When a national leader reduces himself to a family head

 

men have ugly wives, share the same problem.
Every one wants a bite!

Back in the village, advice is a stranger, if he is welcome he stays for the night. If not, he leaves the same day. There, although milk and honey have different colours and taste, they share the same house peacefully.

When elders sit under a tree, passing one calabash of beer after another, the succulence of the drink smoothens, not only the throat but the thoughts, too.

Wiping the mouth and beards with the back of the hand and the subsequent licking of lips seals the bank of the soul, in which thoughts are deposited.

So, the full import of it is that never underestimate villagers when they sit around and analyse events and issues dear to them. Theirs is a simple but collective analysis, confirmed and sealed under the tree.

Like milk and honey, the villagers want to be given their respect and positions by the powerful and the educated. By everyone!

Last week, news broke that villagers in Humanikwa in Buhera were up in arms with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai for a drilled monster borehole that the poor villagers thought was sucking all the water from the nearby sources as it guzzled at the water table.

Whatever science informed this reasoning by the villagers — and, there are so many scientists back in the village, whether conventional or not, the villagers made their statement. Whether you argue they had been send by someone to demonstrate the thirst they angrily complained of in front of the TV cameras, it still makes one significant point.

Which point people might have missed. They want safe drinking water. And, correctly so, from a man who aspires to be a President of the Republic of Zimbabwe and, not a man who aspires to be a President of his mother’s homestead.

Little did the villagers know they were expecting honey from a fly. This villager contents it is not the villagers problem, for, they are used to a leader like President Mugabe who provided for all and sundry since 1980 — from seed, water, fertilisers, free education and free treatment at clinics, among others.

Buhera is pretty thirsty. It is bone dry. Tinder dry! Good rains have naturally eluded it year after year, leading to perennial hunger to this a huge chunk of the western part of Manicaland. And, so is the case with the neighbouring Masvingo.

Bitter experiences have been undergone and tales yearned, of all survival fights, including how people have competed with donkeys for chakata, which wild fruit has had many cuisines despite or because of hunger.

The irony is that this is a place where our Honourable Premier comes from and what with the cash that he has splashed on matters related to girding the loins?

So the people of his part of the country cry for irrigation to green this parched piece of Zimbabwe, cry for small drops of water to save their lives!

When the economy of the country was still in its throes, a lot of irrigation projects were initiated. Boreholes sunk. They have now stuttered only to fall and die with the effects of the sanctions.
Irrigation projects represent the Holy Grail of this famished region. So when Tsvangirai thought of an irrigation project — drip irrigation in keenness to the scarcity of water — he made one fatal mistake.
He first thought of his long-suffering mother, pachita chevanhu vese.

(Long suffering, not just not least, because of being an owner of the proverbial bachelor bull.)
We are told he would want this to be an example of the community — and he wanted all his foreign friends to witness this grand occasion. A better proposition would have been a community project encompassing a number of households, Tsvangirai’s mother included.

The buy in from the community would have been massive, the goodwill flowing.
Sadly this easy tact eluded Tsvangirai, who at any rate is not noted for ingenuity. Suddenly, a whole Prime Minister reduced himself to a family leader who thinks of buying his mother first before everyone else.

Tsvangirai’s village theatrics coming on the heels of President Mugabe’s input scheme, makes him someone immune to learning. As if that is not enough, in the same Buhera, Tsvangirai goes on to ridicule President Mugabe for his nationwide input scheme, showing that he never learns.

When you are a national leader, you think of the nation at large. When you are monied like Tsvangirai who seemed never to run out of Uncle Tom’s greenback, given the way he paid for his “sextheatrics”, you can easily turn the whole village into a green lung of sub-butchered Buhera.
You can easily drill boreholes in many villages, but given that the people of Buhera twice, if not thrice, denied him a constituency win, he could be a bitter man.

But in national politics, which is where President Mugabe remains a man and Tsvangirai a mere boy, the ordinary people come first. The people in Buhera still wonder and so do, the rest of Zimbabwe, where Tsvangirai gets the money to fund his expensive sexcapades.

Could he not use the same to do a little bit of community projects? Could funding for one of this globe trotting trips be turned into water projects? Could he not make a difference with an input scheme or school computerisation scheme?

Could he not donate for the hunger stricken villagers in Matabalelend? Could he not fund a clinic? Could he not just assist the ARV distribution project at Murambinda? The village soothsayer, the ageless autochthon of knowledge and wisdom contends: “He who thinks he is leading and has no one following him is only taking a walk into an abyss.”

How do you expect villagers to vote for you when they are thirsty, yet your mother is irrigating next door.

Do village elders not say, it takes a whole village to raise a child? Which village raised Tsvangirai?

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