South Africa is presently at an interesting political crossroads and one just feels the electricity (pardon the pun) this far side of the Limpopo and you cannot help but wish you were part of the excitement. When people claim to own the revolution – any revolution – there is always a danger of making themselves obsolete, and name-calling of those who decide to stand up to skewed definitions of democracy inevitably tend to only strengthen the resolve of those who decide to challenge and change the course of a country’s political course.

Tyranny and opposition to dissent have for years defined African politics, with popular reformists succumbing to the assasin’s bullet, and for anybody who stands up to give “owners of the revolution” a run for their money has got my support.

The COPE founders have been called opportunists and all sorts of names by the very same people with whom they took a stand against apartheid, but one thing for sure is that all threatened despots always exhibit that atavistic streak and will invoke history lessons as part of that bid to discredit breakaway formations.

But all along they forget that they are the same people who present themselves as champions of democracy, so then why not let the brave men who threw down the gauntlet be and let the people decide?

Too bad there have not been such bold moves in Zimbabwe where fear still dwells in the hearts of grown men that they wouldn’t dare cross the path of the founding fathers.

I like to call them “uninformed uniformed forces.” Some are so incorrigibly daft you wonder whether that is how they are vetted for recruitment. Yes, those cops who will fleece and extort your measly dollars, and have become so brazen about demanding bribes they even do it when literally the whole world is watching.

You see them at roadblocks where they stop commuter omnibuses and never bat an eyelid as they accept bribes right under the gaze of passengers. Some think they know the finer details of the law, and I heard the other day one rookie cop with cheeks that clearly have never known a shaving machine or razor blade actually citing sections of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act to a bewildered young man. The cop was going on about the police have the right under Zimbabwean law to stop and search him or anyone for whatever reason the cops deem fit. But the cop knew and the man knew and I also knew that what the cop wanted was a bribe for him to stop wasting that man’s time.

But then some Zimbabweans being Zimbabweans will pee in their pants once these once revered keepers of the peace start speaking that gibberish. And though you know damn well you did not commit any offence, they will still drag you to the holding cells hoping that along the way before you get to the filthy cells you would have made them an offer they cannot refuse. And these days it is strictly forex so woe betide him who walks around with empty pockets. And it’s so true.

I watched appalled the other day as a baton stick-wielding cop threatened bank clients with a good clubbing. “Hofisi yedu ihombe,” the cop said, apparently bragging about being above the law. This was after someone had grumbled that the cop’s behaviour was uncalled for. And guess what, these threats were being done right inside the bank. It was obvious the cops were itching to crash some skulls and break some bones. Imagine a gun in the hands of such people. They would fit those types who live by the dictum: “I only carry a gun when I intend to shoot something (or someone).” And the crime the cash-strapped people had committed: they wanted to know if the bank had any cash. But the irascible cops – apparently on high alert (or simply high on something else) as this was the day the ZCTU had called on the people to bum-rush the banks and demand their hard earned cash – would have none of it as if they themselves had loaded pockets.

But then they are now in the habit of taking out their frustrations on law abiding citizens. I always laugh surreptitiously when I see them in their civilians loitering outside pubs expecting largess from anybody who can buy them beer. “It’s a thankless and dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it,” I have heard that line a hundred times, but when we reach a point where virtually everyone no longer holds these uniformed chaps in awe like during the country’s nascent years, then you know the country is off the rails.

I heard a commuter omnibus tout demanding that a uniformed cop pay his fare like everyone else as these folks are for some reason always in the habit of expecting – and getting – free rides. I wondered what it is that that has changed for a policeman to be dressed down and humiliated like that in front of amused members of the public. “No fare, no ride,” the tout said. Boy was the cop stunned! And pay he did. I could sense that the mortified chap was silently vowing that he would have his day when he is assigned as a traffic cop and then he would demand more than a pound of the tout’s flesh. I thought I saw steam hissing through cop’s ears. But what could he do, threaten the tout with arrest? In any case, it wasn’t the cop’s car so he had to pay like everyone else, I heard an emboldened passenger say.

That is the society we have been forced to live in as young men and women living or working outside the country vow they won’t make the annual Christmas holiday trip because of all this crap they hear about what is happening to their mothers and fathers as scripted by other mothers and fathers (of the Revolution?). For some of us, well, we are right in the thick of things and this Bad Santa has once again stolen our Christmas.

After all, we are living in the age where cops refuse to respond to distress calls and instead expect you to bribe them to arrest a known housebreaker! And many thought it was the burglar who bribes cops to escape arrest, but now these amoral roles have been reversed: now it is the victim who bribes cops so that the bad guy is arrested.

Crap, I say.

Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones, thus goes the old adage.

I pondered the other day, piqued by the poor dietary regimes Zimbabweans have been forced to endure as their nourishment, what if we had glass stomachs? Surely we would all know who is eating what, and the haughty types in the neighbourhood would learn to eat humble pie. The pun is intended. Teachers would not be asking toddlers what they had for breakfast. They would just call the pupils to stand in from of the class, unbutton their shirts and blouses, and there you have it for all to see. You wouldn’t lie anymore about bacon and eggs, rice and chicken and all those African favourites. It would be stuff sci-fi is made of. But seriously, during these trying times, all are known to be eating – if at all – food they would not like the next guy to know that is what they had for breakfast, lunch or supper. If we had glass stomachs, many of us would have turned into recluses, hiding away from the cruel eyes of our neighbours because if we had glass stomachs, the Creator would probably have had it such that we do not wear shirts! But then perhaps one would brave those eyes well knowing that many stomachs are either empty or have all sorts of weird stuff masquerading as nourishment!

God bless the Zimbabwean people during these cruel times.

Small wonder for us pessimists that the “Founding Father” is still at it, deciding when we shall know about OUR future. It brings me back to my favourite question about our post-independence democracy dalliance: “why hold elections if losers claim to be winners?” “Because losers don’t care about the result, stupid!” Remember that old truism: “finders keepers, losers weepers?” Perhaps we typically fit the bill. Perhaps that makes us losers of the American kind. But as the old tale goes concerning our lot as once told by that not-so-esoteric spin guy whom cartoonists believe has more scalp than hair, Poof Moyo, we are a peace loving lot therefore we are not very much likely to take up any kind of arms to protest against anything. Even when someone breaks wind in a crowded banking hall, we all suffer silently, and the very fact that one decides to break wind in that crowded banking hall depicts us a people with no sense of shame whatsoever. So a windbreaker of the political kind gets off lightly because, well, we tolerate all kind of nonsense! And like that banking hall dolt, the politically-challenged windbreaker has no shame whatsoever. But then, if you take up arms in post-independence Zimbabwe, what other limbs are you left with? And then the soldier laid down his arms. Catch my drift? Though what is happening in Zimbabwe is not funny anymore, you still find people laughing. Only it ain’t the zany type no more! “You will laugh alone” goes the ghetto parlance. You laugh not because you find it amusing, but because you wonder what kind of species we have become. It is the cynical laugh that says, I don’t believe this. It is stuff that that would have you raving mad: incredible prices of basics and ridiculous wages for starters. One has to listen to the anger in the streets to get a feel of why nothing has happened since the 90s when this rot set in. Some believed it started much earlier, when Ndabaningi was ousted from the party he formed, perhaps? The guy with a funny “mouth-do” has juju, I heard someone say the other day. Surreptitiously I exclaimed “oh my God.” If we are to reduce this suffering to this, then there is nothing we can do until some malevolent god makes a grand appearance. But one thing I know for sure is that I detest windbreakers of any kind, because, as common understanding would have it, they have dead consciences.

Perhaps I belong to that species some prefer to call rather unflatteringly “Afro-pessimists.” But for me, I figure that I elect to embrace that gloomy outlook with good reason. For many years we have listened to what I call the “Pan-types” who, despite all evidence, have internalised and radicalised their belief in that all criticism of an African politician – and as common sense will have it, any Blackman – is a manifestation of toadying to the racist Whiteman who has failed to see anything positive emerging from the Blackman’s universe. These types are those who will invoke juvenile history lessons to state their case, and become conveniently amnesiac where it involves atrocities and other evils committed in the here and now by men and women of colour.

I raise this here after a colleague said to me the other day after the signing of the Government of National Unity agreement by Zimbabwe’s main political players that I was an inveterate pessimist after I confessed that I could not see anything fruitful emerging from the “historic” signing, be it in the short or long term. We had been told that the nation would know about cabinet appointments and allotments before the week of the signing was over. I did not hold my breath. As if by some ESP-based intuition, something told me this party formed in the 1960s – which would make it a dinosaur – would stick it out and trash all attempts to make something out of that crap signing. And here we are many days later not having a clue about where we are at as a nation.

My pessimism about all things Zimbabwean is informed by the fact that this country has had many false starts; each time the people imagine they are about to pass this man-made hell, the “veterans of the struggle” cock a snook and show us their butts. And then with glee they shout “Gotcha!!” Just analyse all elections held since 1980. They have always been about “See, we hold regular elections, so why accuse us of being enemies of multi party democracy?” But the setting up and subsequent flourishing of democracy based checks and balances and other democratic institutions do not form part of the multi party agenda, so you know where that leaves us. But I digress. The hubris that emerged after the signing where you had whole neighbourhoods blowing trumpets, beating chests, and as Patrick Chinamasa alleged, beating up people as they celebrated the coming into government of their point man, Morgan Tsvangirai was another pointer of the naivety – or desperation – of a crisis-weary people yearning for better days. Call it the plebeian excitement of the working class, but you had to see it to believe it. It was the stuff popular street uprisings a la the Orange Revolution are made of.

I could hear and see people celebrating that those folks whose lives depended on remittances from abroad were in the coming week – not weeks – to be reduced to “ordinary” Zimbabweans as the street exchange rates were doomed to plunge to all time lows, thereby depriving them of that elitist existence they were enjoying thanks to the voodoo economics of the “out-going” cabal of kleptocrats. Noone cared to explain how this would happen, but I imagined it had something to do with the whole thing that the people are fed up with Zanu PF’s false promises and self-aggrandisement streak. It eerily appears as if this streak is indelibly etched in their DNA, someone whispered the other day. I listened, bemused by all this tabloid-like stoking of emotions. Toothless grannies yearning for tea with milk, bread with butter, stopped you in the street asking what was happening. They too were already celebrating that at last the one with a funny if not silly moustache was on the verge of what would have been an equivalent of what would in the next days befall his trusted foreign minister and fire fighter Thabo Mbeki.

First, what has become the pulse of the economy, the street-based foreign currency trade became the pointer of better things to come. The “illegal” black market saw a huge and dramatic dip in the exchange rate of the local useless dollar against major currencies as speculators spread falsehoods and in the process raising alarm and despondency. We know the fate of others who treaded that path! This was a sure miracle for many, a Godsend of some sorts. A guy who is always eager to fleece old women of their forex said to me the other day after the signing, ‘I am not touching any of that foreign money. I would be stupid to accept that. What will I do with the (South African) Rands next week?” He asked. I asked him back, “What is it that you have heard?” “People are saying…” was his response. I dismissed him with the contempt he deserved. “Ignorant fool,” I might have added, but then you do not rub it in when in the company of people who have no clue about anything but appear to know more than everybody else in that realm of what has become the favourite of many here: arcane contemporary politics… and economics. And in present day Zimbabwe, such types come in their millions. But before the shyster could yawn, the rates had shot two fold! I said to myself, what kind of people have we become that we have no clue about anything in a time and era where news dissemination now transcends all sorts of censorship? Shouldn’t people have the right to know when it is their livelihoods that are being discussed by men in suits…and dark glasses? As a wise crack quipped ages ago, if you want to control people, deny them information. And Zimbabweans now provide ample thesis material in that miserable regard.

Keeping a permanent gloomy outlook about all things Zimbabwean has helped me not raise my expectations about the future only to expose myself to a possible cardiac attack after having cursed friends and foes alike basking on my ignorance that if cameras flash then hey “Turn up the boombox, put on your hightops, Come on outside, today’s gon’ be the day we Start livin in the new worrrld.” (apologies to Black Thought, Tha Roots). I am yet to be provided with any reason to raise my head up high and say I will buy my two boys baby cereals and all that stuff paediatricians tell us will make prodigies out of these tiny tots. But in my guarded pessimism, I try to be careful that this – like hate – does not consume me to that extent that I move from being compos mentis to what the Hispanic chaps would call loco.

The ink has dried. The cameras have flashed. The champagne popped. The king has spoken. The dry humour has done just that: dried. Everybody is happy. Oh! Happy day, when Thabo walked and washed our woes away!  Elsewhere, a poor woman lies in a filthy hospital ward groaning in pain. For days a bulging belly refuses to let out that life that has been growing inside her. Day two, the eve of the signing, doctors decide a C-section is the only option to free this poor woman from the pain, to give the baby a chance to enter that brave new world. Day three. The baby is having difficulty breathing. Hours later, that little bundle of joy has stopped breathing. Elsewhere, big men in neat suits promise a new beginning. The poor young woman has no clue what that means. She closes her eyes and tears – like water from the giant Zambezi dam – keep falling. The young man who planted the seed decided to do a Harry Houdini on her – he is nowhere to be seen. Men, men, men! She bears a permanent C-section scar and will carry it for the rest of her life as a reminder of not the “historic power sharing deal” but that life lost on the very day Zimbabweans were being promised better things ahead.