If we all stand back from things that are broken, that need fixing and say that we can’t do any thing, and that the government is responsible and they need to fix it. And if the government says that it doesn’t have the money to fix it then does that mean that there is no solution? Does that mean students will forever go without schools and books and teachers? And sick people will go without hospitals doctors and nurses? If we all agree that we don’t want handouts from rich countries and that we want to dictate the terms of their aid, and yet we still expect them to come and bail us out, do we really believe that they will take us seriously? If we let our politicians get away with corruption and we don’t hold the MPs that we voted into position accountable for their actions, who really is to blame for a bad situation turning into an untenable one?

And so 40 more people have died on the Harare-Masvingo-Beitbridge road. Before that it was 30, and before that? Many more.

As a nation we seem to have lost our sense of outrage. We have become inured to death and loss. It seems as if over the past ten years, we have lost so many people we have become desensitised to death. Whether it is 1 of fifty people dead doesn’t seem to matter.  Just earlier this year we were losing hundreds of people to cholera by the week.  Mothers, fathers and children, gone.

Now this bus crash has claimed so many lives. Mothers, fathers, children. We will not hold our breath that something will be done soon. When Susan Tsvangirai lost her life on the same stretch of road, noises were made. Months later, those noises had died down. Until this. Now I suspect there will be a resumed frenzied cacophony of them. But after all the noise has died down, after the State has bought coffins, doled out bags of maize and provided transport for the dead, life will go back to normal. We will be stuck once more with a State which helps people when they die, but does not help them live.  Then officialdom like circling vultures will wait. Wait for the next crash (it cannot be an accident when we can pretty much predetermine the cause). Wait for the next batch of people to die. Wait to declare a state of disaster and buy more coffins, dole out more maize and provide more transport for the dead. Shedding crocodile tears while leaving the road unfixed.

Snip snip. Extra extra. Blah blah. Aids could well be worst thing to happen to mankind if one is not to indulge in time consuming Biblical and other extrapolations to find worser scourges, but the strategies being debated and proffered by health experts have somewhat exposed how desperate the world – especially the developing – is about containing new infections. That is if not only it was about taming the feral sex urges. Take for example all this talk about circumcision: it has been reported that this drastically reduces chances of contracting the HIV-virus that causes Aids. But looking at the bigger picture this provides insights about the world’s obsession with unprotected sex – just exactly what is killing poor Africans in their millions! No wonder radical religious types snort at all approaches designed by experts as what will beat this terrible thing. Have a circumcision, have unprotected sex – bulletproof! Why? Without sounding like some haughty holier-than-thou type, is it because we have resigned ourselves to the eerie imagination that nothing else will – not even behaviour change – beat this terrible thing that is claiming the lives of young men and women with so much promise before their time? To circumcise or not to circumcise, that’s the question.