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The day you are scheduled to die, you will certainly die, regardless of your resistance, for do village elders not say, the day a monkey is scheduled to die, it finds all trees slippery, with dogs on hot pursuit?

And, yet the dead are a respected lot! Their remains might be interred in the grave but their soul, eyes and ears are all over the living- practically, spiritually and effectively. Hard-hitting, even!

In the village, death is like a weir in a river. For a while the flow of life is held up. The current of life whirlpools, vortexes and eddies round and round and streams back and back to itself as the process of dying and burial gets underway.

But soon after burial, their weir gates into another life are winched open and the flow of life continues, now on a different pedestal.

The dead, abandon the limited powers they had while still living on earth and their weaknesses and ignorance, transform into ancestors, who see the future before it happens and can cure very evil. They can see tomorrow, today. Ancestors make perfect parents!

In the village all men and women are expected to provide for and protect their families as best as they can. Even when they die and leave their bodies in the grave, they do not cease to care for their descendants. The richness of their personalities and the depth of their characters and acquired experience do not end abruptly. They transform into more supernatural powers, after death.

Now in our workplaces and other endeavors, many of our professionals have killed the dead for personal gain.

On many occasions workers have lied to their managers that they need bereavement off days because so and so has died, yet the person died a decade ago. On such occasions, they need an off day to go to South Africa to shop, or they need and off day for a deal. They kill a dead person. They go to a “funeral” of a long dead and buried person. Dear reader, how many dead people have you killed?

Some workers have killed their mothers several times. They have killed their long dead fathers, dead brothers, dead sisters, their dead grandmothers and their dead grandfathers and their dead relatives! Some are so daring they even kill the living. Some of our fathers and grandfathers are dead men walking in the villages after being killed at work. They do not even know that they are known to be dead at workplaces. What with the real death coming?

There is no longer fear for the dead, yet the dead can punish! They do punish. It might not be now. It might be later.

The recent story of Christpowers or Simbarashe in the village- the Headlands boy who died in an unfortunate inferno, depicts another version of killing the dead. Instead of burying the boy to eternal peace, he was killed several times through versions that border on nothing but speculation. Speculation inspired by cheap personal political gains. Deliberate distortion of the truth for political gains and this villager believes the poor boy should be turning and twisting in his grave with anger and disgust that his death has been so cheaply politicised.

That a whole Honourable Prime Minister of a country seized the opportunity and methodically recreated the death od Simbarashe for his own much-needed political survival, shows how seriously people can undermine the dead and abuse them. Do dogs bark out of might or out of fright?

It if fact not fiction that there is nothing the boy will benefit from the hullabaloo but that MDC-T is seeking to benefit from his death. And, so does Simbarashe’s gullible father! As for him, there is indeed nothing to gain. The Prime Minister is quite an actor. he even calls himself a main actor in the script of Zimbabwe’s regime change. He was acting at that funeral and indeed he continues acting.

The Hon Prime Minister sounds an amazing male chauvinist and given his reflections on the death of his wife, one wonders when he will become real. When will his acting antics end?

“Ask yourself that in that accident (which killed his wife Suzan) had it been me who died and she had survived, what would have happened? One of the fundamental things is that the main actor doe not die if the film is still on,’’ there went the PM.

This villager thinks, his late wife Suzan really had a lot handling to do. Even into her grave, she must be wondering what the politician is now up to. So it was right for her to die and the PM to live? Let the film continue!

Fortunately for the PM, the plethora of women’s organisations has been silenced by the western donor funds. In the village a dog carrying a one in its mouth does not bark, lest the bone drops.

Death is a very difficult time. It can unhinge the brains of the living. Coming to terms with death can really be difficult.

Village elders with cotton tuft heads say, one can tamper with the dead at their own peril. Do the graves we see not remind us that no matter how small one’s feet are, they are still good enough to leave behind imprints?

The same way seashells should remind us that there once lived some creations.

In the village it is taboo in as much as it is silly to abuse the dead, even for a grain of sand.

In modern day professions- politics, industry and civil service, among others- the dead have been killed many times by workers seeking selfish personal gain.

Life is a dream walking, death is a going home.

Life is like a game of chase, after the game the king and the pawn go into the same box.