The year 2008 in Zimbabwe has been just like a weekend packed with events and a lot of activities that one can quickly forget. Like watching soccer: more injuries, more scores, more yellow and red cards, tricks, penalties – all in 90 minutes!

However, we are now in November, only about seven weeks left to call it off. We have traveled a long way with no foot steps to show where we were coming from. So Zimbabweans will be celebrating Christmas 2008 with no government in place, no drugs in hospitals, no withdrawal and deposit slips as some of these banks are requesting customers to bring their own.

No water from suburbs around town, no electricity, no education for our children, no official school holidays as children are already on holiday, no teachers, no money, no food, no jobs, no industries operating, no doctors and nurses as they are striking, no fertilizers for the new farmers.

But we have plenty of mosquitoes, uncollected garbage, sewage canals, political parties, empty promises, queues, unprotected boreholes/wells, illegal structures as people can no longer afford to pay rentals being charged in foreign currency, dumping sites known as (kumarabu) and deforestation. Just take a look at the area between Jaggers Msasa and the Mabvuku turn-off.

Since the signing of the historic power sharing deal between Zanu PF and the two MDC formations, most Zimbabweans have been waiting for the unknown and uncertain like a pregnant woman. A pregnant woman is under constant worry about whether or not she will deliver a normal healthy baby. She is also concerned with the risks of miscarriage and still births both which are probable dangers during pregnancy.  Zimbabweans have grown to be anxious about whether the deal will work or not and most of them have been cautious of the deal.

When looking at the whole gestation period, that is the negotiation process, one realises that the period has been a painful, tiring and difficult one. The way the negotiation process has been progressing can be compared to a pregnant woman suffering serious complications due to the pregnancy. The complications surrounding the negotiations can be seen as a cue of the struggles and challenges people of Zimbabwe are likely to face as a result of the signed agreement. There have been a couple of deadlocks recently on the allocation of ministries and Mugabe is not yielding on the governors and nothing has been said on the allocation of ambassadorial posts.  There is still no common ground from the party leaders and one is left to wonder how the government of national unity is going to function. There are serious ideological differences between the two parties which makes it practically impossible to believe in the capacity of the GNU to deliver people of Zimbabwe from the mire that they are in. Tsvangirai who won the 2008 March harmonised elections is still Mugabe’s junior partner or a junior brother, he still reports to Mugabe and Mugabe does not necessarily report to anyone. He still enjoys a high degree of autonomy.

The pregnant Zimbabwe will give birth to a Down syndrome baby, a baby without the capability to function or do anything for itself. . All the expectations and hope will be replaced by disillusionment, misery and pain and the people of Zimbabwe will continue to live in dire straits.

Cathy Buckle, in her weekly writing about life in Zimbabwe, says it like it is.

In the three weeks since a power sharing deal was signed between the winners and losers of Zimbabwe’s election, nothing has happened except arguments. So many of us had such high hopes but these are fading fast.

There is no sign of leadership, either from the old or the new, and all we hear is bickering and whining about wanting more mediation when all we really need is action. No one knows who is in charge, or who is going to be in charge of what and while this vacuum continues we have virtually turned into a gangster state.

The walls are falling down around us very fast now and still we baby-cry about mediators. Shame on us.

Without hope life has no meaning or point. Hope is now Zimbabweans most important positive attitude, the basis for all the others. We hope for a political settlement and agreement of some sort from these two major political parties.

Wherever you are, be it in the bus, internet café, beer hall, church, office, or shop people are hoping to see food and bread back on the table again, hoping for the best. And hoping for a better Zimbabwe!

No one expects these talks of power-sharing and cabinet posts to fail. People all around are struggling to make ends meet. But people are still chatting, sharing, assisting and encouraging each other to be stronger hoping that this political impasse is a passing phase.

This time its the whole nation in crisis and not only  individuals like the days of Murambatsvina. Together we will conquer and together we will win, we must rally under the spirit of oneness.

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.