Just been going through online comments on the death of former Zambian President Chiluba who “died on the early hours of Saturday [18 June] morning.” The comments are from Zambians themselves and you get the sense that politicians do indeed change how the ordinary African folk – despite all the pretence – approach the concept of ubuntu.

Death, we are always told, is a realm where the living remain “too careful” about what they mouth concerning the dead, and it is all somewhat attached to our umbilical origins that “this is not how our forefathers taught us.” If anything candid at all is ever said, it is within private exchanges in pubs, diplomatic circles etc. But when you get it in writing despite being anonymous, you cannot have it any better than that.  It is interesting therefore that this is one of those few interpretations of existence where African Traditional Religion seeks to have common ground with Christian mythology despite criticism of the early missionaries that they saw all things African as inherently demonic. But who cares, we all live and die! Still, hey, you don’t speak ill of the dead, it just doesn’t jell, we all apparently know that: Ask Cont Mhlanga who tried it at the death of Mackey Tickeys but was soon eating his words! Yet over the years, the death of some political gladiators has been met by ordinary folks jettisoning these ages old strictures and speaking their mind about the dead chap.

So it has been with the Zambians concerning the death of the man once celebrated for representing the people’s pro-democracy movement from that anti-colonialist/nationalist time-warp to 21st century popular democracy. It is interesting in itself to note that shift from the traditional form of reader opinions censored in “family newspapers” [way before the advent of online press] has found unfettered expression online, and no doubt no “independent” newspaper would dare publish sentiments that have emerged in the aftermath of Chiluba’s death. Yet it provides many lessons and reminders about other presidents concerning how their exit from this wretched earth will be recalled in their death. For a peek of what Zambians had to say, you can check it out here. You will laugh, you will cry, you will understand the people’s “grief.”

For example one wrote: “Chiluba was a leader, good at first but later treated us like idiots. He became master dilibler, crooke and everything that caused pain to us. Grabbed somebodys wife e.t.c. Thts wht we shud be saying after death no one shud become a saint after death. We need to be real. MHSRP”.

Another added: “Let him meet his maker. he had the opportunity to take this country to great height but he became greedy. he allowed his love of women and money get the better of him whilst pretending to be a born again christian. that is the worst hypocrisy! we will now see all those that he gave money queuing up to sing praises…at the end of the day he was a thief of the Zambian treasury, a husband to Regina, a pain to Vera, a father to Vera;s children and a few others we wont mention. He has gone to meet people like Paul Tembo, Ronald Penza, wezi kaunda, Ngenda the lawyer who all died mysteriously, Levy mwanawasa…his day of judgement is here. jah rule!”

And for us Zimbabweans we just have to throw-back to a week ago for Tekere obituaries, and have to wonder what will be said about his remaining erstwhile comrades. Bad governance, kleptomania, human rights abuses have all bred traits among “ordinary” Africans that have inverted ages-old traditions that orbit around seeking to understand and coming to terms with death – especially that of politicians. One only has to recall how the death of Laurent Kabila was greeted in the streets of this country and the reaction of a chap named Chenjerai Hunzvi before he knew of course that his own end was nigh.

Sad indeed.

USD400 for vehicular homicide, 2 years in prison for ‘almost’ running over a cop…

“Kombi driver jailed two years, licence cancelled,” read the headline of story carried by Newsday [Friday, June 3, 2011, p4]. The Kwekwe-based kombi driver was also banned from driving commuter omnibuses and other heavy vehicles for the rest of his life. The story is that the 64 year-old man was cornered by a traffic cop while he was doing what these kombi drivers know best: loading passengers at an undesignated point.

The driver is reported to have sped toward the cop who was riding his patrol bike, intending to knock him down, as the State no doubt proved n court. But the cop was quick enough to jump off the bike only to watch helplessly while the mangled bike was dragged under the kombi.

Now, a young lady was killed a couple of months ago by a drunk driver who got off with a USD400 fine. Being the lay person that I am, I’m still trying to figure out the glaring differences of these sentences: one involves a cop and a kombi driver – those “eternal enemies” – the other a drunk driver who takes the life of a young woman obviously minding her own business.

Let’s exercise our imaginations a little: the drunk driver gets a “slap on the wrists,” but for all we know that’s not the end of his bingeing, drunk driving, threatening the lives of other road users and other traffic offences.

The cop returns to work, gets a new bike, imagine the probability of having another kombi driver trying to run him over.

Imagine the sentences thereof.

I already know about malice aforethought, which could explain the sentence meted out to the kombi driver, but I’m still banging my head trying to figure out why where a life is lost, the drunk driver gets that slap on the wrists, while a kombi driver who “threatened” the life of a cop gets two years behind bars?

But then in Zimbabwe these are the kind of questions that are asked just for the sake of it as responsible authorities have never been known for taking up any queries from members of the public. In fact, you are asked: are you telling us how to do our job? And you may as well end up behind bars yourself!

We have heard it all before about artists attempting to justify touring despotic regimes claiming their art seeks to bridge differences – sometimes if not always  very bitter and inviting international disapprobation – and all that crap.

From Olympians participating in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Vorster’s apartheid South Africa and other international sporting events, examples come aplenty, and imagine men and women of conscience claiming “well, sport is a uniting force among nations, this is our contribution to bringing different peoples together!”

For local sportsmen, artists, musicians and other kosher cosmopolitans, they no doubt have a hell of a time time explaining themselves about being part of any event from Olonga and Streak’s cricket to Mtukudzi’s Swazi jaunt “boycotted” by other “big names”.

Mutukudzi claims he is a man just doing his job by going to perform in despotic Swaziland. Well, indeed he is. Africa’s remaining absolute monarch also claims he is also just doing his job cracking down on unionists!

But for many artists and ordinary people alike, the question appears to be: “do these boycotts change anything?” And it is that logic that no doubt informs the indifference of many artists and sportspeople despite these prominent people this time wearing the hat as conscientious objectors being able to keep up the heat bad presidents.

Only a while ago, a group of yuppie South African girls were debating among themselves whether they should hit the road and visit Swaziland and have a real weekend blast. However, as one of them wrote, their consciences were burdened  by the awareness that where they were destined to enjoy their “girlie outing,”  the natives [the Swazi] themselves were being clubbed for staying away from work, opposition politicians being hounded, their universal human rights being generally trampled upon by the increasingly despotic monarch. Thus it was, ” can we dance the night away well knowing outside these walls a mother is missing her son, a wife her husband, an activist denied her right to speak her mind?”

It then obviously is a question of conscience if a “respected” chap like Tuku [once referred by some with a twisted sense of humour as Zimbabwe's own Michael Jackson] is to be understood by his determination to be part of a crowd that only soon harps – as much as our own – “see, international artists are coming here to shame the lies and lies of the western press about the alleged despotism of our dear leader.”

Is he [Tuku] not the same guy who has – unlike Mapfumo – refused to say there is something wrong with the men and women he lionised and penned many a liberation war soundtrack back in the halcyon days of nationalist fervency? But it sure looks like it’s about the bread and the butter first and human rights concerns later, and he could well be retorting, “fuck you, I don’t eat human rights.”

Only a few nights ago, Tuku Supastar was on the telly courtesy of some ZTA shindig telling the nation that journos must not obsess with the negative! Looks like he knew what was coming!

Surely his PR people should know better.

Does our president ever stay in his own country? Silly, but well, it has been asked before, and I am asking it again this week.

A few years ago he was panned for trotting the globe, traveling the world and cartoonists had a field day as he was saddled with the unflattering sobriquet that borrowed the name of that well-travelled explorer Vasco da Gama.

Today our president “arrived” from Nigeria where he had gone to witness the swearing in of President Goodluck Jonathan. A few days ago he had “arrived” from Addis Abbaba, “arrived” from Namibia, “arrived” from Uganda, a few days before that “arrived” from…

Of course as “Head of State and Government and Commander-in-Chief” who wants the best of everything without regard of that starving Makokoba, Madlambuzi, Mhondoro granny you would expect this.

Yet Biti has already complained about the country ill-affording the “pleasure trips” of government officials with the poor taxpayer bearing the costs.

Of course it predictably will be claimed that the Dear President travels on official state business or whatever, but then we all know about other presidents who skip any jaunts and have made less foreign travel one of the defining  matrices of their tenure.

I liked it when Karikoka Kaseke – for the first time perhaps – opened his mouth and spoke sense when he complained recently that it is unfair to expect the impoverished taxpayers who will never in their lifetime board a plane to continue bailing out Air Zimbabwe when it is rich people who travel by air. And by rich, you just have to read “government officials!”

If we are to count the trips “His Excellency” has made since the beginning of 2011, keeping in mind of course the “medical tourism” to Asia, you have to seek Biti’s opinion about the justification of these travels.

Perhaps Biti might as well retort, “why ask me? Ask him!”

But we ask, how much have the taxpayers forked so far as we hit the half-year mark? The Singapore trips alone are already known to cost the taxpayer USD3 million according to press reports. Go figure.

Two funerals in the neighbourhood brought back the pain not just about lives being lost before the individuals reached their prime, but the whole thing about people leaving the country only to return in their caskets.

A young man who had barely made it into his twenties was buried last week after falling terribly ill in South Africa, and I’m told he had actually made it as far as the States or UK in his journey in search of a better life for himself and his family much like millions who have left over the decade.

One just has to imagine the parents’ pain. Every parent who has a child abroad or just across our borders has a sense that they will live a life better off than the average person/granny in the neighbourhood, so one really has to empathise with these folks. Being the Africans that we are, when a death occurs, graveside whispers are inevitable about how these young people take on lives that have no semblance of how their mothers raised them only to succeed in accelerating their departure from what is already a wretched earth.

But folks will always moralise even if they have no clue about the circumstances that led to that premature loss of life, yet the constant thing that one hears at these funerals is why people have to leave their motherland in the first place. You hear it all the time: “If he/she hadn’t left, perhaps he/she would still be alive today.” Yet it points to the desperation of the common man to find answers not just about life and death, but why families have to endure all this simply because a country that had so much promise for all its people could turn out so badly.

The other death was one that for many boggles the mind about the trek to South Africa that has lured “older” folks we thought would be content having a job and never dream of joining young bloods in the cruel universe of job hunting. This is a “young grandmother” who worked many years as a primary school teacher and toiled reading for a psychology degree with the Zimbabwe Open University. As soon as she took her degree about four or so years ago, she did not wait for that piece of paper to gather dust: she immediately left in search of a teaching post in South Africa. I recall having a chat with the son back then. The son said he found it hard to live with the “humiliating fact” that it was his mother not him who had left the country to look for a job in SA.

Yet this has become the story of so many people’s lives you ask yourself how and why so many families have been destroyed by this quest for a better life. What use is it then when so many people in the process die “before their time,” as some say here? Sounds like the Biblical “what does it profit a man…” Of course it’s a truism that death will always be part of us, but one has to listen to families whose relations die outside the country as they try to understand the death of one of their own. These stories have become too common in virtually every neighbourhood, and it points to Zimbabweans being virtually powerless abut what to do about their circumstances, be it economic or political despite the claim to being a democracy.

The bitterness of families and the people in general about the bad turn the nationalists took finds justification because while these families continue losing loved ones outside the country, the men and women who authored the country’s economic demise still hold their heads high and claim relevance to the country’s political space. It is no surprise then that these men and women will never countenance giving the millions who left their suffrage as the authors of bad politics know only too well what this would mean.

For all the departed who left the country of their birth to fend for their families, may their souls rest in peace.

I thought I heard Walter Mupfanuchiya [sic] say, “for more news you can visit us on our website, mdc.co.zw.” I swear. The mind can sometimes let slip what lies hidden in the dark corners which we make strenuous albeit subconscious attempts to cloak. Something called the Freudian slip perhaps?

But anyways, when I saw him again cyborg-like reading the 8 o’clock bulletin the following day, I figured either my ears were playing tricks on me or Shamu and other mandarins had not been alert enough to catch this clincher. Or it could also mean they missed it because heck, they do not watch their own drivel!

Elsewhere, I had a chat with a female Botswana journalist who was puzzled why political parties that carry names such as African Christian Democratic Party, Christian Democrats, and other some such names with “Christian” in them and come blazing the trail as pro-lifers, preach the “political gospel” of the goodwill of Man, political salvation from political Devils, et cetera et cetera, do not produce any landslide win?

Her logic was simple. These are principles, virtues, ideals every human being firmly believes in, so why are these parties not popular as one would expect? Hmmmm. I extended the thread, but of course with no pretense to psychological interrogation, just common sense:

Why do bad men insist they are good?

Why does Zanu PF use violence on opponents when it already claims mass popularity?

Why do Tsvangirai supporters make good Zanu PF students by violently expressing their opposition to fellow “freedom fighters?”

Why does the MDC allow itself to disintegrate before it even tastes power as the only party forming government by pitting founding members against each other in congresses that are ostensibly held to showcase Tsvangirai’s democracy credentials?

Why do these African political parties that have invested years fighting the good fight for good governance allow egos into the democracy equation?

A guy parades his “popularity” among his party supporters when he is in essence contesting against someone he claims they are in it together punching from the same corner and still expects this “democratic model” to hold the centre together.

No wonder the “humiliated losers” have many a time decided to form their own political outfits and thus  begins the fall and fall into political obscurity. No wonder many believe rather ruefully that Zanu PF is here to stay. And no wonder political parties like those imagined by the Botswana journalist are always the type that emerge from the woodwork only when there is a poll looming.

A mind sure is a terrible thing to waste.