time in the lock up. What is so special about this woman? It is certainly not her singing.

Till next week, bottoms up!