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Majome Jessie

Tinomudaishe Chinyoka
THERE is something especially stupid about an MP who breaks the law, then goes running to the Constitutional Court alleging that she decided that she would not follow the law because it is unconstitutional. For this is what has happened with Jessie Majome, the MDC MP for Harare West. Having been parachuted into the seat made vacant by Trudy Stevenson, that American citizen that Morgan Tsvangirai foisted upon us as if we did not have enough Zimbabweans to stand for Parliament, Jessie Majome has been running around the constituency like a headless chicken, making a nuisance of herself with issues that have nothing to do with an MP’s remit.

She takes to Facebook about potholes and burst pipes, calling upon the Harare City Council to do something, as if she expects that they will read her Facebook page, instead of merely going to them to inform the Council of the problems (if any) so that they can be taken care of.

For a Member of Parliament to behave in this fashion, discussing problems through social media instead of directly with those that are in a position to do something about it, is straight out of the Book of Lunacy, right after the chapter on “Victimology – How to blame your opponents for your own stupid mistakes”.

Of course, taking these problems to the City Council would be too discreet, for our MP likes publicity. She is on record as claiming that she bought a water tank with the Constituency Development funds, and that Zanu-PF went and destroyed it. What rubbish! Why would Zanu-PF, the party that has, throughout its time in government, built schools where none existed, dug boreholes where water was scarce, built roads in no-go areas, suddenly want to vandalise a simple water tank?

Has Zanu-PF not been on the side of the people all the time that the MDC has been on the side of the British and their progeny, the white commercial farmers?

We are suddenly being asked to believe that suddenly, the champion of the poor, the party that sent us to school for free, suddenly wants us to die of thirst? There is something spectacularly stupid about this claim. But, we digress. So, here she is, breaking the law by not paying a licence fee to the ZBC, like everyone else should, then going crying to the Constitutional Court that because she is not being interviewed enough on ZBCTv. It seems to her by this lack of interview time on TV that this means that the broadcaster is biased against MDC and as a result she is not supposed to pay the licence fee. Instead, she wants ZBC to encrypt its signal so that it does not show on her TV, where she would rather be watching BBC and taking instructions from there on how to misrepresent and denigrate our country.

First, what is it about these MDC officials and their aversion to common honesty? There seems to be a visceral hatred of truth in all its forms, as they seem to wage a full force assault on anything even approximating verity in any of its forms, deliberately distorting things and disavowing yesterday’s actions for no other reason than that they are at variance with a good lie. The MDC, it seems, will never allow simple truth to come between them and a publicity stunt against the image of our country.

As anyone that has a chance to look at the Hon Ms Majome’s aforesaid Facebook page, which she uses to publish her “Harare West Information Service”, it is replete with invitations for her constituents to listen to her being interviewed by this or that radio station, and sometimes, presumably when they can find her, ZBC Tv. Unless if Ms Majome thinks that ZBC must run as her Harare West information service like her Facebook page, then one cannot see why, given how many times she is in the media, she suddenly thinks that that very same media is biased.
We have, in Prof Jonathan Moyo, a very able minister responsible for the media. There is no suggestion from Ms Majome that she sought an audience with the minister to voice any concerns that she might have had about this so called ZBC bias. No, of course not – because that would not go into the papers that’s why. A discreet meeting would not be reported on news websites and disseminated to her handlers in London and Washington DC, who need to see that their stooges are “raising hell” and “keeping Mugabe honest”. Shame. Second, this game has become tiring. These people pick up the most unmeritorious challenges to the law, take them straight to the Constitutional Court, knowing full well that they will lose. Why would anyone do that, right thinking people might ask? Because they want to lose, that is why. Because the MDC has been preaching this gospel about “Mugabe and his biased judges” for a long time, so much so that even people that should know better (like me) were starting to believe it, and that gospel needs to be fed continually.

How better to do that than by bringing the zaniest possible cases before the court, as long as they can be made high sounding enough to confuse Mr and Mrs John Q Public, and proceed to lose. The challenge against the licence fee will no doubt fail, because it is without merit. However, I think that any statement suggesting that it failed because the judges are biased, ought and should attract criminal sanction, because bringing our justice system into disrepute is or should be a crime. Of course, were the AG to suggest that they be arrested, he too will be castigated as a Zanu-PF appointee. To which one must ask: if the President of the day stood on a Zanu-PF ticket and won, should he abdicate his duty to appoint people to offices for which they are qualified and give that job to . . . whom? Oh, the man who thought that former ZBC TV DJs were fit to be his spokespeople and MPs? And this is the same ZBC that is biased? You do not wake up from the nightmare of having subcontracted your party’s publicity department to a phantom of lies running around as Baba Jukwa and decide that everything is unconstitutional. What next? We will have cases suggesting that police sirens are constitutional, and should be encrypted so that only criminals can hear them. You do not just go and file a constitutional challenge just because you can write. It is a waste of the court’s time, money and expertise. The ZBC has an address, anyone with a complaint about how they run things should go there and talk to ZBC. Or write them a letter. Once, when I had a problem with the continuity announcer saying “Children’s programmes” in reference to cartoons, I sent the ZBC a letter. I did not sue them for my licence fee on the basis that as I was not a child, they should not have my money to show programmes that I did not like. The content of ZBC programmes is an editorial choice, and has no relationship to the liability to pay a licence fee. If one has a problem with editorial policy, talk to the editor.

If one is upset because they could not be interviewed on a particular date, then they want to turn around and say “I do not want to pay the licence fee as a result”,  that person is nothing but a petulant time waster.

Too bad the court does not have a sieve to trap and cast out those cases, such as the present, that are no more than a cheep publicity seeking headline grabbing garbage that we seem to keep getting from the lunatic fringe.

Unless the MDC thinks that everyone has a Facebook account and can be updated on their news that way, public broadcaster is necessary. The UK, from whence their instructions originate, has a licence fee, which funds the BBC. You do not need to watch, or even like, the BBC to pay the fee, everyone that owns a TV must pay it.

And no-one, even the most unintelligent of jacanapes, has tried to suggest that the BBC must encrypt their signal so that it doesn’t go to their homes in order to enable them to avoid paying the licence fee.