“Fidel Castro celebrated his 85th birthday outside of the public spotlight… with little fanfare around the aging revolutionary,” thus it was reported 13 August. Different strokes for different folks.

I see there is a lot of heat concerning the questionable “spending habits” of the Prime Minister, Finance Minister and other senior MDC officials in government and how they are abusing public funds. And heck, they are being investigated by “the law,” and they well could find themselves behind bars where they previously have been guests and would no doubt not relish a night at Matapi!

While of course one cannot afford the luxury of ignoring politicians bloating their faces with money meant for the poor, building humongous manors when across the road are hovels housing dirt poor families, or travelling by air first class when the ordinary Jack has to travel in those ramshackle death-traps called long distance buses they already know will falter, veer off the road and plunge into a ditch, one still has to question this rather apocryphal due diligence of the public defenders who have taken these coalition partners to task about how they are spending public funds. And this is in a country where we have folks who have been in government for barely three years being investigated for alleged fiscal malfeasance when we have men and women who have been at it for three decades exhibiting an indefatigable streak of kleptocracy still holding their heads high and with no lawman daring to throw the book at them.

That is why it has been fairly easy for MDC officials and supporters to dismiss the investigations on the USD1,5 million for the PM’s house and the foreign trips of the FM’s staffers as part of a grand plot that no doubt will unravel as we head for the next polls. We are obviously watching closely how this will pan out, yet I can see a flood of “sympathy votes” in the offing! But it is something to imagine how resources to investigate the abuse of government resources have never been diligently spread to challenge over the decades on anything from the 85 percent disability gratuity claims by men and women who “died for the country” but still walk the earth, housing funds meant for poor civil servants looted without batting an eyelid, tender scams from as far back as the 1980s that remain unpunished, the bankrupting of Roger Boka – we could go on and on and on, but then the hypocrisy of the founding fathers has become legendary. Remember the old man frothing about corrupt colleagues and threatening the wrath of the gods on offenders long before anyone imagined he rule “his Zimbabwe” with anyone? We are not asking that these people not be investigated, we are asking that there be consistency.

Great ain’t it?

Zimbabwe Government rethinks South African GMO chicken imports ban. Government rethinks left-hand vehicle ban. Government rethinks second-hand car import. Government rethinks beer ban. Government rethinks plastic bags ban. Government rethinks mining law. Government rethinks indigenisation Bill. Government bans trousers in parliament. Government rethinks trouser ban after female MPs threaten to bare all. Zimbabwe joins Malawi, bans farting. Government rethinks stinking law. Government bans laughing at presidential portrait. Government rethinks funny bone ban. Government bans sex in dark places. Government sees the light, rethinks sex ban. Government bans sex work. Government rethinks sex ban, minister says okay to have sex while working. Agriculture production slumps. Government rethinks violent land-grab. [Well, that’s pushing it.] Mugabe rethinks GNU, so does everybody! Government rethinks condom ban in schools. Minister says sex is basic human right, even for students. Government outdoes itself, rethinks thinking.

Plato wrote that a better world can become a reality only if it is ruled by philosopher kings, in other words people who think. Thinkers as it were. Curiously, in Zimbabwe rethinkers come aplenty, and we all know where that has got us!

Had a few good laughs watching ZBC news last night when a senior education official in one of the Mashonaland provinces said President Mugabe had donated computers in schools where there is no electricity. Nothing new really. Sydney Sekeramayi was officially opening a computer lab at some rural school, and the education official’s comments were indeed telling and I wondered why the reporter had allowed that comment to make it to the bulletin considering it was not very flattering if you think of it. The other week Sunday Mail [July 24-30] ran a story with the headline “REA please give us electricity.” REA of course being the Rural Electrification Agency, and it will be recalled that this was one of the vehicles used by the then ruling party to galvanise support in the rural areas, and in the Sunday Mail story it was the rural folks themselves who were making the appeal for magetsi kuvanhu. The Sunday Mail reported: “Many rural areas are still  “in the dark,” more than a decade after the launch of the programme.” You then have to wonder who advises the President when he makes these computer donations to schools in areas where that education official says there is no electricity. But then as we have seen it with local politicians for a long time: what they do or say does not have to make sense, just as long as they are seen to be doing something. So much for an informed electorate in an alleged democracy!

I heard the other a man say to another: “Don’t speak to me in Shona. When you are here in Bulawayo speak to me in Ndebele.” The other guy said, “Okay, let’s speak in English then,” to which the first guy retorted, “How can you expect me to speak English that comes all the way from Britain when I cannot speak Shona here in Zimbabwe.”

I couldn’t figure whether this was just buddy-based banter or this was indeed a no nonsense exchange, yet it raised once again the emotions that surround the issue of language in Bulawayo where there is an increasing outcry by Ndebele-speakers concerning how the language is being decimated. The first guy’s response was exactly what got senior Zanu PF official Joshua Malinga into trouble when he told off a cop who had addressed him in Shona. Malinga fumed and told the cop that he had no business addressing him in that language here in Bulawayo.  He was promptly arrested.

The other day, a letter writer to one of the dailies complained about the wrong Ndebele spellings on the Zimbabwean passport. Again the other day, one was complaining about place names carried in street signs about the appalling misspellings. Inevitably for many here, this has been interpreted as part of a grand agenda to render the Ndebele language second class and this among other things is what no doubt has given “secessionists” here ammunition to call for self-rule or whatever. Yet you just have to ask yourself what is simmering underneath because we know what has happened elsewhere based on violated tribal and ethnic sensibilities.

The next question of course is how are the country’s political leaders themselves reading this obviously divisive issue of language especially at a time when we already know that some of them have traded barbs labeling each other tribalists.  You do get the sense that this is an extension of the troubles of the 1980s which the government men who choose to explain “salutes” instead are so reluctant to address. Touché.

On Monday 18 July, Chronicle newspaper reported that Defence Minister “Munagagwa” [that’s how his name was spelled right there in the front page] had declared that the Gukurahundi debate was a closed chapter, accusing “the private media and leaders of other political parties” of “engaging in cheap politics” and “trying to reverse efforts by the national healing organ by opening the Gukurahundi wounds.”

Predictably perhaps, the minister said the Unity Accord signed by President Mugabe and the late VeePee Nkomo “brought the nation together, bringing an end to the sorry chapter of Gukurahundi.”  Then on Thursday 21 July the same paper (Chronicle) carried a story with the headline “Gukurahundi issue sparks fierce debate.” The report was based on a public hearing convened by the Thematic Committee on Human Rights and the Portfolio Committee on Justice, Legal, Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs, and members of the public spoke their mind about the “Gukurahundi killings.” You have to ask the Minister what his opinion is about this seeing Gukurahundi obviously remains a very open chapter, and it was not the private media nor was it “other political parties” that opened the Gukurahundi book. It was “ordinary” residents who “demanded that the committees should review the political disturbances of the 1980s, popularly known as the Gukurahundi episode,” Chronicle reported.

We know “Munagagwa’s” government colleague Moses Mzila-Ndlovu still has a lot to say about these ’80 atrocities and is not about to let the matter die a natural death. But then that’s Zanu PF’s idea of government of the people, for the people, by the people. Zanu PF speaks and you listen, never the reverse.

Looks like the Gukurahundi chapter remains very open and will not wished away mate. But then the minister’s insistence is perhaps understandable because activists here have fingered him as one of the architects. Sorry Cde. Minister.