Marutenga naZvanyanya/Sim-ukaiwo mupembere/Gwenya-mbira svika pedo/Uitewo makorokoto/Nhai maiwee-e kani tofara  isu/Imi amaiwee-e kani tofara! Hurray, Nelson Mandela has turned 12!

This week's scoop by The Herald was stunning. A scoop against Trevor Ncube's stable. A scoop against Strive Masiiwa's stable. A scoop against supposedly all-seeing America's organs here. Above all else, a stunning scoop against the Prime Minister's spokesman, Luke Tamborinyoka. He had to read about his boss' amorous conclusions, to read it all in The Herald!

High pedigree
I don't care what the nuances to the story are.
The fact is something happened at the Tembo homestead, something involving the Prime Minister and muzvare Tembo, one Locadia. That's good enough.
In any case The Herald story which has now become everyone's story, will force out truth, the whole truth and we shall all be the richer  for it. You need to know the history of the liberation struggle to know whose daughter Locadia is. She has a venerable pedigree.

The way to home truths
Equally, I don't care whether Sekuru Tsvangirai paid lobola, paid damages or maputiro. I will soon find out anyway, and I know where to go for this. So patience, patience comrades!
Soon, and very soon, the Tembo girl - Buhera's newest bride after so many false starts - will have to roll down the Chivhu Highway, turn left into another highway, this time the one down to Dorowa.

Down, down that highway, past Renje, past Nharira, past Daramombe, into Buhera, past Banza, Chigavakava, Nerutanga, Chikuvire, crossing Chidzikisa River, leaving Buhera camp alone, to her the North. Locadia will do a gentle dip, yehumwenga, a dip into a vlei unevenly split by the Nzombe stream as it hurries to empty into Chidzikisa, close to Jemawachema, the place of repeated tears.
Legend has it that all drowned bodies would finally be recovered in this cataract, mangled and trapped between its yawning boulders, well frothed by swift waters racing down its declension. Day in, day out, bereaved families would visit Jemawachema to recover loved ones.

Rural paraphernalia
She will be driven on, occasionally catching a glimpse of bony and ribbed cows of home.
They belong to Tsodzo Village, neighbour to the Prime Minister's village. These four legged skeletons scatter along either side of the road, clearly wearied, seemingly browsing barren, ashen soils of Buhera, but actually struggling to reach and graze nhangandi, the little green, ground-level shoots of grass sipping nourishment from roadside moisture preserved from Buhera's sparse rains.
She shall proceed along the highway, proceed determinedly, up, up the gentle dunhu plateaued at the top before another deep and then another rise that takes you to a T-Junction which elbows a willing wayfarer out of Murambinda road, leading him on to kwaJeke, and then kwaMuneri, Makumbe Mission if you so wish.

Makanda, Chikara
But she will not go that far. Close to the eaves of this short plateau, the wailing calvacade shall mop, heave and sigh, slowing pace, closing ranks into an interminable beeline of blinking right indicators. Whereupon the lead car shall gaze at the lettering on a modest roadside plaque.
It reads "Makanda School", its fading finger pointing southward, seemingly taunting that zone where the earth seems to stumble and tilt down, as if checking its big toe for injury, before rising yet again to gain better vegetation southwards, off the banks of the languid Nyazvidzi River.
Yonder, in Gutu - the land of those of the Gumbo clan - lies Chikara School right in the heart of Matengenyika, Those-That-Bought-the-Land, literally. The Prime Minister went to that school for his primary education. Today it still stands, orphaned and discoloured like the hand of a leper. It badly needs a caring Alma Meter

This side of Nyazvidzi
Again, Locadia won't go that far. She will remain kumhiri kwaNyazvidzi, on the Buhera side. Nyazvidzi is a big river. Its shoulders vigilantly keep the boundaries that separate Buhera and Gutu, holding the ambitious homestead of the Prime Minister in check.
But it is all dry sand now, except for some weak flow that meanders from its middle, a weak flow which from a higher vantage, resembles a fading dharakisheni splitting the manicured head of an African coxcomb of the ‘40s.
The banks of Nyazvidzi are populated with tsanga, well sharply spiked, but providing some greens for cattle especially in the hard, dry season of spring. In his youth, the Prime Minister would swim here, stark naked, like all of us once upon a time.
This Tembo bride will have arrived, will have finally reached the laden white sands of home where, thanks to the baneful legacy Land Apportionment Act, maize plants cob at the height of weary millet.

The small joys of new home
She will have reached the land of the VaHera, where groundnuts buy cattle, and send children to school. Buhera, where to be smart is to shampoo one's undernourished, tawny, brownish hair with the okra-like ruredzo from the creeping feso plant.
Every barefoot herdboy knows this cruel plant so notorious for its hard, bold pricks. But its leaves, once mixed with water, give a beautiful shampoo which melds drenched hair so beautifully. I see our women nowadays need to part will a few hundreds of dollars for the same effect. So you shampoo your hair with ruredzo, and then comb it to ensure the shampoo reaches the foothill of these undernourished tufts of hair.

You follow up on each comb swipe by a hard, open-palmed pat on the head whose hair is already slippery from the ruredzo. Pat, pat, pat until you beat it into a thick, even mat of cascading or undulating knots so beautiful to behold. You then rinse the head gently, following and reinforcing the cascading hair strands.
If you had hair oil, usually red and in a small plastic bottle, you then add for a lasting shimmer. This is Buhera.

Faded times, faded joys
Buhera, where to complete smartness means sliding into a shirt and trouser pair - both being the latest generous donation from a kind brother or relative wekuHarare. The attire - invariably oversized - will have been indifferently flung your way by a relative who is ridding his wardrobe of all "small" and faded clothes, mostly torn along seams, clothes left behind by the speeding wheel of time and fashion. All this the Prime Minister knows from his boyhood and early adolescence. Yes, he knows or recalls that to be happy in Buhera is to leave home early Sunday - spick, span by rural standards of course - to leave home armed and fortified by a rusty or dirty sixpence in pocket - then pick and follow the winded road to the township - kwaMukumba, kwaJeke or kwaMatimba for the Prime Minister; kwaMarenga or kwaMurambinda for our bogey white-man who would be MP, one John Makumbe, and of course for the sex-smitten Shonhe.

Coke in hand, or on counter table, you slide into the makeshift dance floor to jive furiously to East African riffs like "Monica Akeche", "Rosalind Soda" always vulgarised to "Ruzarina Soda", or much later, to Solomon Skuza's "Banolila", blaring from an old Tempest or ZEC, all to the great notice of village beauties fawning reluctance, playing the un-eager.

And the icing on the cake was to have brand new "super-pro" tennis shoes which would flash in sympathy as the tempo heightened and swift feet pounded the dance-floor in intricate twists. All done, you whip out a white handkerchief, often with an ornately put amorous message from a loved one from the village. You elaborately wipe off few grains of sweat from you brow, all in a huge pantomime show of ostentation. That was to be home, to be in Buhera then.

Weep not child
She will have arrived to a home with all these rich idiosyncrasies. Whereupon the expectant village shall explode into happiness, less for the Prime Minister's marriage, more for the promise of a great eating feast to follow. Kokora (Coca Cola) tsvuku, nhema, dzegirinhi accompanied of course nezvingwa, munched between animated gossip.

The drink, the bread, all these playing forerunner to the main course - habitually sadza nenyama - which in turn trigger makate nemakate emaseredzanhindi (settle-my-stomach brew), always potent, always frothing to give all drinkers, however shaven and shorn, some effervescing moustaches!
For the groom, the joy is the hope of filled nights as nuptial rituals break into the joyous dance of suppressed echoes, plaintively splitting the quiet night; for the community, it's the time of eating, the time of drinking, the hour of ephemeral plenty.

All this will take place in hungry, drought-stricken Buhera, the new home for the new bride. So, Comrade Luke, weep not, weep not child, for there is plenty ahead. Like a drunken man's fart, a wedding is always a noisy affair.
Why wrap it from prying eyes? The Shona people have a good one on the futility of lying about the inevitable: however hard a broken girl may cough, her pregnancy is sure to show one day!

Defiling zones of privacy
I am not interested in the Prime Minister's private life. That is for him, and as I vainly hope, for him alone. I have never understood why pakuru has allowed this side of his fraught life to be a matter for his Office, for his fawning officials, often clownishly competing for his languid notice. Even politicians do have private lives, do have those zones and segments in their lives - admittedly zones always diminishing, always receding - which should be left alone, or kune vehukama. Ibasa raanaManasa iri, Luke.

Kuti uri muDanga here? Should it become absolutely necessary, absolutely necessary for the Office to come in, these zones of privacy should be navigated cautiously, should be handled by authorised officials with utmost care, and under very heavy strictures and studious guidance.
So I am not interested in the Prime Minister's evolving love life for which I wish him well. My real interest is how a mishandling of his private life breaks and perforates this magic insulation, this magic zone, how a mishandling of this becomes invites the public in, creating rich fodder for politics and politicians, indeed for Nathaniel Manheru especially, who has an obligation to create opportunities for Zanu-PF, his only Party.

Into the bedlam
Frankly speaking, the Prime Minister is poorly served all-round, whether by his officials in his Office or from his party, or by those unaccredited "tongues' that claim to whelp in his aid. Empty tongues such as Ruhanya whom our solipsistic private media dare dress in the garb of political analyst. Ruhanya? Ahh-h! Kikikikikikikkkiii! The Prime Minister's deck is simply overcrowded, overcrowded to a point of being a bedlam of riotous tongues, a bedlam and a sanatorium combined.
There is an ugly hubbub around him, wanting in both rhyme and reason. He must prune, he must trim, he must shut superfluous mouths up, for messaging discipline which sorely lacks presently. If truth be said, the sex subject threatens an early ruin to a man who stares a nasty political defeat shortly ahead. Why such cruelty from within his own ranks?

Beware of sextics!
No one in the MDC-T or in the Prime Minister's office seems to know that from the days of D H Lawrence, sex remains a dirty word, an ugly little word. It needs care; it needs good handling, good intuition if it is to reveal its earthly delights, its heavenly splendor.
This is why it is always wrapped: by plastic, cloth, darkness or by secrecy. In the case of the Prime Minister, it has been mishandled, badly mishandled, whether by actors who include him, or by spectators who gossip about him and his wassails.
Politically, the verdict is a straightforward one: if you can't run your household, you can't rule us! We are a more complex proposition than the woman you have. That is the relationship between sex and society, between marriage and mandate. Yes, there is something called "sextics" and our Prime Minister still has a long way to go!

Sex, man to man
I will skip the Prime Minister's written escapades, to deal with his Newsnight interview on sexuality, man to man. To this day that interview haunts him. It is sure to haunt him into the great electoral future.
The wily Mugabe is angling him for an electoral debate on this short ugly word called sex, a subject matter which threatens the MDC leader with incalculable reputational ruin, all for a farthing!
And the President keeps piling animal epithets to describe homosexuality which the Prime Minister mechanically supports without any emotional or political dividend. It makes him look queer; it reconfirms his poodle status vis-a-vis Cameron. Did he have to jump into that one? Vintage sextics indeed!

In the league of Chirau, Ndiweni
Even his own name betrays and condemns him, predisposing him for perpetual ridicule.
More-gay, Mu-gay Tsvangirai. The whole debate, so needlessly inaugurated, hurtles headlong into the self-fueling and self-enriching zone of national humor and comedy. It finished those who have gone before him and who resemble him in many ways: by sellout politics, by low intellect.

People like Chirau, Silau as he became in national comedy. People like Ndiweni. No serious politician wants to be the joke of the pub, which is what Tsvangirai now is, and without being accorded the right of reply! Is this marriage in the taboo month-of-the-goats a desperate way of containing more damaging aspersions of homosexuality? Michael Jackson did precisely that. And could Tamborinyoka's denial be a desperate way of placating offended traditional power in the land, while waiting for this months of goats to expire, before coming back with confirmation of the marriage in Zvita or December, the months of deeds? The Prime Minister appears to hop from one entanglement to another. Tomboisendeka iyo.

From disaster to gaffe
The roora. Except for the months, what would be odd about a Prime Minister who lost a wife a few years ago, all to overwhelming public sympathy, marrying after so long? What would a right-thinking spokesman be defending by denying it? Surely where my boss' sexuality is under debate, where his sexuality is under doubt by conventional measure, such an occurrence would be a real godsend, a definitive way of reissuing my man sexually (pun unintended) so he shames the raving, besmirching obloquy?

And the denial, one so hideously mistaken anyway, comes by way of a bald bite tendered in the hope of an impression, in the hope of genius. Listen to Luke: "If you can believe that [that his boss has paid lobola for his new love] my brother, it is the same as believing that former South African President Nelson Mandela is now 12 years old". Aaah Look (again no pun)! That is appalling. Well, with Mandela ailing at 93, is this just a reckless bite or a mockery of Mandela by a public relations upstart whose style is igniting a conflagration to douse a torch-fly? So Luke defends his boss through a remark which far from conveying incredulity, actually mockingly describes the age-related mental status of a man to whom a gushing tribute begs. It's not very polite Luke. Much worse, if the analogy was meant to convey impossibility, it turns out that indeed it is far easier to imagine Mandela turning 12 than to visualize Luke as a truth-telling spokesman of the Prime Minister. What now?

Widening gyre of errors

Luke weds, sorry, wades deeper into mud. "The Prime Minister spent the whole day at his Charter House office... The only marriage the PM is concerned about is the dysfunctional marriage called the transitional government". If this was meant to be a clever deflection, it turned into an uncontrolled bounce from a reckless return.

In the first place Luke seems so comfortable in parleying Tsvangirai and his new in-laws, albeit with The Herald in between, playing Trojan Horse. Or he genuinely believes he is debating The Herald? Even an idiot knows this breaking story is not about The Herald writer, is not about a medium. It is not about the notebook; it is about the knot, whether tied, to be tied or untied. It is about the written, about the man in the news, indeed about the man in subcontracted denial. To what end for his boss? Why can't Luke simply produce his boss denying the story if he thinks he is so right, telling himself to shut up in the meantime? And if "the transitional government" is the only "marriage" he knows and cares about, is caring for it inviting one Jacob Zuma into the bedroom? It is an ever widening gyre of errors.

Hit, pay and run!

Then you have Tsvangirai's unaccredited tongues masquerading as unnamed and unmanned officials. I have no doubt that we are still listening to Luke, only incognito. He says:

"What is happening now is an attempt by the Tembo family to embarrass Tsvangirai into marrying her. These people think they can corner him into marriage." All the reports on the claimed marriage are "sexed-up" by evil people intent on "stitching Tsvangirai up" with their daughter, the voice adds. No, Tsvangirai never married, he only paid "damages" for impregnating the Tembo girl out of wedlock, we are told! This is incredible. So who "sexed" who? Who "stitched up" who by the way? Not even the language is helpful. Zvese zviri kubhiridha! Do I get the sense that the Prime Minister and/or his people find the fact and status of marriage more menacing than the image of a playboy, of a nymphomaniac who goes about breaking knickers without lasting responsibility?

That the Prime Minister hits, pays and runs? The same way he is said to have hit Loreta Nyathi, before bolting, again dropping a few coins in mid-flight? Where does that leave the PM's image? And of course that line fuels greater speculation on the Prime Minister. Already, we hear he is about to dump Locardia because of pressure from some married woman, again associated with ZANU(PF), an irate woman who will not have it. Is that true? The gyre widens even more, I say! Why stock more damaging speculation?

In so many angry words

Enter Ruhanya, the "political scientist": "This woman [Tembo] is a friend if not relative of Theresa Makone [Home Affairs co-minister] and the MDC and anyone else who does not see the hand of Theresa Makone is not being honest.... Tsvangirai does not go out looking for girlfriends, but he has personal friends who play matchmakers and at the heart of this free dating service is personal interest, namely controlling Tsvangirai. Makone should move out of the private activities of the Prime Minister and focus on her job as a public servant. The woman is a source of instability in the MDC-T".

Very serious charges from a man whose locus standi on this whole matter is hard to fathom. But it works. He draws out Makone who confirms a relationship akin to what Ruhanya alleges: " We involve each other to the extent we want to and there are boundaries in that relationship." On relationship with the bride and whether or not she introduced her to the Prime Minister, she defensively says: "So what, so what? Whether she is a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, so what? What has that got to do with me if she is to have a relationship with the Prime Minister?

She is not a stranger to me." Was Theresa confirming something in so many angry words? And then we are told about something called Project 2016 by which it is alleged Makone wants to take over the MDC-T leadership. Expectedly she denies. To all that add the un-sure reaction from MDC-T Senators to a naughty motion from ZANU(PF), led by the national chairman, S.K. Moyo. The overall picture is of a knotty affair.

Teaching the horse to neigh better

Without doubt Ruhanya is a very useful but undisciplined informant. Certainly he lacks the disciplined thinking of a political commentator, although his outbursts provide valuable pointers. He is an embittered MDC-T activist aligned to a losing faction. This is also the faction of Luke, Timba and a few other talkative ones.

The fight starts in the Prime Minister's Office to reach the Prime Minister's bedroom. And on both end-nodes of the short continuum, the Makones feature: husband in the Office, wife at home. And both factions have sourced potential brides for the Prime Minister, hoping for more profound hold over the man. I wait either faction to challenge me and we can go into names if they so wish. Professional ladies have been hurt, their careers ruined. So Ruhanya is no bystander, no observer at all. So true, Luke might not have known about the beginnings of this whole matter. But he had an obligation to check with the horse in order to neigh better. He didn't. Expectedly matters got messy, with the Prime Minister sinking deepest into the quagmire.

Aim just below the belt!

Far from beating back the Makones, the Timba faction has only succeeded in exposing Tsvangirai even more. The boss has become the collateral damage of his warring minions. We now know what kind of a leader he is in his party, what kind of a leader he seeks to be for the country. To control him is to aim just below the belt, and his officials have done much to bring this otherwise forbidden zone up for pelting. If he runs party affairs from the hip, then the hip naturally becomes an issue of governance.

He cannot blame nobody. In the MDC-T, politics play out as sextics. It is not about good ideas on running the country which endear you to the man. It is about beauties, bevies and bottoms! Far from helping him become a good politician, Tsvangirai's officials are busy finding fine feathers for the peacock, fine feathers with which to dazzle the peahen. Need we wonder why the Prime Minister winds up in Morocco, ostensibly to learn democracy from an autocratic monarch? It is scary! Icho! -

• nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw -end-